Jeff was just basking in that nice warm feeling of validation that you get when your friends prove you’d done a good job choosing them—a feeling he admittedly hadn’t had in a while—when Max said, delighted, “You gotlaid.”
“No!” Trix said. Then she looked at Jeff’s face. “Wait, yes?Yes?”
“If I tell you, can we get started rehearsing already?” Jeff needed to warm up.
Joe put his hands over his ears.
Max and Trix leaned forward like puppies hoping for table scraps.
“Yes, I got laid,” Jeff said. They didn’t need more details. He stood up, guitar in one hand, and offered the other to Trix. “Now can we practice, please?”
Trix let him drag her up. “Aww. Jeffy. We missed you too.”
IT WASpossible, Jeff knew, to be a technically proficient performer and make a good career as a musician. But if you wanted to be a superstar, you had to love it. You had to feed on the roar of a crowd, you had to crave it, you had to feel lost without it.
There were days Jeff forgot that he was that guy—the one who fed, who craved, who got lost. But one hit of the stage at a full house and it all came rushing back and flooded his brain with dopamine.
“Good energy tonight,” Joe said, standing in the wings beside him.
“Greatenergy tonight.” Max corrected bounced on the balls of his feet.
Jeff would’ve worried about him if he weren’t like this before every performance, which felt unfair—he was literally just thinking about his own adrenaline rush, about how much he loved the anticipation of stepping onto the stage and holding your breath as the fans cheered you on. Everyone else was excited too.
But everyone else wasn’t a drug addict, so.
Their opening act, an alt-rock group from Winnipeg with a style a little softer than Howl and a lot less polished, closed out their set to decent applause, and the stage lights went dark.
There was a little resetting required—different equipment, different settings for the sound mixing—but it was a well-oiled machine by now.
The cheering started when Trix walked out, visible to the audience only as a slender wild-haired silhouette backlit against the curtain as she made her way to the drum kit. Max followed as he always did, all the way across to the far side of the stage, guitar slung across his back.
Joe and Jeff did their preshow fist bump, and then Joe joined them.
Jeff gave it a few seconds, soaking it in. Then he slung his guitar around until he had it by the neck in his left hand and walked out to center stage to a deafening roar.
The tech crew had left everything where it should be. Jeff plugged in and gave the nod to the sound engineer backstage, who turned on the juice.
It felt a little likehe’dbeen plugged in, like he had twenty thousand volts running through his blood, lighting him up from the inside. But the stage was still dark.
They’d been opening this tour with “Blood in the Water,” one of the singles from the latest album, and it always got a great reception. But this afternoon at practice, after the first number, Trix had flipped a drumstick on the snare and then said, cheekily, “We should do ‘Seventeen’ instead.”
Because Jeff was a sentimental asshole, he’d agreed.
The thing about concerts was that they were for fans, and fans talked. They knew to expect “Blood in the Water.” Giving them “Seventeen” made them feel like this concert was special, liketheywere special. And they let Jeff know how much they appreciated it when, instead of the distorted, trembling opening chord of “Blood,” he plucked out the retro-sounding twangy intro of the band’s first number-one single.
The roar reached deafening levels… and then went silent.
Trix came in with the thud of the drum just after the third measure. Joe and Max joined in two bars later. But the lights stayed down until Jeff made friends with the microphone and sang, like someone was pulling his heart out through his mouth with a fishhook, “I met a man with kindness in his eyes, I met the truth in the ache of a long goodbye.”
The lyric was supposed to be about aboy. Jeff didn’t doubt people would notice. But it felt right. Maybe he wasn’t about to go on television and tell the world or anything, but a little update wouldn’t hurt.
He caught Max’s eye and then Joe’s after the second verse. They nodded, and as the chorus started, Jeff backed away from the mic and let the audience carry it, filling the venue with the words Jeff had written.
So yeah, he loved his job.
By the time the song ended on a ringing chord that reverberated throughout the space, the mood was electric and Jeff was pulsing with the heartbeat of twenty thousand fans.
He grinned into the microphone, full of joy, and glanced sidelong at Max. “Hey, Toronto, long time no see.”
