Two bored-looking guys leaned backward against the bar, staring into their beers. The bartender sat on a case of whiskey, half hidden, sending texts.
The girl at the pool table shrieked. Myles looked over in time to see the cue ball go over the edge. All three of the players jumped back when the ball hit the floor, laughing harder than seemed necessary, managing to hold themselves erect only with the help of their sticks. The one who wasn’t the boyfriend retrieved the ball, setting it back upon the table as if it were a pearl on a velvet pillow.
It was the same pool table, or at least the same spot, where he’d tried to teach McGee to play. She’d been in college then, just a little older than these kids were now. Myles himself must have been twenty-four. McGee had been in town for the summer. They’d met at a party. Even now Myles didn’t really understand how their circles managed to cross, friends of friends of friends. She’d been with a group of college kids, white kids from the suburbs with rings in their faces. She had a summer job counseling women, victims of domestic abuse. All her friends had jobs like that. April was teaching autistic kids to use computers. Others were feeding old people or rescuing dogs or chaining themselves to trees. They weren’t even jobs. They were volunteers. Nobody was getting paid, but still they had apartments and bought beer and cigarettes and managed to eat. McGee and April were sharing a place in Ferndale, even though they could have stayed at home with their parents for free.
Some of Myles’s friends had been to school, too. He’d done two years of community college himself. But by the time he met McGee, he and Holmes had normal lives and normal jobs. Myles had been working in a video store, clueless that the place — that the entire idea of the place — was about to go extinct. Holmes had been doing odd jobs for his uncle, patching up houses and apartments on the cheap. He still was.
Myles still remembered being perplexed when McGee explained the work she was doing then, helping abused women.
“What do you say to them?” he’d asked her that first night at the party. “What do you say to these women?”
“I help them,” she’d said. “I show them resources.”
“But what do you actually say?”
He couldn’t seem to explain what he meant. What could a girl twenty years old, a girl with no experience of the world, a girl who’d never been married, what could she possibly say that a grown woman — an adult who’d gone through genuine horror — would bother listening to? He wasn’t trying to be mean. He’d just wanted to understand. He couldn’t imagine ever saying anything that would be of any use to anyone.
A few nights after the party, they’d come here to a show, and Myles had shown McGee how to hold a stick. It was a test, partly, to see how close she was willing to let him get. It had been years since he’d heard her laugh like she did that night, miscuing balls all around the table.
The brown-haired girl was ready for another try. She bent over the table and sighted along her stick. This time there was a solid clatter, and something sunk in one of the pockets. All three of the kids threw up their arms and cheered.
The rest of the club remained quiet. The floor in front of the stage was still empty, but a couple of kids had gathered along the back wall, smoking and talking. Myles didn’t recognize any of them. They seemed so young, children with cigarettes dangling from their mouths. Where was everyone else? Where were all the people they’d known, the ones they’d always run into at shows, the ones who’d come to hear Fitch and Holmes play?
And where was McGee? She was supposed to close the store and come straight here. There were still no messages on his phone. No texts.
He started to type “where are you?” with the tiny keys, but then he stopped himself. It wouldn’t do any good to sound impatient, to make it seem he was checking up on her.
“Come on,” Fitch said, appearing behind him. “We’re on.”
April was back on stage, tapping out an unsteady beat.
“Shouldn’t we wait?” Myles said.
Fitch squinted at him. “For what?”
Myles checked his phone once more. “We should’ve asked for a later slot. We should’ve gone last.”
“Are you nuts?” Fitch said. “We’re lucky we even got this.”
“Maybe we can switch with someone else,” Myles said.
“The only reason we’re here at all,” Fitch said, “is because I called in a favor. For you.”
“The video,” Myles said. “No one’s here.”
“What were you expecting?”
“It’s important,” Myles said. “People have to see it.”
Fitch put his hand on Myles’s shoulder. “I say this as a friend: I’m pretty sure no one here gives a shit.”
Myles’s phone said quarter after seven. “McGee—”
“She can see it at home.”
“I made it for this,” Myles said. “The big screen. So people would remember it.”
“They come to hear music,” Fitch said.
“I passed out flyers.”
Fitch shook his head. “We’re openers for the openers.”
“Don’t make me do this.” April thrust herself between Fitch and Myles, teeth tearing at the nail of her pinkie finger.
Fitch took her other hand. “Let’s get this over with.”
The club fell into darkness, only the dimmest glow bleeding onto the stage and dance floor from the bar.
Holmes was a blur in the darkness at the front of the stage, pointing a remote control at the ceiling. Behind him, an enormous square of blue light flashed on a white bedsheet suspended above the band. Then the blue light flashed to black, a sign the video was about to begin. But before the images came the sound, the speakers crackling to life with the roar of a crowd. The silent kids all around Myles looked at one another, as if they feared a mob were just outside, ready to storm the room.
Within moments, the roar in the speakers began to ebb just slightly, the voices coalescing, changing to a chant. At least it was supposed to be a chant, but the words were so amplified, so heavy with bass, they sounded more like the grunt of industrial machines.
After a few seconds, the black projection gave way, and at last an image appeared: a crush of bodies, protesters, mouths only slightly off sync with the chant. The camera pulled back, taking in more of the surroundings — the street, a skyscraper. Then the camera slowly panned over the front of the crowd, pressed up against a police barricade, fists in the air, shouting and pointing. On the other side, next to a dented gas canister, four riot cops stood shoulder to shoulder, rifles at the ready.
At the lower edge of the screen, the crowd continued to swell. Against the pressure of all those people, the police barricade rocked, about to fall. One of the cops lowered his head, speaking into the radio strapped to his shoulder. The movement of his lips was firm and explosive.
The chants intensified, thumping like drums. Now there were twice as many protesters in the crowd as before, picket signs bobbing. On the other side of the barricade, the riot cops were multiplying, too. And just when it seemed — even to Myles — that the tension on the screen was about to reach its breaking point, the girl appeared.
The girl was maybe sixteen, and she seemed to come out of nowhere, materializing at the side of the cop with the radio. Between the cop and the girl there was just that teetering board, the flimsy barricade. The girl was skinny, bony, in jeans and a faded turquoise T-shirt. The cop threw up his palm, ordering her to stop. In response, the girl opened her arms, revealing a white daisy painted across the front of the shirt. I’m harmless, she was saying. Look.