Broadcasting and Communications was my favorite class. A few months in we still hadn’t been allowed to touch a camera or use the recording equipment, but the assignments were easy, and the class was helping my overall grade point average, which needed all the help it could get. It was also the only class I had with Kayla that semester, and our teacher, Mr. Kim, a small, nervous, absentminded man, basically let the two of us get away with murder while we were under his supervision. When we showed up late, he never got mad. If we left early, he didn’t report us. Friends would skip class to hang out on the orange velvet couch in the back corner of the adjoining room, where the equipment was kept, and Mr. Kim didn’t seem to notice the extra bodies.
But my absolute favorite part of the class was getting to hang out with Spencer, from the Abbeydale crew. After Emma invited us to come wait at her house in the mornings, he started sitting with me and Kayla in Broadcasting class. He had the longest lashes I’d ever seen on a boy. When we talked in class, I tried not to stare at them when he spoke, but it was hard; he was beautiful. My room was covered in Green Day posters and I started to think of Spencer as my real-life Billie Joe.
“Did you dye your hair black to look like him?” I asked Spencer one afternoon as the two of us sat in the back of Mr. Kim’s class and flipped through a Rolling Stone with Green Day on the cover.
“No, he dyed his hair to look like me.”
He was a boy of few words, but when he did talk it was often to spit short, witty, sarcastic quips under his breath. I strained to never miss one.
Kayla and Spencer fell into a comfortable rapport during this time, too. It was obvious to everyone, including me, that they were crazy about each other, and when she asked him out before Halloween, he said yes. I was happy for Kayla, and in no rush to get a boyfriend, so it didn’t bother me she snagged him first. Nothing changed between the three of us when they started going out anyway. We joined ski club and skipped Mr. Kim’s class to smoke weed. After school we’d crowd together on the couch in Kayla’s basement to watch MuchMusic. Mr. Kim called us the Three Musketeers.
“Oh my fucking god you guys,” I shouted, racing into Mr. Kim’s Broadcasting class just before the final bell.
“Language.” He sighed from next to the chalkboard.
“Sorry, Mr. Kim.”
I tossed my backpack off and leaned into Kayla and Spencer. She was sitting on his lap at our usual table at the back of the class. “Green Day announced a show here,” I squealed in their faces. “They’re coming to the Saddledome, so we have to get tickets. And Bruce told me and Sara this morning that we can skip Friday to go line up for tickets. And my mom will come get us after. You guys have to come with.”
“YES!” they yelled at the same time.
“Tegan, please, can you sit so I can start?” Mr. Kim whined from the front. “And Kayla, how many times do I have to say no food in class?”
“It’s not food, Mr. Kim. It’s a Slurpee.”
He sighed heavily, and the three of us laughed.
“Why do we have to line up?” Spencer whispered as Kayla slipped off his lap into her own seat and Mr. Kim started his lesson.
“We have to get floor seats,” I whispered back. “So we can mosh.”
“Duh,” Kayla added.
Spencer cringed. He was a worrier. He was risk averse to an extreme level. He refused to try acid with us even though all his friends dropped almost every weekend. “I don’t want to have a psychotic break,” he claimed when I pressed him to do it. “What if mental illness runs in my family?”
“Trust me,” I said quietly, before turning my attention to the front of the class and Mr. Kim’s lecture. “You’ll love being up close. Moshing is so cool. Maybe we can even crowd-surf?”
“Oh my god, no way,” Spencer said, shaking his head. “What if someone drops me and I break my neck?”
Friday afternoon Sara and I went downtown with Kayla and Spencer to get tickets, and that night I pinned my ticket up next to my bed under a Green Day poster and thought about Spencer as I drifted off to sleep.
A few weeks later Sara, me, Kayla, and Spencer met at Sunridge train station to head to the arena for the show.
“I hope we don’t get crushed when the train comes.” Spencer swiveled his head, frantically scanning the growing crowd gathering on the platform around us. “Or knocked onto the tracks. Maybe we should step back.”
“No one is going to push us.” Sara laughed. “Relax.”
When we boarded, the train was crammed with people wearing Green Day shirts. Spencer, Sara, and I squeezed into a row together, and Kayla sat on our laps.
“What if one of us falls and gets trampled by people moshing?”
I shook my head. “Spencer! Oh my god, stop worrying! You’re going to be fine.”
“I think we should all link arms the whole time. Promise you guys won’t let go of me.”
“We won’t,” Kayla and I both said at the same time.
Against the black metal barricade near the stage, Kayla and Spencer and I linked arms as a deafening roar spread from the back of the venue and the overhead lights started to flicker. As Green Day sauntered onstage, a surge of bodies from behind pressed us into the metal, pushing the air out of my lungs. I felt scared for a second, but when the tide went out, and air gushed back into me, I screamed, “THIS IS FUCKING AMAZING!” in Spencer’s face.
He just opened his mouth into a terrified O shape and then closed it.
Billie Joe barked something into the mic, and the crowd roared even louder. After that, I didn’t hear any other voice but his. The speakers in front of us came alive with the first notes of “Basket Case.” When the front light hit Billie Joe in the chorus, I gasped. It was strange to see someone famous, right there, so close.
We’d seen New Kids on the Block in that exact room when we were nine. But Sara and I had been in a box seat with Dad’s boss, so far away we had watched the show mostly on the screens on either side of the stage; it was more like watching TV than being at a live show. Bruce had taken us to see Bruce Springsteen when we were twelve. Again, we’d been in the second tier, a hockey rink’s distance from the Boss, mostly watching him on the screens. Now, standing just a few feet from where Billie Joe was snarling and tearing at the strings of his guitar, a guitar hanging so low it forced him forward into a nearly ninety-degree angle, I felt starstruck, overwhelmed, consumed.
At the end of the show, we were all breathless. I rubbed the tender parts of my arm where Spencer had clung to me through the lightning-fast sixty-minute set. Lingering at the front of the stage, kicking empty plastic beer cups and lost shoes from crowd-surfers, the four of us reluctantly made our way out of the arena to where Mom was waiting outside to drive us home.
“How was it?” she asked when we climbed into the Jeep. The overhead light of the car illuminated a smile that stretched across her face as she took in the damage. My pants were ripped to my knees. Sara’s hair was a hive of knots from the pit. Spencer and Kayla looked windblown, and all of us were red-faced and shaking with adrenaline. Our ears were ringing, and as we answered her questions about the concert, I could tell we were yelling as if still in the arena, trying to be heard over the music.
“Amazing,” I shouted. “We were at the front the whole time. I could literally see the pupils of Billie’s eyes.”
“And we moshed, and people were crowd-surfing, and Billie kept swearing at the audience to get crazy,” Sara yelled from behind me.
“And some of Billie’s spit got on us,” Kayla said seriously.
“He spit on you?” Mom looked amused.
“Yes,” we all shouted happily.
“It was so cool,” I said, and sighed.
“Spencer, what did you think? You’re being awful quiet about it. Not a fan?”
“No, I love them. But we almost died,” Spencer answered flatly from the back. “It was terrifying. I had to watch out for them the whole time.”
“As if,” I said.
“That’s a little twisted,” Kayla said. “I think it was us looking out for you.”
“Well, I’m glad it was so fun,” Mom said, putting the Jeep into drive. “Alright, who am I dropping off first?”