I went to pick up the car and drove back and got Owen and added Amy, a quiet punk with a black hoodie and no makeup and a backpack. We stopped at Mac’s for smokes, and I pissed in the alley. This was back when I lived on Spence.

Out by the floodway, we lay on blankets and someone produced beers. We tried to watch the meteor shower, but mostly the sky was blank—occasional traces of falling dots you strained to see, the opposite of a spectacle, the city lights still too bright out here.

But the guys were clowning around, and the sky was still beautiful, and I drank my beer lying on the blanket, looking up. “Josh on his way?” “He’s twelve miles past Beausejour.” “Twelve Miles Past Beausejour is the name of my new Nickelback cover band.” And I said nothing, and it was so nice to just be and not need or be needed.

Then Owen’s friends said they were going farther out, to really see the shower. We were totally in, and we got back in the car and followed them. They drove west for a while, and then turned south onto the number seventy-five highway.

We drove for a while. Then another while. The city was long behind us. Owen’s phone was dead, so we couldn’t call his friends.

I started to get worried.

Amy said, “Does anyone mind if I open a beer?”

We didn’t. But Owen’s friends kept fucking driving! All the way to fucking Morris! The only stop between the city and the border, the only place for miles in the country with a gas station open at night.

They stopped at that gas station and we got out. We said, “What the fuck?” But they were just as surprised. “You drove all this way? Why didn’t you turn around?! We were just out of gas.” It struck me, later, how there’s a divide in the expectation of whether someone will be concerned for you, or not, and how sometimes that divide falls along gendered lines (and sometimes not).

It was past four a.m. and we were zonked. We turned around to drive home. And then, as dawn filtered into the sky, Owen’s friends pulled over and jumped out of the car.

There’s a singular tree off the number seventy-five at that point just north of Morris. The boys ran across the road toward it, through the field, gradually lit by the slow prairie light. Owen and I sat on the hood of the car with a blanket wrapped around us and watched his friends climb in the sunrise. They looked beautiful.

Did we kiss then? You know, I don’t remember. I only remember how his body felt against mine under the blanket, how his friends looked like ants on the horizon, bathed in yellow and orange.

Back in Winnipeg, we dropped Amy off, and then went to Owen’s place in South Osborne. Inside were empty beer bottles and a roommate freshly home from work, a guy with a mean look to him, that look certain young men have that says they’re fucking their lives up now, and maybe they’ll be doing the same in two decades, or maybe they’ll own a house with a pool and shithead kids.