The band crashed into the song with double-time drums and chest-shaking bass and some unpredictable, processed shrieks that must have been emanating from a guitar. The room disappeared into darkness interrupted by toxic green strobe flashes. Thomas spun away from me and into the pit. Someone to my right gave me a hard shove in the lower back and I stumbled toward the melee of thrashing people. I kept my hands in front of me and hip-checked a skinny kid into the open floor. Hell yes. For about five seconds, I felt the pure exhilaration promised by a thousand Greil Marcus columns. Then I turned and caught an elbow in the face, the pain so blunt and clarifying that it didn’t register as pain, pure heat without humidity. My glasses went flying and my vision was reduced to glowing red spots underlaid by a sick green. When the music paused, because all of EOB’s songs were about ninety seconds long, I heard a crack, followed by the fatal crunch of lens underfoot.

“Glasses!” I called out. “Anybody see glasses?”

A blurry someone handed me some bent plastic.

“They’re pretty fucked, bro,” he said. “And your face’s bleeding.”

Somebody grabbed my shoulder. Thomas, blurry.

“Who did this?” he shouted.

“Nobody,” I said. “It was just random.”

“Nothing is random, dude,” he said.

The music returned, faster and louder than before, and I ducked behind the sweatshirt mafia. I touched my finger to my eyebrow and it came away wet. Not great. I held the broken glasses up to my face. One of the lenses was still intact, so I pressed it to my eye socket and moved back toward the main thrashing mass, trying to fulfill my pledge to keep an eye—if only an eye—cute, buddy—on Thomas. I held my watch an inch from the usable lens. It was ten minutes until midnight.