“Man, I wish I’d come up with that! I couldn’t stop thinking about it. That fingering isn’t easy. I’ve been playing guitar all day every day for thirty-five years and it took me a minute to get it. But it feels like I should know it already, you know? Like it’s gonna be part of the canon. Dire Straits. The Who. The Kinks. You guys are, what again?”

“We’re Rock,” said Jeremy.

“Rock. Okay, okay, I dig it. Rock. Fuck yeah. Rock.”

A stagehand brought them back into the audience just as the lights went down in the arena. Everybody was ready to rock. Thousands of people squirming and shouting and whistling in anticipation of getting to experience three men playing their music. Jeremy looked around him and felt certain that this was his future. How could it not be?

About halfway through their set, Billie Joe came to the microphone:

“We’ve got a seriously talented guitarist in the audience tonight, everybody. He and his band just won our ‘Green Day on Campus’ contest and you all are gonna hear that single soon. I promise, I promise, you’ll love it. So, Jeremy? You down there, mate? Not in the loo?” Billie Joe put his hand over his face to shade his eyes from all the stage lights. “There you are! Come on up. Think you can handle ‘American Idiot’?”

Jeremy didn’t even look at his boys; he took the metal stairs to the stage two-by-two. He had willed it into happening. Someone handed him a guitar and he strummed a few chords and they were off.

“Dude, this is officially the best night of your life so far, right?” said Dante when the concert was over and they were riding the escalator down to the subway below Penn Station.

“A hundred percent,” said Jeremy.

“Where should we go?”

“Somewhere cheap,” said Chris. “And not exclusively hetero.”

“On the best night of my life so far I want to get laid,” said Jeremy. “I want to fuck a hot chick.”

“You can do it, man!” said Dante. He swept his arm around at the teeming masses of sweating Green Day fans above and below them. “The city is your oyster. Ladies! Ladies! Do you recognize this man? He played tonight!”

Scattered laughs and a couple shouts of “Woo-hoo!” emboldened him.

“He’s single!”

“So’s she!” A brunette half a floor below them waved her arm and pointed at her friend, a blonde. The brunette was wearing a T-shirt with the word “Bride” on it in glittery letters. The blonde and the half dozen women around her were wearing matching pink “Bridesmaid” T-shirts. The blonde had her face in her hands for a moment, then pushed her friend and laughed.

“It’s true!” she shouted.

“Jeremy?” said Dante. “What do you think? Swipe right?”