By Matt Thurston
Felix left his office later than he had hoped. In a well-rehearsed motion, he hit both the call button for the elevator and the nearby switch for the fifth floor lights.
There was no need to doublecheck. He knew he was the last to leave.
On the ride to underground parking, he re-examined the e-vite. There was always the chance he had imagined it.
You are Invited!
Celebrate Labour Day weekend with the Original Six.
It's been far too long.
Just bring yourself and some swimmies.
The Fort
1138 Fire Lane #1
Fort Pontiac, QC
Please RSVP by July 15
Love, Ethan and Charly
Ethan got top billing in the complimentary close. However, Felix knew Charly authored the invite. It was ‘swimmies’ that gave her away.
Felix had properly sent an RSVP. It was a month and a half earlier when he scurried out of bed in a partial panic. Did ‘by July 15’ mean before or on July fifteenth? Ambiguous boundary condition. Inclusive or exclusive? It was the fourteenth of July, twenty-two minutes before midnight, when he sent his reply.
The elevator opened to an empty garage, save the little blue EV Felix had rented for the weekend. The car model was a Leaf. The rental company only offered it in blue and white. No green?
The Leaf was parked in one of his company’s overflow spots. Felix had declined a parking spot assignment. He didn’t own a car. He commuted by light rail. And anyway, the spot assignments were an anachronism. Three floors of underground parking with fewer than fifteen cars on the busiest day. Why hadn’t he just parked next to the elevator?
After the short stroll, Felix got into the blue Leaf and psyched himself up. He hadn’t been outside the city limits since Boxing Day. The winter before the pandemic.
Felix was late but prepared. He had pre-packed his overnight bag (with the requested swimmies) and had rented the car on his lunch break. No extra stops were required.
He notified the Original Six group chat:
leaving the office now, map says 2h6m. see you soon
Felix put an earbud in his right ear. He didn’t trust hooking his phone up to a rental’s infotainment system. Who knew who had accessed it in the past? Not worth getting hacked. He would listen to his audiobook: The Feynman Lectures. But with only one earbud in. Safety first.
He headed north.
Twenty minutes into the drive, Felix approached a fork in the highway. The GPS guided him to the right. This was a welcome change. He’d been fighting the low sun with a combination of the EV’s flimsy visor, his sunglasses, and slouching.
That low late summer sun was putting on a show in hazy skies.
Feynman was putting on a show as well.
In the introduction section of his lecture on the Laws of Gravitation, Feynman quipped, ‘even the artist appreciates sunsets and the ocean waves. And the march of the stars across the heavens.’ Felix chuckled. And now that it wasn’t assaulting his eyes, he took a moment to appreciate the sunset.
And his mind wandered.
Wandered right into thoughts of his dad. Felix had mentioned this cottage weekend to his dad in their weekly chat. His dad followed up the next day with a playlist link: Cottage Roadtrip Tunes. Felix knew this shouldn’t upset him. It was his dad’s way of connecting. Felix heard his therapist: ‘there’s little to gain in a twenty-year-old grudge.’
Still, he picked the Feynman lecture over the playlist.
But Felix’s thoughts fixed on that playlist.
It was all Canadian content. No surprise there. He remembered that Bobcaygeon and Lake Fever by The Tragically Hip were on it. And Blue Rodeo’s Lost Together. There were at least three Neil Young songs. Harvest Moon for sure. A couple tracks by Joni Mitchell. Joni had been his mom’s favourite. Somewhat oddly, his dad had included two versions of The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald. Gordon Lightfoot’s original and a cover version by the Rheostatics. There were a half-dozen or so other songs he couldn’t recall. He resisted the temptation to look at the list on his phone while driving. Safety first.
Felix was sure of two things. 1. Those songs were all great. 2. They were filler. It was the bookend tracks that mattered: Decked Out and A Northern Lake Remembers. Both by The Jack Pines.
The Jack Pines had been a big part of Felix’s life.
A huge part of his dad’s life.
Felix’s dad’s given name was William, but almost everyone called him Wiz. Short for Wizard, Wiz was monosyllabic inevitability. It was Wiz’s music studio skills that earned him his nickname. Those, and his unkempt gnarly nest of a neckbeard.
Wiz was an audio engineer and music producer. He was semi-retired now, but always willing and able when the right call came in. He had worked, almost exclusively, at North Shore Studios. Wiz had spent endless hours at that studio. So did Felix, for a time.
North Shore Studios was unimaginatively named for its location on the north shore of Lake Ontario. A converted turn-of-the-century (twentieth century, that is) stone farmhouse that was a half-hour drive west of Kingston. The studio was just like a trip to the cottage but with a reasonable commute. Assuming you were based in or around Kingston. It was further than the Muskokas for the Toronto bands.
Wiz had a long list of engineering credits but got to call himself a producer because of his work with The Jack Pines. Originally, he was hired as the in-house audio engineer for their sophomore album. During those sessions, he was promoted to producer.
The story goes that Owen, The Jack Pines’ lead singer and primary songwriter, was defending a line from Decked Out:
Decked out, in the afternoon
Me and you, and the bottles empty too soon
The record label’s producer insisted they change the lyric to ‘and the bottle empties too soon.’ But to Owen, the singular ‘bottle’ evoked the hard stuff. He was singing about swigging cold ones out on the deck.
There was profanity and projectiles, and the presumptuous producer was sent packing. All over the singular form.
Good news for Wiz. The band loved Wiz.
A field promotion on the rock and roll battlefield.
North Shore Studios doubled as Felix’s summer camp. He went with his dad whenever he got the chance. He’d smash away at the drums, learned some piano, and got quite good at guitar. There was no shortage of musicians around to learn from. They were generous with Wiz’s curious kid. When serious recording was going on, Felix would make himself scarce and tear around the nearby woodlots on his BMX. On hotter days, he’d cool off in Lake Ontario.
Nights afforded Felix time to tinker. Wiz embraced cutting-edge gear. The studio was stuffed with pedals, pre-amps, synths, speakers, compressors, conditioners, microphones, mixers, and reverb racks. And so, so many cables. North Shore could also mount an exhibit on the history of digital recording. Every size, shape, colour, and generation of audio workstation was once found in the studio’s control room.
Felix experimented with it all. His career in tech owed much to those summer nights, on the shore of Lake Ontario, hacking some decommissioned system to the soundtrack of the next big thing.
Felix hadn’t been back to North Shore Studios since the summer before university. It was also the last time he wielded a musical instrument.
Early that summer, Felix’s mom fell ill. After some back and forth with doctors and tests, cancer was diagnosed. The prognosis wasn’t fatal and a treatment plan was set up. There was hope.
At North Shore, the Jack Pines were in session, recording their fourth album. Wiz had buried himself in the work. It left Felix to shuttle his mom to and from her appointments. As the summer plodded on, Felix grew angrier at his dad’s absence. His mom, never wanting anyone to fuss over her, deflected his anger. She assured Felix that she would be fine.
She couldn’t have known.
It wasn’t the cancer that killed Felix’s mom, but a staph infection. She was admitted to hospital with fever on the Friday of the August long weekend. She passed on Monday. Wiz did leave the recording session when she was hospitalized. He was at her bedside with Felix when she passed.
For Felix, the damage was done.
He could never bring himself to listen to The Jack Pines’ album recorded that summer. Or any that followed.
The GPS’ statement of fact pulled Felix back to the present. He eased the Leaf onto a grass field to the left of a big house that looked even older than North Shore.
The Fort.
Beyond the Fort, Felix spotted the flickering of a campfire. And beyond the fire, the waters of the Ottawa River. Wide enough here to impersonate a lake.
The sun was now below the horizon, but the sky held fast to a pastel palette.
Felix stepped onto the grass. A shadow approached from the campfire. Feynman was still lecturing in Felix’s ear. He pulled out the earbud.
“Felix, how are you?”, asked the shadow.
Felix recognized the voice and replied, “Bobs.”
Bobs approached, came in for a hug, and Felix obliged.
“So glad you made it. It’s been far too long. We got a fire going. You got a bag or something? Throw it in there.” Bobs pointed to a screen door on the side of the Fort.
They made their way to the fire.
After greetings and more hugs, Felix sat on one of three logs that horseshoed the campfire. Bobs put a cold one in Felix’s hand and sat beside him. Charly and Ethan were seated on the log parallel to the river, and Dez and Alice across the fire from Felix and Bobs.
The Original Six.
‘It’s been far too long.’
Felix lost track of who had said it last.
Bobs’ real name was also Ethan, but he was the second Ethan at the startup. Ethan-one (of Ethan and Charly) was co-founder with Dez. Felix joined in the startup’s first month on the same day as Alice. They had never settled who was employee number three or who was four. Charly joined next. And Bobs (Ethan-two) made six.
The Original Six.
For the first couple years of the startup, addressing an Ethan was an ambiguous mess. Happily, ‘Bobs’ was baptized in the startup’s second autumn. They had just crossed the fifty-employee mark and had spawned an HR department. Mandatory team-building was a necessity. It took the form of a fall fair. Ethan-two thoroughly dominated the apple-bobbing contest. ‘Bobs’ was born. A pre-pandemic pastime, to be sure. Who would share slobber water these days?
At the campfire, Felix focused on re-engaging his atrophied social skills. It was never his strong suit, and it had been far too long. Luckily, he genuinely liked all of these people. They had built a great company together. Sure, it had been acquired, downsized, rightsized, upsized, reintegrated, reacquired, refinanced, but it was still a shared source of pride.
The Original Six had made out well.
Charly asked it first, “so Felix, you’re still working there?”
He used his canned response, “someone has to keep the AIs in line.”
Half-hearted chuckles.
A hand-crank storm radio quietly played at the campfire. Charly had it next to her. She perked up excitedly on hearing the DJ’s voice, “he’s coming back on. Felix, you have to hear this guy. He’s so good.”
She turned the volume up and silently shushed with an index finger to her lips.
A built-for-radio baritone transmitted out of the radio’s four-inch speaker.
They joined mid-sentence:
“…from the Skydiggers’ seminal album Restless. This is Big Billy Buffer coming to you on 93.3 FM, C-K-I-don’t-know. Radio Free Pembroke. The bots stole our jobs, so we stole back the airwaves. I got all the Can-Con, so your long weekend can rock on. The phone lines have all been ripped out, and I threw my mobile in the river, so yer gonna have to send all yer requests telepathically. But don’t you worry, the Buffer is keepin’ the good times rollin’ straight through till Monday mornin’. Hope you’ve found yourself wherever you are with a cold one in hand and loved ones who understand. Tip one back for this rocking cottage number. From Kingston’s finest, The Jack Pines, here is Decked Out.”
The intro drum salvo warbled the tiny radio’s speaker.
Felix chuckled to himself and wondered if Feynman would have posited the corollary, ‘even the scientist appreciates serendipity, the poetry of coincidence. And the march of the stars across the heavens.’
“Ha! Felix, that’s a great quote, but what’s the coincidence?” asked Bobs.
Felix, flustered, looked towards Bobs, and managed to emit a “what?”
“What’s the coincidence?” he asked again.
Felix looked down and glared accusingly at the citrus-noted craft cold one in his hand. Had his Feynman thought been thought out loud?
It had.
While Decked Out rocked the antique storm radio, Felix managed to do something outside his comfort zone: he shared.
He had to do something to explain his Feynman outburst.
So, Felix shared the story of Decked Out and North Shore Studios.
Felix was careful, though. He shared how his dad was a recording engineer. How he got the nickname Wiz. How Wiz was the producer on Decked Out. How Wiz earned his promotion. How he produced nine Jack Pines albums. How Felix had spent summers at the studio. How it was just like a trip to the cottage but with a reasonable commute. How he learned to play guitar and, adding emphasis, learned tech at North Shore. But he did leave out the difficult details of his last summer there.
Their surprise: ‘how did we not know any of this?’ and ‘who knew you were so mysterious Felix?’ and ‘you can play guitar? Really? C’mon?’
And even: ‘wonders will never cease.’
Ethan asked Felix, “would you play us something? There’s a guitar up in the house.”
Felix shook his head in four-four time at one-twenty beats per minute, “No, no, No, no. No, no, No, no.”
The campfire wound down with less impactful conversation, and the Original Six made their way to bed just before midnight.
They entered through a screened-in porch that spanned the river-facing side of the Fort. Bobs had set up a day bed as a sleeping nook on the porch. “It’s going to be just like sleeping under the ‘march of the stars.’ But without the bugs.”
There were bugs.
Bobs would sleep inside the next night.
“Difficulty sleeping in a novel environment is a common phenomenon often described as the first night effect.” This was the opening sentence of a journal article that Felix often referenced to explain why he slept poorly away from home. The theory behind the first night effect is that the brain is primed for defence in novel environments. This led to shallow restless sleeping.
This was just one of the things on Felix’s mind as he got ready for bed.
Had he overshared?
How bad would the first-night effect be tonight?
Would he find the bed comfortable?
Could he use lack of sleep as an early escape plan?
Did he need an escape plan?
Had he brought his noise-cancelling headphones?
Had he remembered to download his binaural beats (both delta and theta wave versions)?
Had he overshared?
The sounds and smells of breakfast preparations woke Felix.
His headphones were still in his bag. His binaural beats, downloaded or not, were unplayed.
He felt refreshed.
Wonders will never cease.
Felix made his way downstairs and headed toward the sounds and smells. A thick rectangular slab of a table dominated the Fort’s kitchenette. Running alongside the kitchenette, a half-wall framed a view of the kitchen. Alice chopped fruit. Ethan tended bacon, sausage, and a tofu scramble on the gas stove top. Tater tots were keeping warm inside. Dez kept an eye on the toaster while flipping flapjacks on an electric skillet.
Felix’s stomach grumbled. Bobs placed a mug of black coffee in his hands.
Charly sat at the far end of the big table cradling a coffee of her own.
Felix took a sip. Charly launched, “Felix, I had an idea. You shared something personal last night, and the rest of us were…”; she reached for the words, “…taken aback, I guess. We didn’t reciprocate. That’s not fair. So, tonight, we are going to have another campfire, and everyone else gets their turn to share. You know, a cottage story. Like yours at North Shore.
“What do you think?”
“Uhm…”
Charly jumped in, “you are off the hook, you already shared.”
Distracted by the arrival of flapjacks to the big table, Felix responded, “okay, looks great. Sorry. I mean. Sounds good.”
The sausage and scramble, bacon and berries, marmalade and maple syrup, toast and tater tots followed the flapjacks.
They feasted.
At breakfast, Ethan proposed a trip to town to fetch a special treat. Charly declined. She promised herself that she’d work on her crochet this weekend. Dez and Felix had eyed the chessboard in the sitting room.
Bobs and Alice agreed to join Ethan.
Charly, Dez, and Felix settled into the sitting room.
Big Billy Buffer continued his marathon weekend, but had been upgraded to Ethan’s uncle’s hi-fi. The DJ’s baritone was now met and matched by the system’s vintage tubes and ten-inch woofers. The morning’s set list included Leonard Cohen, Rufus Wainwright, k.d. lang, and the Cowboy Junkies covering Sweet Jane.
Dez and Felix traded wins at the chess board. Charly spent equal parts of her time consulting an introductory book on crocheting, and the craft itself.
A quiet cottage morning.
The town trippers returned at noon laden with farm-fresh produce. And Ethan had acquired his prize: semi-illicit unpasteurized Quebec cheese curds. He promised poutine with dinner: “it’s not ‘pooo-teeen’. It’s ‘puh-tin’”
Big Billy Buffer shifted gears and kicked Saturday afternoon off with Bryan Adams’ The Summer of ’69.
The energy level picked up.
Charly announced it was time to get out on the water.
“Everyone remembered their swimmies right?”
The other five, some audibly, some not, replied, “yes, Charly.”
No one was hungry for lunch, so they packed snacks for the boat. It was built for a lazy day on the water. It had big banana-yellow pontoons, a zippered canvas enclosure, and its starboard-side sported a retractable diving board.
They spent the afternoon anchored on the Ottawa river. It was sunny and hot. They took turns going in for a dip.
Bobs giggled with adolescent glee when he splashed a cannonball back towards the boat. This received a muted response. A half-eaten bag of sour cream and onion chips was the least impressed. Alice was a close second.
Alice flapped her paperback in an attempt to minimize the water damage.
Felix, also aboard at the time, asked, “is that a novel you are reading? Like, fiction?”
Felix never read fiction. In the startup times, he and Alice often shared articles and books on cybersecurity, privacy, big data, machine learning, and cloud-native horizontally-scaling software architectures. Never fiction.
Alice answered, “I found it in town. It’s Cory Doctorow. We’ve read his non-fiction stuff.”
Felix nodded.
She showed him the cover: Red Team Blues. “It is a cybersecurity story. I’ve been trying to read less academically these days. This might be a step?”
Felix nodded again, “sorry, I didn’t mean to…”
A rumble of thunder interrupted Felix. The sky above the boat was still a brilliant azure, but the western sky had gone indigo.
“We should get back.” Ethan directed his request at the swimmers while pointing an informative finger west.
Neither artist nor scientist would get to appreciate a sunset that evening.
The storm cancelled outdoor grilling, but Ethan’s poutine did not disappoint. He fried hand-cut potatoes in a Dutch oven–masterfully manipulating the oil’s temperature with a Fahrenheit-only relic of a thermometer. The mushroom gravy was scratch-made. And the cheese curds. Pasteurized or not (there was significant discussion on the veracity of that claim), they were ooy-gooey delicious. The poutine was no side dish. When their plates were cleared, it was bits of grilled sandwiches and glazed carrots that were left over.
After a collective cleanup, Charly clarified that the lack of a campfire did not get them out of sharing. Ethan joked to Bobs, “mandatory team-building.” They both caught Charly’s unimpressed glare. Ethan mouthed an apology.
The rain continued, joined by thunder. They gathered in the sitting room. Big Billy Buffer was turned down quiet on the hi-fi. But he kept the weekend going with a stormy night soundtrack that included The Grapes of Wrath, Robbie Robertson, Neil Young (in a Crosby, Stills, Nash configuration), and The Guess Who’s These Eyes.
Alice went first. She fondly recounted visits to her grandparent’s vacation trailer on Rice Lake near Peterborough. Her grandfather, a math professor, created scavenger hunts that involved word puzzles, ciphers, and tiny treasures he would hide around the campground. On one hunt, when she was six, she came across a full unopened ‘sixty’ bottle of an unidentified brown liquid that had washed ashore. Its label was lost at sea. She returned it to grandpa for identification, thinking it was part of the hunt. The adults laughed at her innocence.
“You were solving ciphers at six?” asked Bobs.
Alice succinctly said, “yes. And it’s your turn.”
Bobs grew up in Toronto, his mom was a lawyer, and his dad a mechanical engineer. They didn’t have a cottage tradition, but he did recount a Great Lakes fishing trip. Bobs embraced the spirit of sharing and delivered his story with dramatic flair.
He stood to address the room, and with gusto, “we set out from Toronto, drove north and west to Tobermory. There, we boarded the Chi-Cheemaun and made the two-hour ferry to the mighty Manitoulin Island under a vast beautiful blue sky.” He waved his right arm in an arc. They guessed he was drawing…the sky? He went on, “we were not satisfied with a mere ferry ride. The next day we rented a proud vessel and acquired provisions for a day of angling. My mother, still sea sick from the ferry passage, remained ashore. But father, myself, my brother, and sister set out to sea. The boat was old but not a stranger to rough waters. And rough waters we found. A storm kicked up and surprised us. We…”, he lost his steam.
He continued, in his normal voice, “it really wasn’t all that dramatic. There was a bad storm, but we made it back fine. I was young, though. Like five or six. I was pretty freaked out. The thing I remember most is how comforting my older sister was. She’s eleven years older than me, and I was always closer to my brother. But she was so great that day.”
Charly politely acknowledged Bobs’ story, but jumped in quickly with hers. She recounted a trip to a hunting lodge in her university years with her dormmates. It was right after spring exams. The lodge was near Algonquin park. She hurried through some details: A grotesque collection of mounted animal heads. A ‘bedroom’ that was just a room packed wall-to-wall with bunk beds like an army barracks. An oversized bat that found its way indoors (they guided it back outside with wooden tennis rackets).
And then the kicker. That weekend at the lodge was also Charly’s twentieth birthday. Her friends had all forgotten. Not even a cake. She looked over to Ethan. He knew this story. He was keeping his cool. She said, “when I told Ethan my hunting lodge story, he arranged a surprise birthday weekend at a similarly disgusting hunting lodge.”
Alice, Bobs, Dez, and Felix shared puzzled glances. Dez asked it, “why have we never heard that story?”
Ethan intercepted the question, “it was back when I was still officially Charly’s boss. I guess we were pretty good at keeping our secret?”
Their nods were accompanied by a harmony of ahhhh’s.
Dez was up. They were estranged from their parents. The Original Six all knew this. Expressing gender outside an Adam and Eve archetype was not acceptable in Dez’s family. Dez graciously spared the sharing session from an uncomfortable tale of conflict. Instead, they recounted how an older cousin had taught them chess during summer visits. The game wasn’t explicitly forbidden by the family’s cult-adjacent religion. But the two of them enjoyed treating their games with a little clandestine excitement. Dez had a knack for finding the positive.
Finally, it was Ethan’s turn.
The Fort was central to Ethan’s childhood. He took full advantage of the current stormy night situation to set the mood. He told them of the Canada Day weekend when he was thirteen. A thunderstorm had knocked the power out at the Fort. Cousins, aunts, uncles, Ethan’s parents, and his brother had all gathered in the sitting room to tell ghost stories by candlelight. Ethan hammed it up: “this very sitting room.”
Before Ethan could continue. A crack of lightning. It was close. The sitting room went dark. The hi-fi silenced.
A pungent plume of ozone wafted in.
They were shaken.
Bobs tried to lighten the mood, “I guess that’s the poetry of coincidence.”
It didn’t work.
The Fort itself was fine. A nearby elm, less so.
The power was off all night. They got by with flashlights and camp lanterns. The storm persisted, coming in waves. Windy at times. Heavy rains. And more lightning. No one slept well.
At dawn, the skies stayed gray, but the winds died down. Light rain fell all day.
It was mid-afternoon when the power was restored.
Felix and Dez were playing chess. Charly was crocheting. Alice was reading Red Team Blues. Bobs was flipping through the Fort’s collection of vinyl records. Ethan was studying a cookbook.
The hi-fi came back to life, interrupting their quiet activities, “this is Big Billy Buffer coming to you on Radio Free Pembroke. 93.3FM. That was one helluva storm last night. Even with the power out, Big Billy was never in doubt. God showed us Her wrath. She always gets the last laugh. So here we go, from your brainwaves straight to the Ottawa Valley airwaves. We’re gonna need a sad song for this gray-scale Sunday. A fun fact about this next track: it’s the singular song penned by the band’s producer and honorary fifth member, William ‘Wiz’ Thomson. From their tenth and final album, the title track, by The Jack Pines, A Northern Lake Remembers.”
The Original Six traded wide-eyed looks.
Bobs turned up the volume.
They listened:
On the shore at dusk, a down-on-one-knee request
To spend forever side-by-side
I swore that night, I’d always put you first
You hid your doubts behind a smileA northern lake it listens
And floats our worries away
A northern lake remembers
Our loveOn the shore at dawn, with your belly eight months on
I was busy arguing on the line
I swore that day, that I’d put both of you first
He kicked hard when he heard my lieA northern lake seeks no judgement
We’re innocent on its shore
A northern lake remembers
Our loveA northern lake it listens
And floats our worries away
A northern lake remembers
Our loveOn the shore at dark, alone, and I whisper
To the heavens for you to hear
I swear on this night, I’ll get back in his life
Because I’ve wasted too many yearsA northern lake is my judgement
No innocence on its shores
A northern lake remembers
Our loveA northern lake it listens
And floats my worries away
A northern lake remembers
Our love
The song ended.
Bobs was the first to speak, “okay, that’s the poetry of coincidence.”
This time, they agreed.
The Original Six planned an early escape Monday morning to beat the cottage commute. They said their goodbyes standing in the wet grass of the Fort’s makeshift parking lot.
‘I still can’t believe your dad wrote that song, Felix.’
It was Charly that said it last.
Felix kicked water off his shoes before getting into the Leaf. As the others pulled out onto the fire lane, he pulled out his phone and dialled his dad.
One ring. Picked up.
“Hey bud, everything okay?”
“Yeah, dad, everything’s fine. Can I come visit next weekend?”
“Sure, sure, no problem. I can be free. It’s not a problem. You sure nothing’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
“Okay. Cool. How was your cottage weekend? Did you listen to that playlist I sent you?”
“Sort of.” Felix gulped and asked, “you wrote, A Northern Lake Remembers?”
“Yeah, bud.”
“It’s about mom?”
“Yeah. Well…and you.”
“Can you tell me about it when I visit?”
“For sure.”
“Cool. See you then.”
“See you next weekend, bud.”
Felix started the Leaf, enabled Bluetooth on his mobile, and connected. Safety was second.
He swiped over to his dad’s playlist, tapped the screen, and cranked the volume. The Jack Pines’ Decked Out punished the Leaf’s sound system.
It sounded great.