“So, they were older and quite pretty and, like I said, we weren’t exactly a catch at that point in our life. But I guess they wanted to try out having boyfriends—as teenaged people sometimes do, I’ve noticed—and they didn’t get along with each other the way we do, so they were somewhat limited in their options. They were really competitive and always mad at each other, so they had to have all the exact same stuff or it’d be chaos, right?” Jaymie stood at the centre of the Provencher Bridge finishing his story, his frostbitten ankles forgotten for the time being.

His listeners nodded in agreement; they were in Friday-night mode and fully game for a high tale of high school drama.

Further down the winding river, a ‘secret’ show had just gotten underway. The opening band had activated its backing beats, then experienced some technical difficulties, restarted their Mac, reopened Ableton Live, and re-kicked off the night. Hannah was arriving at the venue; Jo was arguing with Michaud over which songs to swap into the set in lieu of the ones with more involved drum parts; Maggie was mussing her already messy bun and establishing a position for herself and Rex close to the stage.

“Anyway, they were really trying to make their friendship work, so they thought having almost the same boyfriend would smooth out any romance-related jealousy issues. We were quite frightened of them, but we rightly suspected that the opportunity to be in close proximity with a girl would not arise again for quite some time.

“I went with the slightly older one since I’m slightly older too—that’s how they chose who got who, since they didn’t know us all that well to start out—and we dated for about a month. Full disclosure—I experienced my first kiss in that time. But then I guess they got bored, or maybe they each didn’t trust that the other sister didn’t have the slightly better one of us, and they started messing around a bit. And I don’t mean to represent teenage girls poorly, because I had great female friends in high school, or like, you know, I talked to some girls a couple of times. But everybody’s human, and sometimes people make careless choices, right?”

The four listeners nodded in sympathy at his disclaimer, now primed for the guilt-free slander of conniving teenage girls.

“Well, they clued in at some point that we couldn’t actually tell them apart. I guess we were supposed to know by their perfume or the call of true love or whatever. Also, both were getting more suspicious that the other one might have the better boyfriend, so to satisfy themselves on the issue, they swapped us for a while.”

His audience tittered, not sure if they should side with the empowered yet duplicitous female set of twins, or the boys too guileless to have bothered identifying the distinguishing features between their girlfriends.

“I guess that got old for them at some point too, since at that age we were basically the same anyway. They couldn’t bear to keep the secret forever—soon any time we were hanging out with them it was all, “Of course I’m Natasha! …Or am I?” and we were getting very confused.

“But then one time I was going to a movie with whichever one was Tash for that night, just the two of us, which was nerve-wracking for many reasons, and I got the idea to send Aaron with her instead. This was before our cousin caught him in the face by accident with a cupboard door and he got a little scar you can kind of tell him apart by—not that it’s noticeable. Anyway, I met up with her sister instead of him, and you know what? They couldn’t tell us apart either!”

Daffodile finished her smoke, looking skeptical. She hadn’t laughed yet, but Jaymie was glad to see she was making no move to go back inside.

“So, we called them out on it, which turned out to be a bad idea because they told the whole school we were sexual deviants who’d hoodwinked them in order to try and bang each other’s girlfriend. We were widely scorned for the trick, except for a few people who celebrated us, but those are not the type of people you want to be friends with. Never mind that we were so shy of those twins that we barely ever did more than hold their hand.

“Obviously we pointed out the hypocrisy, to which they responded that they’d only pretended to switch places, and actually we’d both been with our own original girlfriend, albeit acting a little more like her sister, all along. It might be true; we never found proof one way or the other.” He shrugged and reached to tap his cigarette on the rusted metal ashtray mounted on a post nearby.

“So, we all had a good laugh, except Aaron, who doesn’t have quite the same sense of humour as I do, and we called it quits.”

The women were satisfied with the anecdote; they’d determined that no girls had been swindled in the making of the story and Jaymie came out as a good-humoured but endearingly clueless and notably handsome lead.

“Do you ever see them?” asked one of the women.

“No, never. One is in prison. They interviewed her in there and it turns out she checks off most of the boxes on the psychopath test.” He let out a long exhale of smoke. “We have no idea which one she is or whether the other one survived.”

***

Aaron knew there was a staircase to the second floor on the other side of Young Adult Fiction. He jogged through the stacks, one hand brushing the smooth spines to guide his way in the dark, at one point taking a wrong turn and ending up face to face with a colossal cardboard Little Bear cut-out looming from the shadows of the Children’s section. He yelped and cursed traitorous Little Bear, whom he had regarded with great devotion twenty years earlier.

Stepping over a scattered assemblage of teeny chairs into Kids’ Non-Fiction, he dropped into a crouch behind a display of hockey books, struggling to catch his breath. He shuddered and wondered, not for the first time, why everyone didn’t just do their reading on the internet. A reverberant rapping came from the glass doors now far behind him. He rose and navigated the last twists through the dark stacks, found the stairs, and took them two at a time to the second floor.

Because it was so cold for so much of the year, the city had made an initiative to aid pedestrians traversing the blocks between the library and the Hudson’s Bay Company by connecting all significant buildings via a series of skywalks passing back and forth above the streets of downtown. Using this route generally backfired on anyone with somewhere specific to be and a certain time they needed to be there, but for urban wanderers and somnolent flaneurs it provided a lovely way to spend a winter afternoon.

Aaron was eighty percent familiar with the twists and turns of the tunnels, the crossroads and the troublesome spots on the paths where you needed to go up a floor and double back in order to cross Portage, and the places where you thought you could see your destination through the transparent glass of the skywalk, but when you got to the other side you found yourself back in the central food court of the nearly deserted underground mall from which all the passageways branched off.

He found the skywalk that lead out of the library and traversed its glass tunnel, jumping slightly when an ambulance shot by with its siren blaring beneath his feet. The passage led into a building in the next block that housed the city’s hockey arena. Suddenly, he was free of the pressing silence of the stacks and amidst a great drunken crowd of white jerseys. Their team had won. Relieved, he wove his way amongst the many exuberant sports fans with sanguinely glazed expressions.

Two black-clad people stood out in the sea of white like beady eyes in a giant mosaic of a polar bear. Unable to use the library doors, they’d no doubt crossed the street and entered the stadium to head him off. Aaron realized that he too must be instantly distinctive in his navy parka. He turned to the closest fan and stammered a request for help, for direction to a security officer and assistance finding his brother.

“I don’t carry change,” came the muttered response.

“That’s not—hey, do I look like I’m a—and even if I was, a bit of compassion is—” He gave up and looked for someone else, but being among this crowd suddenly gave him a new chill. The throng was single-mindedly focused on their own escape, caring only about getting to their cars and heading home for a few more celebratory beers; this river only flowed one direction and Aaron’s attire marked him as an outsider to their tribe. He felt an urgent need to be free of these people and never have to speak to them again. He wondered briefly if his opinion of them might be warmer had he not been imprisoned in a cult a couple of weeks ago, but didn’t have time to dwell on it.

He weaved through the sea of people, ducking under the arms of massive men in white garb and barely avoiding treading on the children they towed behind. He veered down the nearest hallway, which took him to another empty skywalk over Graham Avenue. Or was this Garry? Before he could decide, a pair of hands firmly seized the back of his coat and stopped him short.

***

His story concluded, Jaymie tried to sense whether he was welcome to remain in the company of his target once she went back inside.

Daffodile had an inscrutable expression on her round, scarf-wrapped face. Then she let out a ringing laugh that echoed over the frozen river.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

“Wait ‘til I tell you about the time I was a cult leader,” said Jaymie.

“I’d love to stay and chat—?” she paused for his name.

“Jaymie Bukowski,” he offered.

“I’ve heard about you. I’d stay, Jaymie, but I’m headed to a show.” She gracefully lifted a foot and yanked the bottom of her tights down to cover the slice of frozen calf disappearing into her high-heeled boot.

“Is it a secret show?” Jaymie asked hopefully.

A vehicle slid to a stop in front of them, and she checked the TappCar app on her phone. “I think that’s our lift.”

“Would you mind if I…?” he gestured toward the car.

“Will I be able to get a word in edgewise?”

“I’m going to be irrefutably silent, starting right now. You won’t even notice me. Here—I’ll chip in for the ride. I have, let’s see… one dollar, one eighty-five…”

“Ok, Bukowski, get in in the car. I was just telling Alice, here, that—”

“Oh, can we drive down Waterfront? My brother is walking and my twin-sense just alerted me he’s getting chilly. Thanks sorry thanks!”

***

Beneath his heavy parka Aaron was drenched in sweat. He gasped as he was jerked backwards by the hands of one of the collectors.

There exists a well-known hypothesis that drummers never actually tire; they simply accumulate perspiration in their clothing until they are forced to remove their shirts—usually onstage, with one hand, while the other one maintains its duties on the hi hat or snare. It took him less than a second to unzip and slide out of his jacket, abandoning it in the large hands that had grabbed him.

He bolted down the hall he thought led to The Bay and to Osborne beyond, and swore when he found himself in the empty food court at the center of the labyrinth. Brightly lit signs marked each of the customer-less fast food stops around the walls; their few listless employees leaned over the counters, sleepily playing on their phones.

A narrow, twisting pathway ran between the plastic tables, each of which had four cumbersome seats attached to them by thick metal bars. Aaron ignored the path and climbed onto one of the tables, which were just close enough together to leap between. Without pausing, he took the long room table by table, leaving his more ungainly pursuers to navigate the turns of the path. He winced at the echo of his boots hitting the tabletops in the near-silent cavern. The teenaged restaurant workers barely raised their visors as he passed.

At the other end of the room was an out-of-order escalator—that is to say, a functional staircase with an inconvenient “out of order” banner one was forced to duck underneath—the steps of which he skidded down, nearly tripping headlong in his haste to reach the main floor. He took the nearby exit to the street and turned in the direction of Portage Avenue, where he knew he’d find traffic and people and hopefully police officers who could help him, but he immediately had a vision of the swarms of inebriated hockey fans that would be flooding it by now, their crazed eyes passing over him, an easily ignored hindrance underfoot or, at worst, an outlet for their pent up energy and aggression. Aaron had never felt comfortable around sports fanatics.

In the opposite direction lay the Assiniboine River, the darkest but most direct path to Osborne Street. He turned south, sprinted the block to the river, and took the wooden steps down to the ice trail, which ran five kilometres on the Assiniboine until it met the Red and another five kilometres after that, achieving it the Guinness record for the world’s longest skating rink.

Aaron had never particularly enjoyed going skating; there were always people playing incautious games of hockey on the trail, and besides that, the little fractures in the ice made him unreasonably nervous.

The river was even quieter than the empty mall. The only audible sounds came from his boots thumping on the packed snow at the edge of the ice trail and, in a register just on top of that, his rhythmic gasping breath, like quarter notes tapped on a dull ride cymbal.

The silence bothered him. He regretted choosing the river path; he should have braved the revelry on Portage avenue and sought help. He knew the hockey fans were regular people but he was panicked and not thinking straight, and now he was overwhelmed and utterly alone in an arctic world soundproofed on all sides by rolling snow baffles. If he was caught, no one on the street would hear a thing.

For a moment he thought he heard barking. He shook his head and forced himself back to the challenge at hand. He stopped to catch his breath, exhaling nebulas of fog. Who was it he was running from, anyway? Some kind of nefarious collection agency?

He was so distracted thinking about the agents that he barely noticed a new threat, this time from below. Something shifted under his boot, and he looked down. A creaking noise came from beneath him, a gentle whine that whispered through the ice. The river groaned softly, just loud enough to express that it didn’t care at all what happened to him, but he couldn’t say it hadn’t warned him.

And with that, the ice broke and he plunged neatly through the crack into the glacial water below, to be swept up and carried away by the current, as if he’d never been there at all.