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outskirts of town on windy Highway 15, watching humps of trees like curvy hips and shoulders lying down in the distance and the line of the horizon straight in front of me, I’m able to completely exit my mind. I stop feeling or thinking anything at all. It’s my own private enlightenment.
    When I pull out of the driveway this time, I’m heading to GoodLife Fitness. I twist the air conditioner dial up to max. I slide in Bedouin Soundclash and turn up the volume. I turn it as far as it can go without distorting the bass. Then I just holler along. It feels like I’m ticking so close to the end of a countdown I might blow up. It feels good. At the corner of Lansdowne and the Parkway, I stop at the lights. There’s a woman on a bicycle beside me wearing a tank top just like Lise wears. A small white dog sits in her front basket.
    â€œHey-hey, heeey!” I yell to the music. My windows are rolled up. I shout to make my voice go through the glass. “Hey beautiful day! Hey beautiful day!” I hit the steering wheel with my hands over and over like I’m beating a conga drum. Who knows if she can hear me?
    In the beginning there was a little bar on campus, a dark, inauthentic British pub called the Royal, an underground hovel, dim even on the brightest afternoons. There was a pool table in the back and twenty small tables covered with chipped forest green laminate, each set with its own cat- and dog-shaped salt and pepper shakers, a white ramekin full of sugar packs, and a plastic menu stand that held an oil-and-ketchup-stained list of what was on tap. It was April, the month of snowmelt, finals, and tree-planter recruitment. I had just finished my final commerce exam. I walked into the Royal and saw her right away—her hair was in a ponytail and there was a big peach-coloured rose attached to it, a silk flower—and it was like she was the answer to the bonus question.
    She was sitting alone, talking to Matt behind the bar while he rolled cutlery into white napkins. I went to the bar and sat down and Matt slipped a coaster in front of me. I introduced myself to her. She told me her name was Lise, and that she’d just aced her French exam. We both ordered Coronas even though it was only eleven in the morning. She pushed her wedge of lime down into the bottle, put her thumb over the top, and turned the bottle upside down until the lime floated through the beer. When she turned it right-side up again, a blast of white foam sprayed all over the bar.
    â€œNow, that’s not supposed to happen!” she said, laughing. “That’s not how it’s supposed to go!”
    I used wads of paper napkins for the spill and reached over her to wipe it up. Lise came close. She put her beer-damp hands on my arm and pushed up my sleeve to see the rabbit tattoo on my bicep. I have always regretted the tattoo. It was such a stupid idea. I was only nineteen when I picked it—it’s a little kid’s tattoo, a cartoon, it’s meaningless. But Lise noticed it. It was the thing that brought us together. So I changed my mind about it. At that moment the rabbit was a karmic necessity, because when she held my arm in both of her hands, she looked up at me, smiling, and she said, “Merci beaucoup, mon petit lapin.” Her voice was warm syrup and its effect on my inner organs was scandalizing. That was when I experienced the synthetic lining of joy—its perpetual companion—fear. Because now that I had found Lise, it had also become possible to lose her.
    We moved in together and it was fast, in some ways, but it wasn’t like we got married or anything. It’s not like we’re having babies. Everyone’s having babies now. Half of my class got married the year after they graduated. Jake Middleton, Harv Saulter, Mitchell Lavois. I hardly see those guys anymore. They’re involved in fatherhood, they’re growing puffy because they can’t metabolize their