Work Text:
Lev Koslov met two of the most stabilising forces of his professional life during his first North American tour.
One was a box of children’s oatmeal.
The other was a girl from Detroit.
He discovered the oatmeal first, which was probably for the best. It would have been difficult to explain Rose to customs in bulk.
The town Lev came from was not the kind of place that produced rock stars.
It was not the kind of place that produced much of anything quickly. Lysva had a school, a bus station, a grocery store with poor fruit in winter and good gossip all year round, a square that looked larger in photographs than it did in person, and a recreation centre that had outlived two mayors and one funding model through pure administrative stubbornness. Winter stayed too long. Summer never stayed long enough. Everyone knew everyone else’s business by dinner and pretended not to by bedtime.
Lev was not unhappy there. He was simply aware, earlier than was probably healthy, that the world was larger than this and that whatever version of his life was eventually going to become interesting would need outside assistance.
His father worked in local government in the kind of way that sounded boring at the table and important everywhere else. His mother taught at the school and had the unnerving ability to tell when Lev was lying before he had fully committed to the lie. Breakfast was often oatmeal. Plain when money was tighter. With sugar when money was less tight. With jam in summer if somebody’s grandmother had preserved enough fruit the year before. Lunch was whatever could be eaten quickly at home if he came back between school hours, soup reheated, black bread, leftover kotleti, fried potatoes from the night before, tea. Dinner was where the real meal happened, shchi or borscht when there was time, pelmeni when there wasn’t, buckwheat, rice, stewed cabbage, chicken if there had been reason to buy one, pickles, bread always.
Lev was twelve when his father came home and announced they were moving to Moscow.
The explanation arrived wearing adult language, which was how adults preferred to deliver disasters. Opportunity. Ministry. Better prospects. A good position. The family as a unit. Lev understood maybe half of it and resented all of it. He asked if he could bring his bicycle.
He could bring the bicycle.
This did not improve matters much, but it was something.
He was thirteen when Moscow happened to him.
Moscow moved too fast. It talked too loudly. It appeared to have been built on the assumption that if you were not already halfway somewhere else, you were failing morally. Their building was concrete and Soviet and half-renovated in that aggressive way that meant somebody had paid for new doors and forgotten that the pipes were still from another regime. The stairwell smelled like cigarettes, dinner, and collective housing regret. The elevator worked often enough to count as hope and infrequently enough to count as character-building.
On the same floor, three doors down, lived the person who ruined Lev’s adolescence in the most artistically productive way possible.
Ilya Rozanov was eighteen and already in a band.
That was not, by itself, the problem.
The problem was that he looked like a divine drafting error.
Blond curls. Thick dark brows. Hazel eyes. Cheekbones so sharp they felt less inherited than commissioned. A mouth permanently on the verge of either a grin or blasphemy. He looked like somebody had asked the ancient Greeks to design a front man and then, for reasons best known to God, given the result cigarettes, an ego, and no supervision. When he sang, which Lev heard through the walls before he ever saw him up close, he sounded even less fair than he looked. Clear. Rich. High enough to make a hallway feel briefly ecclesiastical if you ignored the swearing and Anton yelling at him to turn his amp down.
Lev first became aware of him through noise.
A guitar through the wall on a Saturday morning. Then the voice. Then another voice, darker and more irritated, which had to belong to Anton because it sounded like a man who had already had enough of everyone in the room and planned to continue having enough indefinitely. Then laughter. Then the song again. Lev stood in the kitchen pretending to be deeply committed to a slice of bread for forty minutes while his mother read the paper and very charitably let him have his first crisis in silence.
She noticed, of course. Mothers always did. Good mothers simply understood that some humiliations were best left unannounced.
The first time Lev actually saw Ilya, the apartment door was open after rehearsal. Music had stopped, but the air in the hallway still felt used. Ilya was leaning in the doorway in a white T-shirt gone thin with washing, curls damp at the temples, one forearm braced overhead against the frame while he argued back into the flat with somebody Lev would later learn was Anton. Then he turned, mid-sentence, and Lev got his first proper look at him. Blond curls. Impossible cheekbones. The kind of face that made adults forgive things on sight. He looked less like a neighbour than a small religious problem.
Ilya stopped and looked at him.
Not rudely. Efficiently. As if the building had presented him with a new fact and he intended to process it before lunch.
“You’re the new one.”
“Yes.”
“Which flat?”
“Five-twelve.”
Ilya nodded once. “You play anything?”
Lev, who had never touched an instrument in his life, said, “I’m learning.”
This was a lie.
Lying, in hindsight, was one of the best decisions he ever made.
Ilya considered him for one second longer. Then he said, “Good. You need something. Moscow eats people who arrive empty.”
Then he turned back to Anton and continue their argument like he had not just altered the next decade of Lev Koslov’s life with one casual question and a complete absence of adult oversight.
Lev stood there with his bicycle and thinking with the terrible clarity available only to thirteen-year-olds. I have to become the kind of person who plays an instrument now.
The practical problem was that he had about twenty minutes to decide what instrument he was supposedly learning before the lie went stale.
This was not, despite appearances, a romantic decision. Or not only a romantic one. Lev already understood certain things about the world. One, wanting something badly did not exempt you from planning correctly. Two, if you were going to lie, it should be in a direction that could become true quickly.
Guitar was useless. The world already contained too many guitarists, and at least one of them was already in the flat three doors down arguing with Ilya. The market was saturated.
Drums were loud, expensive, and guaranteed to get him killed by his mother.
Singing required a level of self-delusion he did not possess.
Bass, on the other hand, was practical.
Every band he knew of always seemed to be short one. Guitarists multiplied on their own. Singers emerged spontaneously from misery. Drummers either broke things or developed opinions. Bass players, meanwhile, were infrastructure. Necessary. Scarce. Usually odd enough to be left alone, which had its own professional charm.
Nobody in their right mind chose to play bass.
Lev, not in his right mind because he was thirteen and therefore fatally susceptible to older boys who lived alone, fronted bands, and appeared to answer to no one, immediately chose bass.
He went home and made the case to his parents with the solemnity of a child applying for office. Bass was foundational. Bass developed discipline. Bass built real musical understanding. Bass, he implied without quite saying aloud, was employable.
His mother took off her glasses and looked at him for a very long time.
“Why bass?”
“Because everybody needs one.”
She stared at him another second.
“That is either very clever or very sad.”
Both, as it turned out.
Two weeks later he had a second-hand bass, a Thursday teacher who smelled faintly of cigarettes and disappointment, and a new problem.
He was good.
Not instantly miraculous, because God occasionally believed in pacing, but good in the way that mattered. Patient. Precise. Quick with pattern. Willing to repeat until his fingers learned what pride would have preferred to skip. His teacher stopped acting bored sometime around the fifth lesson and started assigning work that suggested the boy might actually be worth the train fare.
Three months after the hallway lie, Lev saw Ilya again, this time with the bass case over one shoulder.
Ilya stopped completely.
“You said learning.”
“I am learning.”
“What.”
“Bass.”
The case did some of the arguing for him. So did the fingertips. So did the fact that he had been rehearsing for this moment for three months and still nearly ruined it by getting the strap caught on the banister.
Ilya’s face changed in stages. Surprise. Assessment. Interest. Approval, or something sufficiently close that Lev could live on it for the next year.
“Come upstairs.”
Ilya’s flat was exactly what Lev had hoped it would be and exactly what his mother would have described as a disgrace. Cables everywhere. Empty cups on every horizontal surface. A keyboard against one wall that no one seemed to be using but everyone had learned to step over. Posters. A scribbled set list on the table. A jacket on the chair that might have belonged to Ilya or might have belonged to one of the other two people in the room, both of whom looked up when Lev came in like rehearsal had suddenly acquired an underage administrative issue.
Anton was there, eighteen and already hard to read, long blond hair past his shoulders, blue eyes sharp enough to feel selective, with the kind of face that might have been openly beautiful if he weren’t using it almost entirely to look unimpressed. Roman was there too, younger than Ilya and Anton but older than Lev, leaning against the wall, all average looks and bad decisions, with the sort of grin that had not yet learned how expensive charm could become if you started spending it badly.
“This is Anton. This is Roman.” Then to Anton and Roman, “He plays bass.”
Anton looked at Lev suspiciously. “Does he?”
“Show them,” Ilya said.
Lev showed them.
He played three things properly, one thing less properly, and one thing only halfway before intelligently abandoning the attempt. His teacher had given him one principle more useful than scales for moments like this. Don’t show the nerves. People often mistake composure for skill, which is unfair, but also useful.
He was terrified. He looked mostly not terrified. It was enough.
When he finished, Anton said nothing.
This worried Lev until Roman started clapping.
Roman clapped for everything. Good jokes, bad jokes, surviving the stairs without falling, technical competence. At thirteen, however, Lev only knew that the young one with the grin had clapped and the blond god had not looked embarrassed by him.
“He’s thirteen,” Anton said.
“He can count,” Ilya replied.
“That is not the point.”
“It is literally the point of bass.”
Roman grinned. “Tiny bassist.”
Lev, who was already taller than several boys in his class and well on his way toward the long dark build that would later make women, photographers, and eventually Rose Landry say very specific things to him, chose not to contest the terminology.
Then Ilya looked back at him.
“What’s your name?”
“Lev Koslov.”
Ilya considered this for one beat. Then he said, “No. You are Kozzy.”
Lev blinked.
“Koslov is boring. Kozzy is Better.”
This was not how names were usually assigned. This was how Ilya assigned them, with complete confidence and no regard whatsoever for prior documentation.
Charismatic older boys have been renaming smaller boys since the invention of communal housing. The difference with Ilya Rozanov was that reality tended to accept the changes and move on.
By the end of the week Lev’s mother was calling him Kozzy when she wanted him to carry groceries.
By fifteen, he was invited into the band because another man was a moron.
Vadim, the bassist and Anton had never really liked each other. This had been visible even to Kozzy, who had spent enough time in Ilya’s flat over the intervening two years to qualify him as part-time furniture and had therefore absorbed band politics the way rugs absorbed cigarette smoke. Vadim was barely competent, smug, and not nearly good enough to justify any amount of ego. Anton could tolerate Ilya’s smugness because Ilya had the voice, the face, and the gravitational pull to make arrogance look like evidence. From Vadim, it was just a personality defect.
What resolved the simmering problem was Vadim fucking Anton’s girlfriend.
This was not, in fairness, a sustainable workplace choice.
He was thrown out with spectacular efficiency, several shouted threats, and one cable that technically belonged to the band and which Anton remained furious about long after the girlfriend herself had stopped mattering to the story.
Suddenly there was a vacancy. Gigs booked. Songs ready. No bassist. No time to waste. Available options grim.
Who the fuck else was there?
Kozzy, as it happened.
Roman brought it up first.
To Roman’s considerable credit, before he started making much worse choices for himself, he had a real eye for talent and zero hesitation about gambling on it.
“Use the kid. He spends enough time here, he knows all of the songs anyway.”
Anton looked unimpressed. Sveta, who had joined by then and frightened Kozzy with the terrifying efficiency of a person who wasted neither words nor drumsticks, simply waited. She was all dark focus and impossible timing and the kind of self-possession that made everyone else in the room look improvised.
Ilya looked at Kozzy across the flat. “You want to try?”
Kozzy was fifteen and had spent two years privately orbiting this exact possibility while pretending he had no emotional investment in it whatsoever.
“Yes.”
He did not disgrace himself.
This deserves emphasis. The default setting for fifteen-year-olds in front of their idols is disgrace. Sweaty disgrace. Voice-cracking disgrace. Broken-string disgrace. Avoiding it should qualify for public funding.
He played clean. He listened. He did not crowd the songs or try to force the room to notice how badly he wanted this. He found the structure and sat in it. Anton noticed. Sveta noticed. Ilya noticed everything and looked increasingly pleased in a way Kozzy tried not to die of.
After the last song, Anton exhaled and said, “Well. Fuck.”
Sveta twirled one stick once between her fingers. “He’s solid.”
Roman clapped, because Roman always clapped.
Ilya grinned. “Kozzy stays.”
That was that.
Less than a year later they recorded the first demo. Within six months they were touring Russia and parts of the former Soviet Union in vans that smelled like old coffee, cables, and men who had mistaken youth for invincibility. Kozzy turned out, on stage, to be exactly what he had strategically intended to become at thirteen. Necessary. Structural. The person who kept the floor under everything while other people got credit for standing on it.
By then he had started growing into his looks enough to be properly inconvenient. Dark hair in his eyes. Long athletic build going lean rather than bulky. Hands made for the neck of a bass. Dark colouring. Mouth built for grinning and arguing in roughly equal measure. On stage he had that bassist trick of looking almost relaxed while anchoring the whole picture.
The grin said harmless.
The posture said otherwise.
At seventeen the band signed.
Not to God. Not to a major label with champagne and lawyers in coordinated coats. But to something real enough to count. Papers. Meetings. An actual future written down badly and then revised. Within months they had their first North American run.
This is the sort of sentence people write later to make youth sound glamorous.
What it meant in practice was airport food, no sleep, bad coffee, five people in motion, and Roman starting to look wrong.
Not loudly wrong. Not yet.
If a person falls apart gradually enough, the people around him can spend years insisting it is still weather and not climate. Cocaine came first because cocaine always liked an entrance. The heroin would come years later, but the shadow of it as always looming at the edges of rooms Kozzy did not trust and mornings he liked even less. Roman was too bright one hour, too absent the next. His humour arrived late. His pupils looked wrong. His choices began putting him in rooms with people nobody sensible would have trusted near the cash box, the gear, or anyone’s girlfriend.
Kozzy did not know how to fix this.
Seventeen is old enough to recognize disaster and not old enough to be useful about it.
Anton once said, in the tone of a man offering principle rather than comfort, “You don’t make his choices for him.”
This was accurate and useless in equal measure.
Montréal arrived into all of that.
Cold in a way Kozzy respected. Not worse than Moscow. Just different. River cold. City cold. The kind that went looking for openings in your coat with professional commitment.
The first morning, after too little sleep and too much listening to Roman still awake in the bathroom having what sounded like a deeply personal dispute with the sink, Kozzy decided breakfast elsewhere was not cowardice.
It was strategy.
He left the hotel at seven in yesterday’s black jeans and hoodie, and a pair of Chuck Taylor’s old enough to qualify as field-tested. At seventeen he could already look dangerous under lights. In daylight, in a grocery store, he looked mostly like a tired kid trying to carry adulthood faster than it wanted to be carried.
The grocery store was enormous.
North American grocery stores, Kozzy discovered almost immediately, were public ideology. Every national anxiety had been externalized into cardboard. Eighteen kinds of jam. Twelve kinds of cereal pretending to be healthy. Twenty more proudly not pretending. Entire aisles devoted to breakfast as if the continent had collectively decided the first meal of the day needed more options than governance.
He was there for oatmeal. This was not complicated. He liked oatmeal. Oatmeal made sense. Warm. Cheap. Filling. Easy to make in a hotel room with an electric kettle and very little hope. Familiar in a life that had lately been far from it.
Then he saw the box.
Dino Eggs.
The packaging looked like a sugar rush had gotten hold of graphic design software. Dinosaurs on the front. Eggs advertised in colours no geologic period had ever produced naturally. Kozzy picked it up and read it once. Then again.
His English was good enough by then for menus, songs, interviews, and bad flirtation from venue staff. It was not always good enough for the legal claims of children’s oatmeal.
Eggs.
Candy eggs.
They melted.
They sweetened the oatmeal.
The little dinosaurs stayed.
This, from a budget perspective, was excellent.
He would not need extra sugar. Sugar cost money. Honey cost more. Jam required either refrigeration or optimism. The eggs dissolved into exactly the kind of sweetness a person wanted before load-in without having to buy a secondary system.
He checked the price.
Cheap enough.
That mattered. Tour money had a way of vanishing if you behaved like a person with faith in the future. Kozzy, having grown up in a political household and a touring van, regarded money with the suspicion it deserved.
He put two boxes in his basket.
Then he thought about Roman.
Then he thought about airports and hotel rooms and the feeling of waking up in countries where even the breakfast looked more confident than you did.
Then he put two more boxes in.
If a person was going to acquire a dependency on tour, he thought, it might as well be the kind that hatched tiny sugar dinosaurs and kept him alive through soundcheck. Oatmeal was a much better addiction than cocaine. Vastly better than heroin. Safer than cigarettes. Cheaper than being stupid in restaurants.
At the till, the cashier looked at the stack of boxes, then at him.
“For your kid?”
Kozzy, seventeen years old, six feet tall, visibly not a father, said, “No. Me.”
The cashier blinked.
Kozzy paid and left before Canada could pursue the matter further.
Back at the hotel, Anton was in the hallway outside Roman’s room looking like he as one inconvenience away from criminal philosophy.
He looked at the bag. “Coffee?”
“Better.”
Anton’s face suggested that very little in a plastic grocery bag was likely to improve his view of the morning.
“What did you buy?”
“Oatmeal.”
Anton relaxed slightly.
“With dinosaurs.”
Anton closed his eyes.
This was not rage. This was fatigue finding new shapes.
Kozzy took it as neutral.
In the room he filled the kettle, tore open the packet, and watched the eggs begin to melt. They dissolved exactly as advertised, which was nice. Packaging should not get points for honesty, but here we are.
The oatmeal sweetened. The little dinosaurs emerged at the bottom.
Kozzy stood over the cup and felt something in his chest stop bracing quite so hard.
That was the whole stupid thing.
Warm. Cheap. Predictable. Sweet enough without requiring anything extra. Childish in a way no one else had to understand. He appreciated the dinosaurs not because they were useful, but because they were unnecessary in exactly the correct direction. They reminded him of being a kid in a world that had not yet started asking him to survive professionally. They reminded him that some things could still be silly without becoming dangerous.
He took a bite.
It was good.
Not transcendent. Not life-changing in the way music could be or stages could be or the first time Ilya Rozanov looked at him at fifteen and said Kozzy stays. But good in the most practical, stabilizing way available. It behaved the same way regardless of country, currency, or emotional weather. Under the circumstances, that bordered on holiness.
He bought more in Toronto.
Toronto was where he met Rose.
This was not directly the oatmeal’s fault, but the chronology deserves notice.
The show had been good. Better than Montréal, which had been useful and cold and still slightly unreal. Toronto felt closer to something. A city that understood amplified noise as a civic good. The crowd had been louder. Ilya, naturally, had become unbearable about it. Anton had claimed the monitors were trying to kill him. Sveta had hit like a war crime. Roman had been brilliant for exactly forty-five minutes and worrying for the rest.
After, there was an after party because there was always an after party and because young men in bands are constitutionally incapable of leaving a room once applause has happened in it.
The others dispersed into the usual touring ecosystem. Women. Some men. Drinks they should not have had. People telling Ilya he had changed their life. People telling Anton they loved his pedals. People trying, hilariously, to flirt with Sveta as if death had not already reached them once that week.
Sveta, for her part, kept to herself the way she always did when she was off-duty and unimpressed. Everyone else paired off or pretended not to.
Kozzy found himself at the bar trying to acquire something non-alcoholic and humiliatingly aware of his own age. Seventeen is old enough to be on stage and too young to feel fully in control of a room full of strangers leaning too close. It is a terrible age for being looked at and an excellent age for looking back.
That was when the girl beside him said, “You know you look like Trent Reznor with better hair, right?”
Kozzy turned.
She was, in a word, devastating.
Copper-blonde hair, loose around her face. Pale green eyes catching the bar light. A soft mouth that looked less soft once she was using it. She was pretty in a way that could have gone sweet if not for the expression. Cool. Unimpressed. Already tired of whatever male performance had been happening within ten feet of her.
Kozzy had the immediate and correct impression that half the room would probably have followed her into traffic and she would have found this inconvenient.
Kozzy had no idea who Trent Reznor was.
The tone suggested compliment.
The girl was also extremely hot.
He accepted the premise on both counts.
“Better hair?” he repeated.
“Much better hair,” she said. “You’ve got the whole gloomy industrial pretty-boy thing, but yours still looks like you wash it on purpose.”
He blinked.
She held out a hand. “Rose.”
He took it. “Kozzy.”
She looked at him for a beat. “That a real name?”
“No.”
“Good.”
This, he felt immediately, was a woman who improved a room by standing in it.
“Who’s Trent Reznor,” he asked, because there was no point pretending expertise he did not possess.
Rose’s eyebrows went up.
“Oh, wow.”
“That bad?”
“No. Just educational.” She tilted her head. “You really don’t know.”
“I’m from Russia.”
“I’m from Detroit. We still know who Nine Inch Nails are.”
He had no idea what Nine Inch Nails were either, but the tone once again suggested he should have felt cooler than he currently did.
Rose, apparently reading this accurately off his face, smiled.
“Don’t worry. We can fix that.”
This was how it started.
Not with glamour. Not even with flirting, exactly. With Rose looking at him like he was a problem she might enjoy solving and Kozzy deciding, correctly, that he would like to keep being looked at that way.
She was in Toronto because a friend’s band from Detroit had a run of dates that would briefly overlap with Rozanov. She had come with them because, as she put it, “none of those idiots can count cash, read a route sheet, or remember to eat without supervision.”
This should have told Kozzy several important things.
Unfortunately, he was just shy of eighteen and she was extremely hot.
They spent an hour at the bar while the others cycled through flirtation, substances, and whatever version of emotional dishonesty the city was offering. Rose told him he looked younger when he laughed. Kozzy told her he had chosen bass because every band was desperate enough to need one. She laughed hard enough that he immediately wanted to say smarter things forever.
When she left, she wrote her number on a receipt and told him not to be boring.
Kozzy kept the receipt in the pocket of his hoodie like an amulet.
He called from Chicago.
Then from Cleveland.
Then from somewhere in Ohio that smelled like truck stop coffee and bad carpeting. Rose picked up more often than she didn’t. When she didn’t, she called back. When she called back, she did not do the coy thing. She talked. Asked where they were. Who was being stupid. What Ilya looked like up close, because she “had questions about the cheekbones.” What Anton was currently angry at. Whether Sveta had murdered anyone. Whether Kozzy had eaten anything besides dinosaur oatmeal and caffeine.
This last one was unfair and also correct.
The others had new women, and some of them, sometimes, men in every city. Temporary faces. Temporary mouths. Temporary arrangements held together by adrenaline and key cards. Sveta mostly kept to herself because Sveta was not built for casual nonsense and preferred not to conduct experiments on idiots. Kozzy had Rose.
First on the phone.
Then, a few months later, in person again.
They were back in North America by then, Kozzy having freshly entered adulthood, and with enough dates under their belts to pretend the whole thing was normal and not a miracle held together by zip ties and youthful denial. Kozzy asked if she wanted to come out for a week.
Rose said, “Do you mean visit or help?”
He paused.
That had not occurred to him as two separate categories.
“Either?”
“Jesus,” she said, sounding amused rather than alarmed. “Okay. I’m coming because I want to see you. If I end up doing unpaid labour for your little disaster circus, that’s on all of you.”
She arrived in Detroit with one duffel bag and one rolling suitcase, looking like a woman already regretting the condition of several men she had not yet met in daylight.
By dinner on day one she had:
found the missing venue runner,
made sure Roman ate actual food,
reorganized the merch cash float because, in her words, “this is not a system, this is a hostage situation,”
and located Kozzy’s passport in the side pocket of a gig bag where he had absolutely not put it and was therefore blaming on the universe.
By day three Anton was asking her if she knew where the spare strings were.
By day four Ilya had started saying things like, “Rose, tell them we are not leaving until...” in the tone of a man who had decided competent women were absolutely foundational.
By day five Sveta, highest possible honour, handed her coffee without being asked and accepted instructions about load-in times without argument.
This was how the band adopted people. Not sentimentally. Functionally.
Rose took care of things because they needed taking care of and because she had the exact sort of mind that looked at a room full of men in a mild state of self-created disarray and immediately started assigning tasks. She taped set times to doors. She made lists. She remembered who had eaten. She counted money properly. She told venue staff when they were being stupid in a tone so matter-of-fact it took them several seconds to realize they had lost.
Kozzy watched the whole thing happen with the baffled gratitude of a man witnessing competence he would like to keep forever.
One night in Minneapolis, after she had prevented Ilya from leaving his in-ears in a green room and Anton from strangling a promoter over bad timing, Rose climbed onto the bus seat beside Kozzy, stole his bottle of water, and said, “Your band would die in a ditch without female intervention.”
Kozzy looked down at the box of Dino Eggs oatmeal in his lap, then at Rose, then back at the aisle where the others were all, in one way or another, proving her point.
“Probably,” he admitted.
Rose took the box from him, read the front, and stared.
“This is what you eat.”
“It is essential.”
“Is it.”
“Yes.”
She turned the box over. “Why.”
“The eggs dissolve.”
Rose looked at him for a long beat, then laughed so hard she had to hand the box back to keep from dropping it.
“Oh my God. Of course you’re like this.”
“Like what.”
“Strategic,” she said. “Emotionally strange. Weirdly practical about extremely stupid things.”
This was, by the standards of things hot girls from Detroit could say to an eighteen-year-old Russian bassist, perfect.
He held out the box. “Do you want some.”
Rose looked at him. At the box. At the bus. At the rest of the band, who were currently arguing about whether cereal counted as dinner.
Then she took the box, pulled out a packet, and said, “Only if you make it.”
Kozzy did.
She ate it sitting cross-legged on the bus bench with one foot pressed against his thigh and announced after the second bite that he had, in fact, been right and this was “alarmingly functional.”
That was the closest Rose ever came to reverence.
By the end of the week she had a lanyard she had not been issued, a notebook full of things no one else had remembered to track, and three separate men in the band asking where they were supposed to be at nine the next morning as if she had always been there.
Kozzy, who had met her at a bar in Toronto because she thought he looked like a musician he had never heard of, lay in his bunk that night listening to the low hum of tires on asphalt and thought that North America, for all its crimes against bread and breakfast cereal, had produced two unexpectedly excellent things.
One was dino egg oatmeal.
The other was Rose.