Original Content

Two years ago, at AniMass, there had been Kaiju Big Battle, a pro-wrestling event thrown together by art college students, wherein all the characters were Godzilla-style monsters, Ultraman-style robots, or in one particular case, a kung-fu-powered giant can of Campbell's Tomato Soup, suplexing each other through cardboard skyscrapers. 2007 had been somewhat lackluster, mainly focusing on a cherry blossom festival-themed dance and renewed emphasis on the masquerade, but 2008 made up for lost time.

The Pillows, a Japanese pseudo-punk rock band, famous for doing the soundtrack of FLCL, one of the most universally acclaimed coming-of-age anime of the time, had somehow been convinced to come all the way to Boston, and perform an hour long mini-concert on the convention hall's main stage.

This was, to be clear, a massive get. Many of the attendees this year had bought Saturday-only tickets, just to get a chance to see The Pillows on stage, in person, without having to travel to Japan. It was, Alan thought, probably the main reason that the registration line still snaked across multiple floors, despite being a whole day into the convention. And Alan, being here, was determined to see them.

However, the line for attendance was not the only one that had ballooned out to untenable dimensions. A second, parallel line was running along the inner edge of the convention hall, with hundreds upon hundreds of nerds sitting, patiently, conversing. Some were rabble-rousing, of course – slapping passerby with “yaoi paddles”, basically wooden boat oars labeled with a Japanese word roughly equivalent to “gay”, mostly playfully. Others held up signs saying “Free hugs!” and “Donate to a lonely catgirl!” and such like that, but while these things were part of the background noise of conventions, as Alan walked, surveying this mystery line, he saw convention staff descent upon them, telling them off, confiscating signs, and then, standing guard.

This line was subject to intense security.

He tapped one of the staff on the shoulder, and they whipped around, fists raised.

Alan threw up his hands.

“Uh, what's this line for?”

The staffer sighed. “The concert.”

“Fuck,” Alan said.

“Yeah.”

Alan looked down the hall, and saw the line wrap around a corner – importantly, with all the people facing AWAY from the corner. “If I find the end of the line-”

“Good luck with that,” the staffer interjected.

“If,” Alan continued, “would I be able to get into the concert?”

The staffer laughed, and Alan just stared while they regained their composure.

“Oh, fuck no. Between you and me, we're not just past attendance limits, we're past the fire code. Hell, we might even be past the structural capacity of the room, if we let everyone in. We'd have to stack 'em on top of each other.” The staffer clapped Alan on the shoulder. “Sorry about that, kiddo.”

Alan shrugged, and gave a half-smile. “Nothing to be done about it now. Good luck,” he said, walking away. Then, he pulled out his phone, and texted Steve.

[You manage to get into the concert?]

His phone buzzed almost immediately.

[Yeah, dude, we've been camping out here for hours. Jeff was trying to get in touch with you, but you never replied.]

Alan tapped out a response.

[I had some shit come up. Think you can sneak me in with y'all?]

It took some time for the reply to come.

[Nope, security's breathing down our necks. I think you're fucked]

Alan snorted. As if he'd let something like breaking the law, fire codes, and convention security keep him from engaging in his fandom. [I am the one who fucks], he replied.

[fucking lol], Steve messaged, and Alan began planning out a course of action.

Honestly, it didn't take much planning. The entrance to the main events stage would be guarded not just by con staff, but convention hall security, hired from outside sources. There was a chance that he could sneak into the line, but relying on that kind of coin toss wasn't Alan's style. This convention hall, more than any apartment, more than where he'd grown up, was his territory, and he knew his way around it.

The main stage was on the second floor, directly opposite the cylindrical void crisscrossed by escalators that formed the central conduit of vertical travel, but the main stage was hardly a one-story affair. Sure, the ceilings in the Hynes were high, and you could fit a two or three story building in each floor, but the main stage had a presence on the third floor. Alan had been there the last year they'd been officially accessible, back in '06, watching Kaiju Big Battle beat the shit out of each other with styrofoam Pocky sticks, from a wonderful seat up on the balcony. While Alan wasn't aware of anything terrible happening, in '07, the convention had officially closed the balcony seating, and he understood their position. Anime fans could get a bit overly enthusiastic, and a bit stupid, and all it would take is one person tumbling over the edge of the balcony, falling two and a half stories, and cracking their head open like an egg on the concrete floor, to reduce attendance by several tens of percentages for a few years.

Alan also didn't care particularly about this, because he knew all five entrances to the balcony seats, and knew that only two of them were usually guarded. Though, when he passed them now, he saw no one standing in front of the huge double-doors up on the third floor. He watched a few attendees cautiously give them a push, and it seemed like they were locked – not by a bolt, since they moved a little, so probably by a chain on the other side, which could be circumvented, but Alan would rather try something a bit more clandestine.

The fifth entrance was via a ladder that led to the roof. That was something he knew of, and could, in theory, access – The rear stairwells of the convention center, more blocked off by suggestion than by actual security, had rickety stairs leading up to the roof, access restricted by a keypad and a door made out of chain link fence that, if Alan was feeling brave, he could squeeze around without (probably) falling down the stairwell to his death. That would definitely work, it's not like anyone was guarding it, or had been any year that Alan had looked at it.

But the real meat of things was in the third and fourth entrances. While the first two doors were along the main perpendicular concourse of the third floor of the Hynes, accessing the back end of the balcony, three and four accessed the sides of the balcony, through two thin hallways running through the back-end of the convention hall. Four was more challenging – it shot off of an access corridor that had never been available to anyone other than convention staff, and while Alan could sneak in there, and would prefer it to the roof route or beating a chain lock into submission, door three was his best bet. Last year, he'd used it with Steve and Jeff to get the best seats in the house for the masquerade. It was opposite a set of public restrooms, and it seemed that people never thought about where those doors led. The convention staff, certainly, had forgotten that they existed. Hell, those bathrooms were one of the better-kept secrets of the convention hall – man's inhumanity to man rendered the most traveled bathrooms of any public setting somewhat inhospitable, and these, off in a side corridor, tended to stay pristine for the weekend.

So, Alan made his way down the hallway, and leaned against the wall opposite the bathrooms, as if he was waiting for a friend to come out after an improbably long shit. That afforded him the opportunity to scope out the situation – if someone saw him sneaking onto the balcony through an unmarked door, someone would likely follow him – or see the activity of the main stage through the momentary opening. And if people did that, the secret would be out, and Door Number Three would be closed off to him for at least the next few years.

Just as it seemed like traffic to the restroom was dying down enough for Alan to make a dash for the door, a group of five teenagers came down the corridor, walked past him, and came to a stop directly in front of the secret door.

“So, this is it?” one of them asked.

“Yep,” a girl said. She was in cosplay as a schoolgirl from some music-themed show Alan had been meaning to check out, and she even had the stylistic touch of having her handbag (a necessity for any cosplay without pockets) in the shape of a plush saxophone. And she pressed her hand against the wooden door.

“And we can just go in?” one of the guys asked, his eyes flitting from side to side nervously, and his voice wavering just as much. He wasn't in any cosplay that Alan could recognize, but his plain white shirt, with marker spelling out “Pickle Inspector Fanboy”, had to mean something.

“Do you see anyone telling us we can't?” said a second girl. She was dressed as… Alan had to think about it for a minute, processing the gleaming studs and neon pink, but with her matching pink hair, he was fairly certain that she was doing a punk rock take on Sailor Chibi Moon, which to him seemed in poor taste, considering that her skirt was short enough to constitute criminal exposure in some counties and the character was at most, twelve, which was at least two years too young for a character to look like that. She overtook the first girl, shoving the door open. “See?”

Reality had to be shitting Alan. He'd been taking all of these precautions, and these, at best, stupid fucking kids were just waltzing in with expectations of getting caught? He wanted to laugh at them. They had no idea of the precautions, of the planning, of all the understanding that was required to do the things that Alan and his friends did on a regular basis, and they were…

Oh.

They just walked in. And no one noticed.

The door was swinging shut behind them, not a single patron of the restroom sparing so much as a glance. Alan darted in behind them, sucking in his gut to try and squeeze by without slowing the door. It brushed against his gut, triggering a bit of shame, but that was secondary to the goal of sneaking into the The Pillows concert, and that was achieved. The balcony seats, empty as the hearts of the haters, stretched out before him, his kingdom, minus the small fiefdom claimed by that group of teens. They took a seat by the edge, two members of the group leaning, enthusiastically, over the barrier.

“Fucking look at them,” the ringleader said.

“They're not even on stage yet,” a boy in a graphic tee and cargo shorts said. Some things never changed.

“That's not what I meant,” the ringleader continued. She pointed down below them. “Look at the crowd. All hyped as shit, and none of them have half the view we do. This is gonna rock.”

Nods spread out among the group, and Alan quietly took a seat a row back and ten feet down the row from the teens. He had no idea how to interact with people younger than him. Time was passing so incredibly quickly these days – the lived experience of someone five years older than him was incomprehensible to him, halfway devoid of the internet and cell phones and growing up in a world where the closest thing to nerd accessibility was the local comic shops and their Magic: The Gathering tournaments, and the lived experience of someone five years younger than him was also incomprehensible to him, in a world populated by TokyoPop stores full of anime merch, phpBB message boards about every possible niche subject, MySpace and Blogger pages showing their identities to the world with cute gif animation signatures, anime clubs starting to populate high schools and local libraries, like in another five years, this would all be normal. The mere idea of talking to them terrified him.

Their conversation had bounced back and forth between the five, pointing out fun cosplays in the crowd, teasing each other, infused with that manic energy of being at a convention, but now, it found itself in a lull. And in that lull, the ringleader asked a question.

“Hey, didn't some guy sneak in with us?”

And all five sets of eyes turned to Alan.

He gave them an awkward half-smile, and waved. “Uh, hi.”

One of the girls snorted, and Alan's cheeks burned. Ms. Punk Sailor Mini Moon stood up, walked over to him, and crossed her arms.

“You're not going to narc on us, right?”

Alan filed the idea of a punk girl threatening him into “things to process later”, and nodded. “Wouldn't dream of it,” he said, his mouth running before his mind could start walking.

“Good,” she said, and started to turn back to her group.

Alan, running fully on autopilot, opened his mouth. “You might want to lock the door, though.”

“What?”

“It might fuck over some people following us, but if security tests the door and finds it's locked, they won't check the balcony for trespassers.”

Punk Moon paused, and mulled this over. “Hey, Ellen, can you get that?”

The third girl, rocking cargo pants, a pair of oversized headphones around her neck, and purple hair as short as she was tall, jogged over, and after a few moments of figuring out exactly how it worked, flipped the lever to jam the door's security lock shut.

“Hey, come sit with us,” Punk Moon said, and watched Alan awkwardly hurdle the stadium-style seat-backs to get down to their row. He fought his cape for a good portion of the journey, as it kept getting caught on just about component of the seats. It didn't help that he only had one free hand, what with holding the overly-heavy costume cane, nor that his top hat kept threatening to go flying off into the crowd below.

She reached over, and helpfully took Alan's cane from him. Then, he had the free hands to put his hat on a chair, and then the coordination to untangle his cape, and then, finally, finally, sat down one seat down from Punk Moon.

“Nice cosplay,” she said.

“You too.” It was a pretty original take on the source material, he thought.

She leaned back, and lazily kicked her legs out. “Capes are always a pain in the ass. You gonna be stuck with it the whole weekend?”

“I hope not,” he said.

“You hope not? Dude, you gotta have a plan if you're going to cosplay. When I made this,” she said, gesturing to her, well, whole outfit, “I made it to be worn for a Saturday. High durability, relatively comfy, but not enough pockets and too fragile for Sunday, and too much of a pain in the ass for a Friday.”

Alan sunk in his seat. “It's not even my costume, I was planning on a different character. A…” He trailed off. How the hell was he supposed to refer to Sawyer? Friend? Enemy? Existential threat? “acquaintance had me wear it.”

Even in the spotty light of the pre-concert hall, Alan could see the skeptical look on her face. “Really. An acquaintance just happened to have a costume in your size? You might have a stalker, dude.”

Alan shrugged. “That sounds about right.”

Punk Moon was silent for a moment.

“What's your name, and what's your whole deal?”

“Alan,” he said. “And uh… It's complicated.” That felt inadequate. He leaned forward out of his seat, onto the balcony railing, and pointed at a familiar set of five heads in the crowd. Jeff, Steve, Jack, Clive, and Bill had all made it into the concert. Steve was leading the charge, elbowing his way to a space only a couple dozen feet from the stage itself. “See them? They're the friends I came to the con with.”

“Why aren't you down there with them? Did they abandon you?”

“Nah, I had some stuff come up,” he said, neglecting to mention that “stuff” meant “chainsaw murder”. “Nothing's really gone according to plan. I mean, I didn't really have a plan? But yeah, we've gotten kinda… desynced.”

Punk Moon nodded. “Rachel, by the way.”

“So, what's your whole deal?” Alan said.

Rachel laughed. “Fuck if I know. This is our second convention, so it's all a fucking blur. How many cons have you been to?”

Alan started counting in his head, and gave up. “A lot.”

“Does it ever start feeling normal?”

A brief synopsis of the last 36 hours played in his head. “Nope.”

“Thank fuck,” Rachel said. “I'd hate it if this stopped feeling…” She looked for the right word, and settled on “messy.”

The lights went down, and familiar guitar chords flew through the air.

The Pillows were live, and everything else stopped mattering.

It was hard to explain just what The Pillows meant to Alan, as a band. Their music had formed the soundtrack to an anime called FLCL, which he saw back in 2003, when it debuted on the Adult Swim block of Cartoon Network's programming. It was late August, the end of his first summer break from college, and he'd been feeling lost. Not that he felt much more found now, but… Movies and television and books had given him a certain image of the “high school experience”, and anime doubled down on that. At least half of the anime out there took place with its characters in high school, and it made him acutely aware that he was missing out. He didn't have any close friends, never had a girlfriend, and mostly just kept to himself. Maybe it being bullied a lot as a kid, maybe it was natural shyness, but that's just the way it turned out. And he'd comforted himself with the idea that while he might be missing out on whatever high school was supposed to be like, he'd really open up and have an exciting life in college.

That had not happened.

So, that first summer back, he was depressed as all hell. Come August, he wasn't even replying to messages from Jeff and Steve, who he'd met in his second semester and made fast friends with. Then, FLCL dropped, like a bomb, into his life. It was six episodes long, and with each passing week, he hung more and more on it. He expected it to give him answers. It was a coming-of-age series, set in a what felt like a dying town, with a bunch of sci-fi elements, like summoning robots out of your forehead, and a mysterious, beautiful space pirate, you know – anime shit. But it was the melancholic tone that had grabbed him. Mamimi and Naota, two of the more normal main characters, felt lost. Mamimi was a high school delinquent, chain-smoking her days away while occasionally committing acts of pyromania, and Naota, the middle school protagonist, wanted to be an adult while having no idea what that meant, to him or anyone else. It didn't feel like either of them had ambitions or dreams, and it seemed to Alan, at least, that there was a hollowness in them. The soundtrack, performed by The Pillows, captured that nostalgic feeling of both having everything and nothing ahead of you. He must have listened to it a hundred times in those weeks.

Unfortunately, the show gave him no answers.

But it made him feel like someone shared that sense of being lost with him. Even if he couldn't share that with anyone else, he didn't feel alone.

And so, he leaned over the railing, and sang along with the lyrics of every song.

Further down the railing, Rachel and her four friends were singing along, with every bit as much enthusiasm. He didn't look at them much, just a few stolen glances between songs, but he wondered what the music meant to them. When and where it had come into their lives.

The concert could have lasted thirty minutes, or two hours. Nothing was before it, nothing came after it, and during, it was all there was.

Eventually, it was over.

The lights came up.

Somewhere behind him, Alan heard someone say “C'mon, let's get out of here.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, we're headed to the Dealer's Room. Wanna come with?” Rachel said.