I grab her jacket. Pull her toward me. Kiss her, hard, with the bass shaking the concrete under our feet and Cal's voice tearing through the air above us and two hundred people around us who don't care, who are in their own moment, who are too busy being alive to notice two women kissing in the middle of their church.
Teague kisses me back. Her hands on my face, rings cold against my jaw, and she tastes like beer and chapstick and she's warm from the crowd and the music and her mouth is the best thing in this lot, better than the PA system, better than Cal's voice, better than the surge.
We break apart. She's grinning. I'm grinning. The third song starts and we stop kissing and start moving because the music demands it and we give it what it demands.
Four songs. Five. Six. The set is relentless and perfect and each song hits harder than the last. Britt is a machine behind the drums, every hit precise, sweat flying from her arms. The guitarist plays like they're arguing with the instrument and winning. Cal screams and sings and talks between songs about mutual aid and tenant rights and a community garden that got bulldozed last spring, and the crowd screams back because this is a conversation, not a performance, and everyone in this lot is part of it.
After six songs, they take a break. Cal says "we'll be back in fifteen, get some food, the nachos are mandatory" and Brittstands up from behind the kit and stretches and the guitarist sets their bass on the stand and hops off the stage.
"Nachos," Teague says. "Follow me."
We push through the crowd toward the back of the lot, where a folding table has been set up next to a charcoal grill that's sending smoke and smell into the night air. Behind the table is a woman in a Scorched Ordinance shirt serving what can only be described as nachos on a baking sheet. A full sheet pan of chips, pulled pork, cheese, jalapeños, black beans, sour cream, lime. Actual food. Served on industrial bakeware.
"Two," Teague says.
"Teague!" The woman leans across the table. "Britt said you'd come."
"I told her I would."
"Who's this?"
"Zoe. My girlfriend."
The word. Every time she says it, it hits me new. Because Teague choosing to say it, in public, to a stranger, is still a decision she's making actively, a wall she's dismantling in real time, and I get to watch it happen.
"Your girlfriend." The woman looks at me with clear approval. "Welcome. First show?"
"First show," I say. "This is incredible."
"Wait until the second set. Cal does 'Rent Strike' and the whole lot loses it." She hands us two baking sheets loaded with nachos that weigh approximately six pounds each. "Eat fast. The second set starts before the food gets cold."
We find a spot near the fence, away from the main crowd, and we eat nachos off baking sheets and lean against the chain link and Teague tells me about the band. How Britt and the guitarist started playing in a garage in West Philly at seventeen. How Cal joined a year later after they heard him doing spoken word at an open mic. How they've been playing warehouse shows and lot shows and basement shows for years, building a crowd that comes because the music is real, not because an algorithm told them to.
"This is punk," Teague says. She's got sour cream on her thumb and she's not wiping it off because she's talking and Teague talks with her hands now, which she didn't used to do, which I want to think that she learned from me. "Not the label. Not the clothes or the hair or the patches. This. People making something in a lot with pallets and tape and feeding people nachos and talking about the neighborhood. This is what it's always been."
"It's beautiful."
She laughs. "It's loud and sweaty and someone stepped on your sneakers."
"That too."
She looks at me. The work lights from the stage are catching the left side of her face and the septum ring is glinting and her eyes are soft in a way they only get when she's in her element and she's let me into it.
"You like it," she says. A statement, delivered with certainty.
"I love it."
"You don't have to love it just because I love it."
"I know. I love it because it's yours and because it's good and because that man's voice made me feel things in my skeleton."
Britt appears from behind the stage. She's tall up close, taller than I expected, with the easy physicality of a person whose body is her instrument. She sees Teague and her face opens up.
"Moran. You actually came."
"I said I would."
"You say a lot of things. Usually from behind a bar." She looks at me. "This the girlfriend?"
