Had she been a young male, I might’ve felt inclined to approach him with the offer of a cigarette and a sympathetic ear. I’d often done so in the past when encountering such a scene and, while I’d found that this would often have a calming effect on the individual, I'd be the first to admit that my urge to engage with such individuals is not altogether altruistic in origin. Mason’s Jar, the novel I’m currently writing, features a cast of some thirty homeless teens who’ve sought refuge on a farmstead in Corbeil after fleeing North Bay and, perhaps rather selfishly, I’ve found that the time it takes to smoke a cigarette is often enough to provide the seedling of a character to later germinate on the page.

      But a teenage girl in crisis is another matter entirely and it was hard for me not to wonder, how many times a girl in her circumstance had been approached by some creepy older man, luring her into his good graces with the offer of a cigarette. So I kept my distance and reserved my glances to the fleeting variety, though when I came to a hedge in front of the house at the corner of Elm Street and Division, I couldn’t resist the urge to duck behind it, out of view of the girl but not out of range of her rage, curious to see how the scene might play itself out.

       My resolve lasted mere seconds for there’s really nothing more creepy than some old guy hiding behind a hedge, staring over at some teenage girl having a meltdown with the clock verging on midnight, and all it took was another pedestrian heading my way to tell me that whatever was going to happen would have to happen without me. Telling myself, I’d check in on her on my way back home, I turned down Elm and continued on my walk.

My destination that night, as it had been on any number of Saturday nights since we’d relocated to Kingston, was the so-called student village on the outskirts of Queen’s University. A few weeks after we’d arrived in August, I’d read a piece in the local paper about how Queen’s students were defying the lockdown order by throwing massive weekend parties in the area. We lived only a ten minute walk from campus and, the very next Saturday after Tanja and the kids had gone to be bed, I headed out to take a look for myself.

      Now when it comes to students having a little fun, I’m not really one to judge. I well remember the liquor and drug fuelled debauches I’d been involved with during my first year at the University of Western Ontario and I’ll willingly concede that some of my favourite memories from those days were stumbling back drunk or stoned on weed and/or mushrooms to Saugeen Maitland (then the largest dorm in North America) with a fellow English major who’d earned the nickname Shag for his uncanny resemblance to Shaggy in the Scooby-Doo cartoons. But I will admit to is having been a little shocked by just how brazen the Queen’s students were in their drunken revelries.

       Only an estimated 6,600 of the regular student population of 24,000 had returned and, as far as I could tell, most of those must have been out and about. That first night, I’d taken the quickest route into the heart of the village, following the street we lived on - Barrie - south to Earl, the street my two teenage sons would have taken to the antiquated Kingston Collegiate and Vocational School before they were transferred in January to the newly built Kingston Secondary School some five kilometers north.