The rain pummels down the window pane of Archie’s van, which is parked in the emptiness of a random lot. It’s just Grace and Archie in the presumably six-seater, the two staring at each other longingly in this final scene. It’s what the audience has been waiting for—myself included, as I’m watching them at three in the morning. Don’t do it, I think to myself. They’re panting, the classic movie yearning. Dark eyes travel down to lips split ajar, bodies heave, but of course, the oral herpes. She can literally see the flare, it’s all swollen and pus-like—a special little chicken-pox. “Grace, no,” I say from the comforts of my bed. Like the ending of a Wattpad fanfiction, they close the gap, and it truly is such a beautiful kiss. I do—like, I do, get why Mile End Kicks ends there. Whatever happens to Grace after is an extended adventure, with (or hopefully without) oral herpes.
An hour later, I start an extensive search about Mile End Kicks, about the cast—the symptoms of oral herpes—and most related to me at this moment, Montréal, the place I go to visit in four days. On September 4, just like Grace, I’ll be in the Smart City trying poutine.
Grace Pine, played by Barbie Ferreira, is a twenty-four year old music writer from Toronto with bangs and translucent glasses. A few of her descriptions and aspirations overlap with mine, as I’m a twenty-four year old art culture writer from Queens, New York. No bangs, but I do wear glasses. If I rewind to the beginning of the film, before the rain and Archie and the van, the premise is as follows: Grace picks up her suitcase, and against her family’s approval, she moves to Montréal via the stocky and cartoonish Megabus. Regardless of all the many warnings, Grace turns in her ticket, hardly holding in her glee as the bus pulls away from Toronto foregrounds and into MTL’s unknown.
When she sits on the bus, the audience takes in her quivering grin, her eyes jittery and excited. After Grace arrives at Mile End, her breath ragged from trudging the suitcase up those very spiral stairs, she stops at the front door to peer out at the rue below her. Even then, it is so apparent how quickly the world is about to unfold. As Vendredi came, her jitters soon became mine. 
On September 4, I am at the Moynihan Train Hall with my belongings and a matcha. I triple-check my passport’s location in the little leather crossbody pouch my mom sewed for me just shy of a week ago, which I promise I will never take off because of the ‘because’—theft, danger, crime—and wait for the train to arrive. It comes in late. All of the anticipating passengers speed over to the gate, and of course, anyone going over the border must leave the line to go retrieve paper tickets—instructions we only learn three minutes into boarding. The rat race begins, all of us running to the information desk to grab our rectangular slips and customs questionnaires. Once I receive mine, I practically leap over the escalator. Ticket, matcha, passport, omgthetrainisgoingtoleave—omg, it’s leaving, oh my, oh my, I watch as the train on the left track rolls forward, wind tickling the strands of my french curl braids. I think I’m going to have a panic attack. Additionally, all of my belongings are loitered across the platform.
Until, like a girl—I say to myself, “oh!” My train sparkly and very much there on the right track. I repeat my mantra, ticket, matcha, passport, organizing my items into my hands, shaking off the droplets of matcha I spill across my blue button down, and waddle over. The conductor exhales for me, and with his hand, I find the entrance, moving to find a seat. I wrestle my carry-on into the ceiling cubby, a line of followers behind, the woman next to me holding the last gulps of my matcha. I whisper to the suitcase, “work with me, not against me.” Eventually, it clicks into place, and I click into place, taking my seat (and my matcha). A smile stretches across my face—this is the Megabus moment. Moly, I’m going to Canada.
What brings Grace to Mile End is her fascination with indie music, her idea to write a 33 1/3rd book about Alanis Morissette, what would be her debut prose about female autonomy in the music industry. Similar to Grace, I was also on a mission, I was shopping around for a particular: grad school. In that next week, I would spend my last five days as a twenty-four-year-old there in Montréal, spying on Concordia and McGill, and live the first five days as twenty-five in Toronto, assimilating into the crowds of U of T students walking through Bloor. 
We make it to Albany, and I switch to a window seat across. At the Canadian border, I blabber about not buying a ticket back to New York, which almost gets me detained, the officers demanding to see my bank account. Two hours and some trauma later, I arrive at Gare Central. Scatters of French erupt in the conversations around me, my eyes darting to every arrow and sign that I’m doing it, I am here. It feels like Grace is sitting with me in the Uber as I receive fun facts from the driver about how cold it is in the winter, and how if you travel further into Quebec, the natives there might just blink at your American English. In the lobby of Auberge Saintlo, I hear my debit card screech after tipping off two hundred something dollars CAD to pay for my stay. It’s fine, the currency is lower, I tell myself. I must have the same type of crazy Grace does, our veins consisting of more impulsivity than preparation. How little my bank account matters to me.
To fast-forward in the film, Grace waits to be compensated from her previous employer, Jeff (Jay Baruchel), the invoice she submits disappeared into the ether of his inbox. As Grace waits, so do I, for my two paychecks incoming—one from my publisher job and the other from my freelance gig stickering scrunchies in a basement of a thrift store. Neither her imaginative money or mine make a financial difference at this point in time.
Impoverishment leaves Grace sitting on the kitchen floor, nibbling like a rat at the baguette her roommate Madeleine (Juliette Gariepy) purchases, and for me, I am satiated merely by the thrill of my travels thus far. I eat the train and my OPUS card. I eat the monuments in Mont-Royal and the interior of the Biodome, I eat the clothes I cannot afford in Marche Floh, and accidentally, I eat Grace. Or, I let myself become Grace.
As I take on this experience, with Grace as the outline, I reimagine myself as if Mile End Kicks had always held me as the protagonist, the plot compounding into anew. It’s a large responsibility being this new lead—how often do Black women find themselves center of an indie coming of age film? I might as well take advantage. Mile End Kicks: Joli’s version. Mile End Kicks: a New York Minute. Mile End Kicks, if— Grace’s two bedroom apartment becomes a six-bedroom suite, room 216, in Saintlo, where I lay on top bunk D (accidentally dropping my laptop on the floor while sleeping). The new scenery includes the grey shutters which open or shut out the incoming hostelmates taking the rotating beds. Grace’s struggles to speak French at the kiosks mesh straight into my spiraling awkwardness at Jean Talon, forgetting how to respond to “Comment ça va?” I leave with my maple soap and my six tangerines, swearing, “if this was Spanish, it would be different!”
And I’ll be honest, just as Grace’s 33 1/3rd drops down from S tier to C in a matter of weeks, I can also admit that grad school isn’t completely emboldened in my mind when I’m answering texts from Hinge matches. I imagined before I left that I would be spending all of my evenings perched on the hotel’s sofa, revising the revised-to-be-revised-again-and-then-probably-again-after-that MFA sample I’d been working on for over a year, what terrifies me equally, and maybe more than it does excite me. On my To Do List, I cross off one task, which is to visit the Concordia campus on Mardi, my last full day in Montréal.
“You came all this way for a pamphlet?” Breton, my version of Archie (Devon Bostick) says, when we walk down the rues of Peel. Breton every so often gulps a hit of his carebear blue vape, and I believe Archie would like him, as he too carries a pen—cellblock size—on him at all times.
In order to remain honest, I must address what Grace prolongs. Her and I, and the young women writers universe are feeling an immense amount of uncertainty. Last year, over six hundred thousand Black women were laid off. Every day, there are constant LinkedIn posts dedicated to victims of mass restructures, each post ending in reminders of all they did and can do, which is immediately undermined the moment they’re no longer connected to a publication. And if we talk about the publications—where even are they? Teen Vogue, Essence, Pitchfork, the offices of some of the most established cultural magazines have been boxed up or swallowed by larger conglomerates. Or, worse. For some, maybe the lights did stay on for that imprint or publisher, but what do you do if the commercial landlord enforces propaganda and political decisions which dissatisfy your conscience? Do you stay? And if you leave, are there positions in the field to even apply for?
The writers and journalists work in PR now, the lot of them are social media and community managers. Our dreams to publish stories, novels and 33 1/3rds; to be recognized for our ability to think and create during perilous moments of isolation—it’s all paused. Through tariffs, there might not even be any books. Printers wait for ink, they struggle for paper and aluminum. The current regime calls a war on literacy, and through fascism, there might not even be any readers, we might have to condense all of these essays and stories and miracles and breakthroughs into reels. Into AI generated: fruit dramas, or revenge-body weight loss commercials. Into misinformation, where knowledge becomes a simply ratioed Twitter response: ‘Grok, is this true?’
If I lay my monologue to rest, to ponder on Grace, I feel the resentment she harbors for her cubicle, and her stolen ideas. I empathize with the innocence she lost from late nights working beside sleazy Jeff. The various emails she procrastinates sending on behalf of her flailing unpaid invoice—there are invoices now I still haven’t sent due to NET-30 trauma. Although it performs as light, Grace exudes the junior to mid-level writer’s existentialism. She also exudes that early-twenties self-sabotage, which can be seen from her hyper-fixation on Chevy (Stanley Simons), the frontman of Bone Patrol. Instead of worrying about her future, she intertwines her resume skills and crushing heartstrings to set up a new gig as Bone Patrol’s freelance publicist.
When Archie, Chevy’s bandmate, attempts to stop Grace from ditching her open mic to leave with Chevy, it reminds me that I have not done that—thankfully. I take my performances very seriously. Albeit, in a past life I have hyper-fixated and become undone over a man since in a way, he lights a fire in the sadness, he makes it stronger, he makes the denial of self easier to keep on. Maybe I’m even projecting onto Grace in certain areas, I guess that’s why I’m changing the details.
On Mardi, Breton and I realize Grace and Archie’s moment. A few things I tweak—instead of rain and the van, we’re sitting on the park bench, the sky is clear, there aren’t any stars. Breton buys me a waffle to celebrate my birthday, as I had all twenty-four hours to relish a new age, twenty-five. He argues New York is probably better than Canada, and it is my infatuation about the greenery and kindness in Quebec that blinds me from a probable fact. I tell him about what it’s like, walking along the sidewalk of the Biodome, watching as children play without worry. Or how touching it is to open my shutter in the morning, waving to my hostelmates before a shower. He doesn’t completely comprehend why that’s so special, but I don’t know, it just is. Maybe in my American English nation, with all I have said about the workforce and the career-doom, it is a blessing to feel oversaturated with humanness and hope. Upon that vocalization, I change the subject to ask if he has oral herpes. From what I gathered on Lundi, it is pretty common. 
“No, that’s scary as fuck.” Breton says in his deeply Quebecois accent, frowning about Archie. It isn’t the most romantic transition, but he stops talking and I stop talking. Do it, I think to myself, and that was it, we finish the film. It’s a beautiful kiss, and in a past life, I could feel joy with ending it there. Fade to Black. Unless there’s another page.
Grace and I are similar in most ways, probably every way, except—while the rest of her adventure was left to the imagination post-credit, my adventure continues into Toronto. A special-edition Avengers end-clip. There is more for me to experience beyond Mile End Kicks. The curiosity alone allows me to turn in my room key on Mercredi with ease.
In Toronto, I lay on a new top bunk, avoiding self-induced strangulation from the mixed dorm snore choir. I return to my neglected MFA sample, finding nearby benches and couches to tear out my hair with a sort of Stockholm Syndrome joy that this is the work I get to do. Regardless, of what happens back at home. My photo roll succumbs to several strange angles of the CN Tower, Kensington Market, and Niagara Falls. Hinge, I delete it quickly, swapping out the Chevys and Archies for more Madeleines and Graces. On the ’Falls’ zipline, the world slows down to gift me a view of all I’ve seen since the start of the trip.
“Hold your arms out!” Crystal, my Niagara Falls friend says from beside me. I open my arms to receive this gift, and with a smile, wider than Grace’s when she first entered Montréal, I think about what awaits me when I make it to the other side. My very own sequel.
JoliAmour DuBose-Morris is a multimedia journalist and screenwriter based in New York and California.
JoliAmour is currently in her final year of her B.A. at The University of San Francisco where she’s focusing on film and journalism.