High School

by Sara Quin

  “Bruce hates Nirvana now,” I said childishly.

  “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Ask him. Apparently, he thinks they’re terrible, and now we have to destroy all the records in the house. So, if you have any Nirvana CDs you better hide them before the police show up.”

  “Tegan, you’re getting really close to losing your phone privileges for the night—”

  “You said I couldn’t play Nirvana—”

  “I said I was tired of hearing that song. I don’t know why your mother lets you listen to it,” Bruce said. “And that guy was weird, he wears makeup.”

  “Kurt? Do you mean Kurt?” I was taken aback. “How was he weird? What does that even mean?”

  Smirking, Bruce turned around and under his breath said, “I mean he’s a fag.”

  It was like a punch to the gut.

  The first time I heard the word “fag” was in elementary school. Back then it was a playground insult, like “idiot” or “loser.” I don’t think anyone had a clue at that age what it actually meant, or how derogatory and hurtful the word was. Coworkers of our dad had used it in front of Sara and me around that time, too. “Did you know your dad’s a fag?” They’d laugh as we awkwardly stood next to him at work events or on the floor of the warehouse he worked at.

  We’d shrug and scamper away as he laughed and said, “Oh, that’s a nice thing to say in front of my kids.”

  By the time we hit high school, we’d learned the word’s real meaning, and it had become passé to say, at least in our group of friends, who were growing increasingly political and protective over those experimenting with their sexuality.

  I had not heard it in so long that it took me a minute to recover from hearing it from Bruce’s mouth. I looked at Sara, whose eyebrows were arched in shock. She took a step back into her room, closing the door gently, shooting me a you’re on your own with this one kind of look as she did.

  “Oh my god,” I yelled at Bruce’s back as he disappeared into the kitchen. “You didn’t just fucking call Kurt Cobain a fag.”

  I caught up to him in the basement, as he sank heavily onto the desk chair in his office.

  He looked at me, exasperated. “What?”

  “You can’t say the word ‘fag.’ ”

  “Why not?”

  “You know you can’t say that word. I can’t believe you’re homophobic.”

  “I’m not,” he said. His arms, thick as tires, were crossed defensively across his barrel chest. Bruce had a tough exterior; he worked construction and played hockey, but under his armor he was a softie. He’d been nothing but gentle and playful with Sara and me since he’d come into our lives when we were little kids. When Grampa teased about our oversize pants or men’s work shirts, Bruce was quick to point out he’d given them to us. At the mall when people stared at us, he glared back at them. When I wanted to spray-paint my metal chain different colors, it was he who hung it up in the garage and provided me with a mask and the spray. I couldn’t reconcile the two very different men Bruce apparently had inside him.

  “Why did you call him a fag then? I don’t understand. Who even says ‘fag’ anymore? Is that how you talk when we’re not around when you’re with your hockey buddies?”

  “No.”

  “So?”

  “I just think it’s weird that he wore makeup.”

  “He didn’t wear makeup all the time. He was wearing it in, like, one poster in my room. And so what? He was alternative. Like Sara and me. Do you think we’re weird?”

  He sat silently after that, refusing to speak.

  “You know people call us weird every single day. We get made fun of for being different all the time. When we were little, people called us boys and made fun of us for having short hair. Would you like it if someone were calling us dykes? Because they already call us freaks and fuckups because of how we look.”

  He smirked. “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Actually, it is,” I said, tearing up. “People like you see people like us and don’t even try to understand us.”

  “These aren’t the same things.”

  “Just say sorry for calling him a fag. For saying he was weird. Say sorry and promise you won’t use that word. Then it can be over.”

  “No.”

  I let out a long cry of frustration and then burst into tears, my midsection crumpling as I started to heave into my legs.

  Eventually, he got up and sat down next to me, dropping a box of Kleenex on the coffee table. “I’m sorry, Tegan. I should never have used that word. He wasn’t a fag. I was an asshole.”

  “But what if he were?” I said between sobs.

  “Even if he were gay, that’s . . . okay.”

  “You can’t say ‘fag.’ ”

  “I won’t, but you need to remember where I come from, how people talk on the job sites, at the mill, on the ice . . . I’m better than most, and I’m learning. Your mom has taught me a lot. But I still make mistakes. I’m not perfect. Sometimes I say stuff, and I don’t think. I’m a man after all,” he said, laughing. “I’m sorry. I really am.”

  It was far from a perfect apology. But I was far from being articulate about a topic I was just starting to understand myself. My own language was still developing, my own comfort around the concept was still forming. But I believed Bruce was sorry. And I didn’t imagine that many other dads of kids I knew could have that kind of conversation. I knew Bruce was different, the way my mom was different from most of the other kids’ parents we knew and hung around. They prided themselves on being the kinds of parents we’d come to if we were in trouble. They wanted to ensure there was always a bridge between us, no matter how far away we felt; they provided us a way back. I knew he was trying to close the gap between us.

  After we made up, I played him the MTV Unplugged album Nirvana had recorded before Kurt’s death. Bruce loved David Bowie, and when “The Man Who Sold the World” played, he palmed the disc case and nodded along. “You’re right, they are good.” When it finished and I went to go upstairs, he said, “Leave that CD here, I’m going to make a copy to play in my truck.”

  8. SARA SUICIDAL TENDENCIES

  “Is Tegan depressed?” Mom asked me, point blank, one day after school. She stood against the closed door in my bedroom, her arms folded across her chest like a TV mom.

  “Um.” I looked down at the open binder on my bed, turning the page away from the poetry about death and suffering that I was writing. “No, I don’t think she’s depressed.”

  “Depression runs in your dad’s family.”

  “Mom, it runs in everyone’s family.”

  “You’d tell me if something was going on?”

  Would I?

  I didn’t tell her that when I was fourteen I spent the summer writing suicide notes to the girls who’d bullied me for two years. She was more than qualified to deal with the situation—she’d worked at a suicide prevention center since the mideighties. I didn’t tell her in grade nine when a friend threatened to take a handful of Tylenol at a sleepover, or about the time Naomi’s boyfriend had a knife pressed to his wrist. I’d become dangerously latched to the idea that I could determine which of those threats required parental intervention and which did not. In my own case, I knew that I didn’t want to die. I took for granted that Tegan felt the same way as me.

  “Tegan’s fine,” I said.

  Mom nodded. “And you? Are you depressed?”

  “Mom!” I laughed. “No!”

  “Suicidal?” She stood there, unmoved.

  I closed my binder, swung my legs off the bed. “I’m not depressed or suicidal. I’m not anything!”

  She blinked. “Are you on drugs?”

  “Are you?”

  “I know you and your sister are doing drugs.”

  “Mom, get out of my room. I have to do my homework.”

  “If you’re doing drugs, tell me. I’d rather buy you weed myself, so I know what’s in it.”

  “I don’t want you
buying weed. We’re not doing drugs.”

  “I’d rather you smoke weed than drink. If I ever find out you’re in a car with someone who’s drunk driving, I swear to god—”

  “Mom, we’re not idiots!”

  Mom’s questions about Tegan lingered in my mind. I didn’t think Tegan was suicidal, but the way her face went slack, sometimes for days at a time, did remind me of Dad. His moods were similarly hard to predict, and when he was depressed, he wore that face like a mask.

  “Do you think Tegan seems sad?” I asked Naomi when she called later that night.

  “Like, more than normal?”

  “Mom asked me if she was depressed.”

  “I worried about you, last year. You were sad a lot.”

  “Yeah, but that was different.”

  “Remember when you were obsessed with calling the Teen Line?”

  I’d started calling the help line because of Naomi and the shame I experienced for the feelings I had for her. They became too difficult for me to contain, especially after a night of drinking. With the room and my head spinning, I found gravity in the voice of a stranger. “When I turn sixteen, I’m going to volunteer at that helpline,” I said.

  “You should!”

  “I like hearing other people’s problems because it makes me feel less lonely.”

  “Lucky that you found me, because you’ll never feel lonely.” She laughed. “Do you think that maybe Tegan is sad because we kind of ditched her?”

  A familiar knot tightened in my gut. “We didn’t ditch her!”

  “Maybe she feels lonely, like you did last year, before you and I became close.”

  “Why is it my responsibility to figure this out?” I said, far too loudly.

  “It’s not your responsibility. But, if you’re worried—”

  “Mom’s not asking Tegan if I’m depressed! She loves Tegan more than me.”

  “I don’t think that’s true.” She paused. “She trusts you and confides in you. And maybe she thinks Tegan will tell you if something is wrong because you’re her twin sister and not her mom.”

  I sighed. “What do I say to her?”

  “Just ask her if she’s okay.”

  “Fine.”

  * * *

  I stood outside Tegan’s door and knocked.

  “What?”

  I let my eyes adjust to the darkness as I stepped in her room. I could make out her body under the blankets, the telephone cord disappearing under the covers. Even the remnants of childhood in her room—a few stuffed animals banished to a top shelf over her desk—seemed sad. The shrine she’d built to Kurt Cobain had grown substantially in the two years since his suicide, and every inch of her walls was covered with his face.

  Kurt and our step-grandfather, Ed, committed suicide two days apart when we were fourteen. On the morning of Ed’s funeral service, spread across the front page of the local newspaper was news of Kurt Cobain’s suicide. Dead at twenty-seven from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It was a gut punch in all the ways the news about Ed wasn’t. Tegan’s face crumpled; he was her hero.

  “Take that paper upstairs,” Mom whispered. Sitting in silence in Tegan’s bedroom, we read the details of his death on the pages of the newspaper between us. The space had been a sanctuary, a place to shut ourselves inside and worship Kurt’s lyrics; but at that moment, it felt like a grave. Bruce knocked on the door, telling us it was time to leave for the church. On the way down the stairs, resting his hands on both our shoulders, he offered his condolences, as if we were in black clothes for Kurt Cobain’s funeral, not Ed’s.

  After the service, when our house was finally cleared of guests, Tegan and I disappeared into the basement to watch the Nirvana marathon on MuchMusic. We admitted to each other how much worse we felt about Kurt’s death than about our step-grandfather’s.

  “We didn’t really know Ed,” Tegan said. Did we know Kurt? It felt like we did. After his death, it seemed that everywhere we went we heard his voice on a loop, saw his face draped across every chest and stuck to every wall. His omnipresence was like a resurrection.

  That night, Tegan took a safety pin and scratched the Nirvana logo into her left ankle, promising to rip the scab off and recut it until it was a scar.

  * * *

  “Can I talk to you?” I asked her now, gesturing for her to hang up the phone.

  “I’ll call you back,” she said into the receiver. She hung up and rolled the duvet down past her chin. “What do you want?”

  “Mom thinks you’re depressed.”

  “What? I am not.”

  I studied her reaction. “Well, your room looks like a suicidal teenager’s room.”

  “Fuck off.”

  We both laughed, and she got off the bed and turned her stereo on. Green Day spilled from the speakers. She spun open the dark blinds in her window, pulled the covers on her bed straight. I sat down on the carpet.

  “Do you think Kurt liked Green Day?” Tegan asked me.

  “I don’t think he liked anyone.”

  “He liked gay people!”

  “And hated mean people!”

  “Turn this one up!” Tegan stood up and headbanged, flopping her hair forward and back, her face scrunched up and serious.

  “You’re such a banger.” I laughed.

  When the song finished, I stood up to leave.

  “Want to walk to 7-Eleven with me?” I asked her.

  Tegan bounced herself off her mattress like it was a trampoline, a blush spreading across her cheeks.

  “Sure!” she said. She grabbed her coat from the floor and together we headed downstairs.

  9. TEGAN BASKET CASE

  Broadcasting and Communications was my favorite class. A few months in we still hadn’t been allowed to touch a camera or use the recording equipment, but the assignments were easy, and the class was helping my overall grade point average, which needed all the help it could get. It was also the only class I had with Kayla that semester, and our teacher, Mr. Kim, a small, nervous, absentminded man, basically let the two of us get away with murder while we were under his supervision. When we showed up late, he never got mad. If we left early, he didn’t report us. Friends would skip class to hang out on the orange velvet couch in the back corner of the adjoining room, where the equipment was kept, and Mr. Kim didn’t seem to notice the extra bodies.

  But my absolute favorite part of the class was getting to hang out with Spencer, from the Abbeydale crew. After Emma invited us to come wait at her house in the mornings, he started sitting with me and Kayla in Broadcasting class. He had the longest lashes I’d ever seen on a boy. When we talked in class, I tried not to stare at them when he spoke, but it was hard; he was beautiful. My room was covered in Green Day posters and I started to think of Spencer as my real-life Billie Joe.

  “Did you dye your hair black to look like him?” I asked Spencer one afternoon as the two of us sat in the back of Mr. Kim’s class and flipped through a Rolling Stone with Green Day on the cover.

  “No, he dyed his hair to look like me.”

  He was a boy of few words, but when he did talk it was often to spit short, witty, sarcastic quips under his breath. I strained to never miss one.

  Kayla and Spencer fell into a comfortable rapport during this time, too. It was obvious to everyone, including me, that they were crazy about each other, and when she asked him out before Halloween, he said yes. I was happy for Kayla, and in no rush to get a boyfriend, so it didn’t bother me she snagged him first. Nothing changed between the three of us when they started going out anyway. We joined ski club and skipped Mr. Kim’s class to smoke weed. After school we’d crowd together on the couch in Kayla’s basement to watch MuchMusic. Mr. Kim called us the Three Musketeers.

  “Oh my fucking god you guys,” I shouted, racing into Mr. Kim’s Broadcasting class just before the final bell.

  “Language.” He sighed from next to the chalkboard.

  “Sorry, Mr. Kim.”

  I tossed my backpack of
f and leaned into Kayla and Spencer. She was sitting on his lap at our usual table at the back of the class. “Green Day announced a show here,” I squealed in their faces. “They’re coming to the Saddledome, so we have to get tickets. And Bruce told me and Sara this morning that we can skip Friday to go line up for tickets. And my mom will come get us after. You guys have to come with.”

  “YES!” they yelled at the same time.

  “Tegan, please, can you sit so I can start?” Mr. Kim whined from the front. “And Kayla, how many times do I have to say no food in class?”

  “It’s not food, Mr. Kim. It’s a Slurpee.”

  He sighed heavily, and the three of us laughed.

  “Why do we have to line up?” Spencer whispered as Kayla slipped off his lap into her own seat and Mr. Kim started his lesson.

  “We have to get floor seats,” I whispered back. “So we can mosh.”

  “Duh,” Kayla added.

  Spencer cringed. He was a worrier. He was risk averse to an extreme level. He refused to try acid with us even though all his friends dropped almost every weekend. “I don’t want to have a psychotic break,” he claimed when I pressed him to do it. “What if mental illness runs in my family?”

  “Trust me,” I said quietly, before turning my attention to the front of the class and Mr. Kim’s lecture. “You’ll love being up close. Moshing is so cool. Maybe we can even crowd-surf?”

  “Oh my god, no way,” Spencer said, shaking his head. “What if someone drops me and I break my neck?”

  Friday afternoon Sara and I went downtown with Kayla and Spencer to get tickets, and that night I pinned my ticket up next to my bed under a Green Day poster and thought about Spencer as I drifted off to sleep.

  A few weeks later Sara, me, Kayla, and Spencer met at Sunridge train station to head to the arena for the show.

  “I hope we don’t get crushed when the train comes.” Spencer swiveled his head, frantically scanning the growing crowd gathering on the platform around us. “Or knocked onto the tracks. Maybe we should step back.”