High School

by Sara Quin

  There were long stretches of time when the music galloped. Then during swirling breaks of sound, people paused and gathered themselves, or let their hands shoot up above their heads as if reaching for the music in the air. When the bass and kick returned in surging buildups, there were rhapsodic cheers from everyone in the room. Ecstatic samples of ghostly trumpets and familiar vocal melodies screamed from the speakers; short phrases became stuck in my mouth. A hand grabbed my arm suddenly, and it was as if I were being woken from a dream. Christina stood bug-eyed, her nails digging through my sweatshirt.

  “I need your help.” She dragged me back toward the bathroom. In a stall, she turned and revealed her predicament: a snarl in her hair. Gum.

  “How did that get there?” I laughed.

  “I need your hat; I can’t get it out!”

  I removed my hat and stood in the mirror with her as she pulled on the red felt rim, turning it in circles, and adjusted it until it covered the sticky lump. Under the fluorescent light, I looked blotchy, and the frizz of my hair was an ugly halo.

  “Ready?” I asked.

  She turned and led us back to the main room, but I couldn’t quite regain that sense of euphoria that had swept over me earlier, so I found my backpack and slid down the wall to the floor.

  “Are you having fun?” Zoe asked, crouching down beside me. Her warm arm pressed against mine. “Yeah, it’s really cool,” I said. She didn’t seem to hear me, so we sat for a long time not talking. “I love that photo of you in your room,” I shouted in her ear. “The one of you dancing.” She looked at me, nodding. Her unbroken eye contact, her serious face—I wanted to kiss her. My brain turned in a maddening loop. I stood up and indicated I was going to go back to the floor. She didn’t follow me.

  When the buses started running again at 5:00 a.m., Christina, Tegan, and I pulled our hoods over our heads and walked back to the bus stop. My teeth chattered in my skull, but the rest of my body felt hot. “That was cool!” I said when we were finally on the bus.

  “You don’t have gum in your hair,” Christina said, fidgeting with the hardened glob.

  “Oh, come on, a mohawk will look great on you,” Tegan offered.

  Sinking into the seat, I stared out the window of the bus. Zoe’s name looped in my mind like a song.

  11. TEGAN TEGAN DIDN’T GO TO SCHOOL TODAY

  One afternoon while Mom and Bruce were out, Sara and I were rooting around in the storage under the stairs when we found a guitar case tucked between two towers of office supply boxes. I can’t remember what we were actually looking for, what item was worthy of trespassing the only space in the house that was designated for Bruce’s things. But once we saw the guitar case, we forgot about what we were searching for and that we were breaking his cardinal rule: never mess with his stuff.

  “Bruce has a guitar?”

  “So weird. I’ve never seen this before.”

  “Here,” Sara suggested as she clumsily hauled the guitar over her head. “Help me, grab it.” She passed the bulky laminate wood case over her head into my waiting hands. Bruce was particular about his things and would notice any slight disturbance to his stuff, so we covered our tracks before we turned out the light and closed the door. We were deferential to Bruce’s belongings in a way that we weren’t with anyone else’s, ours included, and so my heart pounded as we moved the contraband out of its hiding place and brought it to the office. I trailed behind Sara, watching her labor with the long neck of the case as she navigated his gym equipment.

  “Careful,” I sang behind her.

  “You be careful,” Sara said.

  In the office, she placed the case on the worn gray couch, left over from Bruce’s bachelor days, and popped the gold locks along the perimeter. I stood alongside Sara and felt a jolt of excitement flood my bloodstream as the yellow body of the guitar was revealed. It was a Fender. Sara looked at me, twisting her mouth open, raising her eyebrows.

  “This is so random,” I said. “Why does he have a guitar?”

  Sara shook her head. “I don’t know. Obviously, he wanted to be a rock star, or he was at some point and never told us.”

  I reached out and grabbed the neck and pulled it free of the black fur-lined case.

  “Wait!” Sara shouted. “Maybe we shouldn’t . . .”

  “Why not? He won’t be home for hours. It’s fine. Relax.” I folded onto the floor, crossing my legs, and laid the guitar across my lap. Its thick body pressed into my thighs; I wrapped my right arm around it like I’d seen other musicians do a million times on TV and in music videos. Though neither of us had held a guitar before that afternoon, finding the guitar felt exhilarating, and the desire to play it felt instinctive.

  At this point in our lives, Sara and I had taken nearly a decade of piano lessons from a grandmotherly woman named Lorraine. We both loved Lorraine, even if we didn’t particularly love the piano, or at least not the classical pieces she forced us to learn, or the theory we studied twice a week in her rumpus room. Half of our weekly lessons were spent talking, something Sara and I both liked to do a lot more than playing the piano. I think Lorraine let us chatter because she knew we didn’t practice. Eventually, she’d suggest we review whatever piece of music she’d assigned the week before, and my stomach would knot. As I stumbled through it, I would promise myself I’d practice more the next week. I never did. And Lorraine never reprimanded me. She only doled out compliments and tips for how to improve.

  “Did Lorraine call your bluff this week?” Mom would ask from behind the steering wheel as we climbed into the Jeep after our lessons.

  “No,” we’d reply, smugly.

  “This is hard,” I said, plunking the fingers from my right hand along the strings of Bruce’s guitar while my left hand tried to hold the neck in place. The sound it made was less than inspiring.

  “No, I think you’d do it this way,” Sara suggested after a second, pulling the guitar from me into her own lap. But she had the same result. “We need something to like, play the strings with.”

  “Like a pick?” I opened the case and found an orange Dunlop plastic pick. “Got one.” I handed it back to Sara, sat down across from her, and watched in amazement as she strummed.

  “It works.”

  We smiled at each other. After an hour we carefully returned the guitar to its case and replaced it in the space under the stairs, checking and double-checking we’d left it exactly where we had found it. Neither Sara nor I mentioned finding the guitar to Mom or Bruce that night when they got home. I also didn’t mention to Sara that when she went to Naomi’s after school in the weeks that followed, I stole the guitar from under the stairs and played it secretly in my room. I don’t know why I kept my interest in the guitar a secret from Sara, or why I didn’t just reveal to Bruce that we had found it and that I wanted to learn and take lessons. For some reason during those first few weeks, I kept the guitar and my desire to hold it to myself. Instead of smoking pot and falling asleep, I watched MuchMusic quietly in the basement with the guitar in my lap, trying to mimic the shapes I saw Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love making with their hands in their music videos. Slowly, I was able to start holding power chords that didn’t sound half bad. And almost immediately, without thinking, I began to hum melodies along with them.

  Sara and I had sung in the choir in elementary school. Though neither of us was a prodigious talent, we joined school productions and loved being onstage. I loved lip-syncing along to my favorite bands in my room and longed to stand in front of a mic. But I only ever sang in front of other people if everyone else was also singing: drunk at a party, in the mosh pit of a favorite band, lying in sleeping bags in the tent trailer in Grace’s (a friend from the Frenchies) backyard. Never alone.

  The only time I could recall having done so was in grade eight when a friend named Dawn called our house. After I finished a long monologue about my love of Green Day, she somehow coaxed me into singing “She,” her favorite song. At first, I had laughed nervously at the
strange request. Stalling, I tried to figure out if I was being tricked—a reasonable theory since we hadn’t exactly been close friends in junior high. But as she encouraged me from the other end of the phone line to sing, I started to warm to the idea.

  “Come on,” Dawn begged.

  “I can’t.”

  “But you have such a good voice,” she cooed.

  Finally, I agreed. “Alright . . .”

  Starting quietly, I mumble-sang the first few lines. As I started to sing, I liked it. I liked the butterflies flapping frantically in my stomach as I managed the notes and the words and worried about what Dawn was feeling on the other end. I liked having an audience. After I sang out the final note, Dawn purred, “Sing it again.” I was awash with an untamable desire to perform for her. Her request quenched some part of me I hadn’t even known existed five minutes earlier. “Okay,” I agreed. And then I sang it again. And again.

  I had never created my own songs or original melodies before. But the instinct was there. As the first attempts at an original melody snuck out of my throat, I felt high. After that, time flew. I stitched words to the notes ringing out from the guitar with no awareness of the time. It was just luck that I noticed the clock in my room; I’d had the guitar out of the basement for over an hour. Reluctantly I returned it to its case and then back to the storage room in the basement. That night as I lay in bed, I hummed the beginning of the song I’d been writing earlier. In the dark, I felt a glow of purpose as I drifted off.

  * * *

  What I didn’t know was that Sara was doing the same thing when I wasn’t around.

  I stopped dead in my tracks on the stairs when I heard her through the closed door of her bedroom one afternoon.

  “Tegan didn’t go to school today . . . ,” she softly sang.

  The first notes of her melody made the hair on my arms stand up.

  “Left me all alone to play . . .”

  It was good.

  “Got up, thought everything was fine . . . found Tegan was walking that fine line between schoooooooool and home . . .”

  She held the word “school” out longer than the rest, and I laughed quietly to myself. Holy shit, I thought, she’s really good.

  Discovering that Sara was writing songs felt serendipitous—almost as magical as discovering the guitar. A few days later I was in my room doing homework when Sara appeared in my doorway. “Do you want to hear what I’m working on?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. I had no idea how she had known I’d also been playing the guitar alone, and I didn’t care. Every moment before that one became irrelevant.

  Back in her room, she sat cross-legged on the floor. She started singing the song I’d heard through her door a few days earlier: “Took her purple shoes when she went back to bed. Could have kicked Tegan in the head. Got to school, forgot my name. Got all flustered, acted lame. Where’s Tegan?”

  I burst out laughing.

  She stopped. “Bad?”

  “No, it’s really fucking good.”

  She played the song a few times, and I clumsily sang along during the choruses. We interrupted each other to make suggestions, and when we finally arrived at something that felt finished, I went in search of a blank tape so we could record it: another instinct.

  “Ready?” I nodded to her when I had the stereo aimed at her guitar.

  “Yes.”

  I pressed Play and Record together. We both exploded into laughter.

  I hit Stop and said, “Come on. No laughing.”

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  It took a few tries, but eventually, we made it through the entire song. Listening back after, I couldn’t believe how good it sounded. How good we sounded.

  “Let’s try it one more time,” Sara said. “Don’t sing until the chorus.”

  That afternoon we were so enthralled by our process we didn’t hear when Bruce and Mom arrived home, snuck upstairs, and stood outside Sara’s door for who knows how long. But at some point, they knocked, and we both froze in place on the floor of Sara’s room. I stood, my legs half-asleep, and unlocked Sara’s door. Instead of looking angry or displeased catching us with Bruce’s guitar without permission, their faces lit up, not at all upset by our deceit.

  “Let’s hear it,” Bruce said.

  Stopping, again and again, tripping through the song, we played them “Tegan Didn’t Go to School Today.” When we were finished Bruce said, “It’s pretty good.” And Mom, smiling wide, clapped wildly next to him.

  12. SARA HULA-HOOPS AND CHAIN SAWS

  Strumming those first chords made the whole body of the guitar vibrate against my chest, sending waves tingling up through my wrists and along the veins in my arms. The weight of the wood felt intimate, touching almost all of me at once.

  After we’d been caught shuttling the guitar between the basement and our bedrooms, Bruce gave us permission to use it. Alone in my room, I’d sit on the carpet with my back against the bed, plucking and strumming with my right hand, humming a little under my breath. Sometimes in the morning before school I’d sit with the guitar on my knees and try to remember little melodies I’d thought of before I’d fallen asleep. My thumb was red and swollen from dragging it along the thick ridges, so I cut up the plastic cards in my wallet and made myself a little pile of guitar picks.

  The day that I wrote my first song, Tegan stayed home from school, claiming she didn’t feel well.

  “You’re not going to school?” I asked flatly from her doorway.

  “I’m sick,” she said, pulling the covers back up to her chin.

  “Can I wear your shoes?”

  “Whatever.” She closed her eyes.

  That afternoon when I came home Tegan was cured of her headache and sore throat. She followed me from her bedroom to mine, flopping down onto the bed.

  “Anything interesting happen today?”

  “No, same bullshit.”

  “Did anyone ask about me?”

  “Nope, I don’t think anyone noticed.”

  She tilted her head. “Come on.”

  “Here.” I handed her a stack of notes from friends.

  “Don’t forget to put my shoes back in my closet.”

  “Yes, yes, your precious shoes.”

  I reached for the guitar in its case and started strumming chords lightly. I didn’t ever sing loudly, or with much confidence, but because I was just joking around, I adopted a kind of British whine, and wailed like a kid might. The words were simple. I was only trying to make Tegan laugh, but they spilled out easily as I shifted between chords.

  Tegan didn’t go to school today

  Left me all alone to play

  Got up, thought everything was fine

  Found Tegan was walking that fine line between school and home

  Took her favorite shoes when she went back to bed

  Could have kicked her in the head

  Got to school, forgot my name

  Got all flustered, acted lame

  Where’s Tegan?

  Tegan didn’t go to school today

  Tegan, I missed you!

  “We have to record that!” she said, grabbing a blank tape from my bookshelf. She popped the deck open and stuck the cassette inside, pushing it closed.

  “I don’t even remember what I sang!”

  She pulled a piece of paper from my binder and started writing down what she could remember.

  * * *

  For years we’d been going to see punk gigs on Sunday afternoons at a community center downtown. We never recognized the band names on the fliers but they all sort of sounded the same, so it didn’t matter who was playing. There was no cover charge to get in, but you had to bring canned food for the Food Not Bombs hamper outside the entrance. We didn’t dress like the kids at those shows, and sometimes in line or just inside the door, I’d see people giving us dirty looks, if they looked at us at all. The regulars gelled their hair into mohawks and moved through the pit like tropical fish you knew were poisonous
just from looking at them. Some of the girls had shaved heads with a single row of bangs or sideburns grown long from above their ears. No one was friendly, but we weren’t there to make friends. In the main hall, bare fluorescent bulbs flickered greenish light on the linoleum and the bands set up right on the floor where the audience stood. Tegan and I usually threw our bags down against the walls and marched straight to the pit, swinging our arms out at a ninety-degree angle. The inner rings would collapse into violent pushing that we mostly avoided, preferring to just bounce off each other like bumper cars at the edges of the pit. Sometimes after a show, I couldn’t even remember what the band looked like, and I’d never felt interested in their instruments. What I loved was the atmosphere, the permission the music gave us to unfurl our insides out.

  I was ashamed to think about us playing Bruce’s acoustic in front of those snotty punks. Even if we found some way to stand up with the guitar, I felt like my body wasn’t shaped right. The women in bands that I idolized had flat chests and electric guitars that they swung around their hips like Hula-Hoops and over their heads like chain saws. If we were ever going to be in a real band, we needed an electric guitar. I’d figure out how to deal with my body later.

  * * *

  The following Friday night, Tegan, Christina, Naomi, and I were making prank calls in Grace’s bedroom when we heard her older brother, Daniel, playing guitar and singing in his bedroom. We sank into silence, our ears tilted toward the wall they shared.