by Sara Quin
14. SARA MONTREAL
Naomi and I spent the summer before grade eleven sleeping at each other’s houses five or six nights in a row. My body pulsed with an urgency to touch her. If I woke in the night and found she wasn’t near me, I’d slip across the mattress and curl around her in the dark. When we were apart, I felt heartsick, preoccupied with all the ways she might die before I saw her again. There were no more discussions about if she was or wasn’t into me, no more panic attacks that we had to be “just friends.” The more time we spent together, the less time she had to think about what we were doing.
At sleepovers, comments from our friends about who was going to sleep where sent bolts of strange electricity down my arms. “Sara and Naomi will obviously take the bed,” someone would say, smirking. If Naomi suffered from their gossip, she didn’t show it. She even started to hold my hand when we were out with our friends, swinging it for everyone to see. We were in love.
In the final week of August, the new house in Renfrew was nearly finished being built. It was a long, skinny house with hardly any back or front yard. “Modern” was what Mom called it. Tegan and I spent weeks covered in dust, sanding baseboards and painting shelves in the closets. We didn’t mind pitching in, especially when the painters were there. We sucked in the fumes to get tipsy while we worked, laughing and singing so that our voices echoed through the house. After work Bruce took us down the street to Peters’ Drive-In for burgers and slipped us each a twenty-dollar bill. Sitting at a picnic table in the parking lot, throwing French fries at the seagulls, I felt happy. This was our new life.
The night before the move, the workshop benches in the garage were stacked with boxes, half labeled in Bruce’s capital letters, and the other half in my mom’s bubbly cursive. Tegan’s bedroom had been packed up for months. Mom had requested she make the walls “less crazy,” but Tegan had gone overboard, removing so much of herself that it turned the space into something institutional.
“I said to clean it up and make it look normal,” Mom said when she saw what Tegan had done.
Naomi and I finished packing up my bedroom. All that remained was the guitar and my mattress. We spread out on it, soaking up a few more hours until she had to go to work. I played her my new songs, and then some silly lyrics, trying to make her laugh. I adored the way she pursed her lips and focused intensely on my face while I was performing. She was my favorite audience. She pulled the guitar out of my hands and we lay on the bed, facing each other. I had a bad habit of staring over her shoulder at the red numbers on my alarm clock, calculating the time that remained.
“Stop looking,” she said, covering my eyes with her hands.
“Maybe you can call in sick?”
“I can’t.”
“But I’ll die if you leave.”
Her face scrunched up. “I have to tell you something.” She sat up, resting on her elbow. “I got accepted into an exchange program. I’m going to live in Montreal for three months next year.”
I’d become so accustomed to her surprise attacks of guilt about our sexual relationship that when I realized that she wasn’t breaking up with me, I felt light-headed with relief. I pulled her back down onto the bed with me.
“You’re not upset?”
“No.”
“I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d actually be accepted.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’re fine about it.”
“What about Christina?”
“I’ve only told you so far.”
I was struck by how afraid I would be if it were me transplanting to a city where everyone spoke a different language, where I didn’t know a single soul. I thought about Tegan and the way she’d suffered at leadership camp in elementary school, the daily phone calls home during which she couldn’t stop crying. After each telephone call, I’d curl into the fetal position on the couch, immobile, devastated that I couldn’t do anything to help her.
“Aren’t you afraid to go alone?” I asked.
“No, I’m excited! Plus, I’ll be with the exchange student, Isabelle.”
I’d failed to consider the stranger that would complete the exchange. Isabelle was set to arrive in Calgary at the start of the school year and would live at Naomi’s house. I imagined the hours they’d spend together on the bus, traveling to and from school, speaking together in a language I didn’t understand. A hollow feeling opened up in my chest.
“We’re never going to see each other.”
“Of course we will.” She curled up against me.
“I just don’t get why you would do this.” My eyes watered with tears and I pushed my palms against my face.
Naomi sat up, pulling my hands off my face. “Please, don’t cry.”
“You said that Aberhart was a great school!”
“It is.” She stopped. “It’s not about school. I want to experience something new.”
I twisted away, turning my back to her.
“Nothing’s going to change between us!” she said, moving closer to me on the bed. “We’ll write each other letters and talk on the phone!”
“That’s not enough.”
She pressed her face onto my shoulder. “It has to be,” she whispered.
* * *
The next day, after the moving truck was empty and had pulled away, Mom, Bruce, Tegan, and I took to our corners of the new house, tearing open boxes and scurrying with our belongings from shelf to shelf. Tall stacks of flattened cardboard were bound in the garage next to dozens of black garbage bags stuffed with bubble wrap. I loved the newness of the house. It smelled like paint and plastic, and a chemical scent wafted from the carpets. A clean slate.
The walls of my bedroom were painted lilac, and the carpets were a deeper plum, colors that Tegan and I had been allowed to pick for ourselves. I flopped down onto the bare mattress and stared up at the ceiling fan I’d helped Bruce install the week before. There were three huge windows, and a walk-in closet with another window in it, that looked out onto the street. The room was big enough for a couch, a TV, a stereo, and the electric guitar and amp that Mom had bought us as an early sixteenth birthday gift. It was the best bedroom I’d ever had.
In Tegan’s room, I stood in the doorway as she dragged her mattress from one wall to the next, searching for the perfect spot. She always picked the smaller, darker room. Examining the wooden bench seat near the window, we agreed it would be a terrific place for us to hide drugs. She’d already marked up her ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars.
“Is Naomi sleeping over?” Tegan asked, flopping down onto her bed.
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“Alex told me Naomi’s going to Montreal next year.”
That Tegan and Alex were talking about Naomi gave me an off-balance feeling in my legs.
“Are you sad?”
I shrugged. How could I explain how afraid I was that Naomi might meet someone else without acknowledging the fact that we were dating?
“Alex told me there’s a French girl coming to live with her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I hope she likes the same music as us.”
“And the same drugs.”
I laughed.
When I’d told Naomi my worries that Isabelle was going to be a stuck-up preppy girl who’d figure Naomi and me out and tell on us, I’d hoped she would dispel my fears. Instead, I’d watched her face stiffen as she considered for the first time the risks this living arrangement might pose. In junior high when rumors about girls kissing other girls at sleepovers spread through the school, I immediately felt implicated. It wasn’t me at the center of the drama, but it could have been. There could be nothing worse than being called a lesbian.
Especially if you were one.
15. TEGAN LATCHKEY KIDS
It was a ferocious start to the school year. Bruce was ornery, constantly stomping around the new house with his tools and muttering about stuff that still needed t
o be done; he was generally disruptive when he was awake. He and Mom were testy with each other, and it wasn’t uncommon to wake up to Mom asleep on the couch in the living room. In the basement, Bruce would play U2 as he worked out in his gym, while on the main floor Mom would blast Melissa Etheridge and Sarah McLachlan on her jukebox.
While a gender war raged in the bottom two floors of our house, upstairs on the second, Sara and I were creating an unhappy cacophony of a different kind. Slamming doors and cranking our music to drown out each other, we fought over the usual stuff: clothes, friends, chores, who was going to carry the guitar to school and back. But now we also bickered in our rooms over which songs needed more work and which ones we should record. We accused each other of hogging the phone and using up the prime hours in the evening. We wore in the new wooden stairs of our house racing up and down them from our rooms to tell on each other to whatever parent happened to be home, when one was. Blaming each other for everything and anything, nothing was sacred.
The one place we experienced a reprieve from all this fighting was at our dad’s. We’d never fought in front of him in all the years we’d been going to his house. No matter what was happening between us at home, when we got to his apartment, Sara and I put it on the back burner for the twenty-four hours we were with him. It was easier to get along with Sara at his house; I grew up feeling like with Mom, we were at home, but at Dad’s, we were guests. He provided meals and entertainment, clean linen, and towels the way a host would. And like polite visitors we walked on our tiptoes, replacing items we used in their precise former positions, as if a cup out of place would throw the whole balance of the apartment into a tailspin. If Sara and I did disagree, we did it in hisses, not howls. Digging our sharp elbows into each other’s forearms while his back was turned, we’d stifle cries so he didn’t catch us disagreeing. Though he had never raised his voice, let alone a hand, to us as we were growing up, it was the mystery of what might happen if we misbehaved in front of him that made us work so hard not to provoke him. He was gone before we were five, and that ingrained in us a desire not to upset him, or risk making him disappear again. We adored him, and since his time with us, like ours with him, was in short supply, when we were visiting him we were ideal children who always got along. Until one Saturday that fall early into grade eleven.
Sara and I had been having a quiet disagreement in the living room while we thought Dad was out of earshot. Out of nowhere he appeared, grabbed both of our sleeves, and forced us to our feet. Stunned, Sara and I allowed ourselves to be walked to the front door of his apartment, where he shoved us both out into the hall. Our backpacks were already lying there waiting for us.
“Don’t come here if you’re going to fight,” he said simply, then let the door close in our faces.
“What the fuck do we do now?” Sara asked me, lifting her backpack from the floor.
“I don’t know. We can’t go home. Mom will be pissed.” I swept my bag up off the floor and onto my back. “Come on,” I said to Sara after a few seconds. “Fuck this. Let’s go to Christina’s.”
In Christina’s living room we joked about what had happened until we shifted into the kind of laughter that becomes explosive. We gasped for air, holding our sides as we laughed.
“Imagine if Mom did that—threw us out every time we had a fight? We’d have to set up a tent in the backyard, permanently, to live in,” I said.
“And she’d have to live out there, too,” Sara said.
“It’s like they’re afraid to parent us,” Christina commented of our dads. Her parents were recently divorced. “Without our moms, they’re lost. They can’t deal with conflict. They have no clue what to do.”
When we got home Sunday, Mom didn’t mention it. Dad hadn’t called to tell her, or to figure out where we went. I felt simultaneously relieved and hurt. The next weekend he turned over a key to each of us to his apartment. “You can come over anytime you like. Even during the week if you want to get away from your mother, or each other. And you don’t need to come on the weekend anymore. Go hang out with your friends if that’s what you’d prefer. Your Saturday nights can be yours. But when you do come to my house, I prefer that you don’t fight.”
At first, I palmed the key excitedly, imagining the weekends I’d now have to spend entirely with my friends. It made me feel guilty, but I was glad I might not have to give up every single Saturday night for the rest of high school to sit with Dad and Sara in his apartment watching Golden Girls when I could be at Grace’s drinking, or at Alex’s watching movies in her basement. But then I considered that his time with us, already limited to one twenty-four-hour period a week, had just become less certain for him. I realized he wasn’t simply giving us a key, he was giving up his time with us. As he’d done that past weekend when we’d argued, rather than parent us, he was sending us out into the hall again. I felt sorry for him then. I knew I’d probably return the next Saturday with Sara, and we’d go back to getting along, even if we were just faking it for him.
A few weeks later, Sara and I were rushing out of Mom’s house with our guitar to go to school when I realized, only after I’d already pulled the back door closed, that I didn’t have my key.
“Fuck,” I said, grabbing the handle of the guitar and racing to catch up to Sara.
“Forget the key?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I’m going to Zoe’s after school.” Sara shrugged. “So, you’re going to be locked out alone.”
“Fuck.” On the bus I dug around in my backpack, hoping I’d find the key after all. Instead, I fished out the one to Dad’s apartment.
Mom worked until midnight, and Bruce had hockey that night. So, after school, Spencer drove me to Dad’s. When I got there, I called him at work. “I’m here. I hope it’s okay.”
“That’s why I gave you the key, babe. You don’t have to apologize. See you at six-thirty.”
While I waited for him, I put on Oprah. Padding around his place I opened drawers and cabinets I wouldn’t have normally if he were there. Snooping through the apartment, I pulled out a pair of red Converse I’d never seen him wear, still in the box in the front closet, and slipped them on my feet. When he got home, it felt novel to have dinner alone with him, to talk about my day without interruption from Sara, to pick what he and I watched on TV before bed without having to negotiate with her. I called Alex at ten when she was finished with practice, long after Dad had gone to bed.
“It’s amazing here,” I told her. “It’s like I’m an only child.”
“Are you allowed to be on the phone?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered with equal amazement.
“Wow.”
I felt strange climbing alone into Sara’s and my bunk beds in the only room we’d ever shared there. When Sara stayed at Naomi’s, her stuff, her room, and her energy had a presence that permeated Mom’s house even in her absence. But at Dad’s, all Sara and I had was each other. Though it had only been a few hours since I’d seen her, I realized I missed her a bit as I lay there in the dark.
The next morning, Dad gave me a ride to school with the guitar.
“Thanks, Dad,” I said, jumping from the cab of his truck.
“Love you, babe.”
“Hi, Teegy,” Sara shouted as I walked up to her and our friends in the hallway before class. “Was it so fun being at Dad’s during the week? What was it like?”
“Oh my god. It was amazing. He ordered pizza and went to bed at nine. And he said I could talk on the phone as late as I wanted as long as I got up at seven.”
Sara shook her head in disbelief. “Oh my god, don’t tell Mom that. She’ll call him and make him change the rules.”
We both laughed. Later that week, Sara went to Dad’s without me.
16. SARA SEX NOTE
Naomi and I had only been having sex for a few months when she suggested that we write down our sexual fantasies. She’d brought the first note to my house after school, telling me, “Do not read it un
til you’re alone.” After she left, I locked the door to my bedroom and paced around with the paper pinched between my fingers. Do I read it on the bed, the floor, in my closet, at the desk? Should I crawl out the window and read it in the park? Should I set it on fire? I settled on the chair and unfolded the paper while my pulse pounded in my eardrums.
No one’s home so I invite you over. When you arrive, we decide that we’re pretty hungry so we order food. The pizza man says it’ll probably take about one hour. While we wait, I start kissing your body all over, paying close attention to “that place.” The doorbell rings but neither one of us gets up cuz suddenly we aren’t all that hungry for pizza. We both agree that a shower would feel great. In the shower, not surprisingly, we don’t rest. We still go at it making each other feel unbelievably good. When we get out of the shower, we decide we’re kinda hungry now so we each have a piece of chocolate cake. We have it all over each other and then lick it off. Good cake, especially the icing. We return to my bedroom still making each other feel wonderful. We fall asleep in each other’s arms, naked.
Later, on the telephone, she asked, “Did you like it?”
Her voice made my whole body shiver.
“Yeah, it was cool,” I said.
“Oh no. You hated it.”
“No! I didn’t, it was exciting.”
“You owe me one now.”
“I don’t know what to write!”
“Anything!”
“I think you should write me another, so I know exactly what you want.”
* * *
In her second letter she’d made a list of everything I did during sex that she liked. And there on the page was evidence that I possessed a knowledge of how to turn her on and proof that I did so regularly.