High School

by Sara Quin

  27. SARA I’M MAKING YOU SICK

  Naomi slipped further from my mind during those three months that she was in Montreal. Our infrequent phone calls and letters, scattered with mundane details about the new songs I’d written and my fights with Tegan, were the only exchanges we had. I refused to ask her about Frederic, and, when she called me once from his house, I drunkenly argued with her until she cried. In the morning I wrote a long apology, begging to be forgiven. When she received the Plunk tape I sent her she either didn’t notice or care that all my new songs seemed to be about her.

  Now she was back. Standing at the front door of her house, my pulse dashed in my throat. I rang the doorbell and took a deep breath. Naomi pounced through the door, throwing her arms around my neck.

  “Oh my god, I’m so happy to see you!” she said.

  Her skin smelled spiced and familiar. I’d spent hundreds of hours with my face pressed in that exact spot between her shoulder and neck. I stepped into the entrance and pulled my boots off. We made our way up the stairs to her bedroom. With the door closed, she kissed me full on the mouth.

  “I’ve really missed you,” she said.

  I sat on the bed, biting at my lip.

  Her brow wrinkled with concern. “I thought we were okay.”

  “I just feel . . . shy,” I said.

  I hoped that seeing her after three months would return to my body the feelings that had consumed me the previous year. But, fumbling through that awkward kiss, I felt a growing insecurity that she might be comparing me to Frederic. How did he kiss her? Touch her? How did I compare? Imagining them having sex filled me with shame; I wanted my body to look like his.

  “Your parents must be thrilled about Frederic,” I said, pulling away.

  “They said he could come visit.”

  I nodded, but I could feel the skin on my face tightening, my jaw pulsing.

  “He hasn’t called me much since I got back.”

  “You got home last night!”

  “I guess.” She sighed. “I’m worried about him meeting someone else.” She leaned closer. “Is it okay to tell you that?”

  I was only willing to tolerate their relationship so long as it stayed in Montreal. I shifted my weight back on the bed, away from her. “Did you promise him you wouldn’t hook up with anyone?”

  “I promised him I wouldn’t hook up with another boy.”

  “What about hooking up with me?”

  “You’re a girl, it’s different.”

  I hated that difference, the undisputed truth of it.

  “And Zoe? How’s your little crush?”

  I felt my cheeks burn red. “She’s not my ‘little crush,’ she’s just my friend—our friend.”

  “You’re blushing! It’s okay if you like her. I get it. She’s beautiful.”

  “I don’t like her.”

  “Did anything happen between you two while I was gone?”

  “No!” I said forcefully.

  I wasn’t yet ready to admit that my attraction to girls existed outside of the sexual relationship Naomi and I had. An instinctive warning flashed in my mind that what had happened while Naomi was away should be kept a secret to avoid hurting her, but also to protect Zoe.

  “Are you still attracted to me?” Naomi asked me then. Like, prove it.

  “Of course.” I kissed her but felt decapitated by the absence of feeling below my neck. I let myself think about Zoe, about our kiss. Was Naomi imagining someone else, too?

  “We should get ready, everyone is going to be here soon,” I said, sitting up on the mattress.

  Naomi stood up, gazing into the mirror that hung on the back of her bedroom door.

  “I look fat in this,” she said. I felt her eyes rest on my face in the reflection.

  “You don’t look fat!” I stood and wrapped my arms around her, rested my chin on her shoulder.

  “I just feel like you’d rather be with Zoe.”

  I recoiled from her angrily. “Stop saying that! She’s my friend! She’s your friend!”

  “I just feel gross.” Her chin quivered. “I just wish you would tell me the truth.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” I said.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You were the one fucking some guy for three months!”

  “And you’re the one making me feel like shit about that guy!”

  “Am I supposed to be happy for you?”

  “I like him,” she said, “but I like you, too, and it seems like you don’t feel the same about me anymore.”

  She opened the door and went into the bathroom. I followed behind her and grabbed at the handle, but it was locked.

  “Fuck. Naomi. Please open the door.” Pressing my ear to the wood, I heard the sound of her retching into the toilet. My skin went cold. “Naomi!”

  The flush of the toilet, water running in the sink. When the door opened, she pushed past me, and I followed her back into the bedroom.

  “What’s going on? Are you sick?”

  “No, I’m just . . . I’m upset.”

  “I heard you,” I said.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “I heard you throwing up.” The words felt dislocated from their meaning. Throwing up was the result of a flu or a night of too much drinking. My mind scrambled. She was pale, the whites of her eyes were bloodshot.

  “Sometimes I feel better if I—if I do that.”

  “You made yourself do that?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I was dumbfounded, trying to comprehend how our argument could cause Naomi to make herself sick. I’d heard rumors about girls at school who threw up to control their weight, but I’d never heard of someone purposely throwing up because they were upset.

  “Don’t ever do that again!” I grabbed at her arms, above the elbow. “Is this also a thing people do in Montreal?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. Her mouth went slack.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean that.”

  Tears slipped down her cheeks. I tried to hug her, but she went straight to her bedroom mirror and dipped her head backward like she had a bloody nose.

  “Please, Naomi. Just don’t throw up like that again, okay? Promise me!”

  She caught her tears before they fell. “I won’t,” she said, then straightened up.

  After that night it was impossible to shake the feeling that I was to blame for everything going wrong between us. My failure to fix it was a second kind of erasure. What sexual attraction remained between Naomi and me felt sullied by my fear that I was making her sick. I lingered outside the bathroom each time she locked herself inside. When we were out with our friends I overcompensated, treating Zoe coldly, sometimes ignoring her completely. Naomi and I were both suspicious, tracking each other for evidence, which we weaponized in our frequent arguments. Desperate to be freed from her secret, I threatened to tell her parents what was going on. When she admitted to me that they’d booked her a ticket to Montreal that summer, I was relieved.

  28. TEGAN SOMETHING’S MISSING

  “Have you and Spencer had sex yet?”

  Emma and I had grown apart in grade eleven. We were still friends, still hung out at school. But we’d long since stopped writing notes, sleeping at each other’s houses, and talking on the phone like this. There was no one reason for it; we’d just been absorbed into a larger group of shared friends, she’d gotten a boyfriend, I’d grown close to Alex, and we’d moved and no longer saw each other in the mornings before school. After Emma asked if Spencer and I were having sex, she took a drag off her cigarette and I tried to figure out how to answer her question. While I did, I imagined her in her kitchen, the long, tangled tan cord of the phone knotted on the floor in front of her. I felt dizzy with nostalgia for a time when Emma and I were headed toward the kind of friendship where I might have readily shared something so intimate, without it having to be pried from me.

  A year earlier we’d edged right up to that kind of intimacy
, but it hadn’t happened. We’d been together in her bed after a party, coming down off acid, and she had started talking about two girls we hung out with who I assumed were hooking up but had never admitted it to us. I’d frozen the second Emma brought them up, shocked by her candor but also enticed by what she was dangling in front of me in the dark. It felt like an opportunity.

  “I don’t know why they don’t just tell us they’re getting it on. It’s not like any of us would care or be bothered by it.”

  I had wanted to tell her about Sara and Naomi then. To explain that these friends of ours weren’t the only ones hiding in plain sight.

  But then she had surprised me even more, adding, “Why don’t girls like me that way?”

  I’d wanted desperately at that moment to confess that I did, that I had a crush on her. And that it wasn’t the first one I’d had on a girl. I’d barely allowed myself to even think such a thing, but I’d felt the truth crowd my mouth as I watched the red tip of Emma’s cigarette light up her face as she talked.

  “Come on, everyone has a crush on you,” I managed in a hoarse whisper thick with suggestion.

  “That’s not true.”

  I breathed in her vulnerability, drew my own into my lungs from deep inside me. I was about to spill everything when she leaned across me to put her cigarette out. Overwhelmed with the desire to kiss her, my heart jackhammering so loud I was sure she could hear it as she pressed into me, I swallowed the truth. I went silent and stayed still after she lay back down. The next morning, I woke up relieved I hadn’t said anything to her about how I felt. We’d been high, and the lines of reality were hazy to me. Stoned and caught up in the moment, I’d felt sure of my feelings, but sober in the light of day, I felt less sure. For a while after our talk we had felt even tighter than before. But soon I withdrew from the line I’d come close to crossing with her, and the intimacy between us eventually faded like the memory of that night in her bed.

  * * *

  Emma calling about Spencer a year later to inquire about our sex life, or lack thereof, reminded me of the intensity of the feelings I’d had for her in grade ten. And it presented an opportunity. If I could tell anyone about the lack of intensity between Spencer and me, it was Emma.

  I switched the phone from one hand to the other and took a deep breath. “Um . . . well—”

  “You don’t have to answer,” Emma said flippantly, cutting me off. “It’s none of my business if you guys are having sex. I was just wondering.”

  “No, it’s not that—”

  “No, you know what . . . ? Just forget about it.”

  I shifted on my bed, closed my eyes, and pictured Emma on her bottom bunk. Wringing the words from myself, I finally managed, “No. We are not having sex. Not even close.”

  “Oh-kay,” Emma said, punctuating the syllables with a pause long enough for me to curl up and die from mortification between.

  Though she didn’t come right out and press me for an explanation of why Spencer and I weren’t having sex, she circled it like a patient vulture for the next hour. I eventually admitted to her that it hadn’t come up, that Spencer and I never talked about sex.

  “Not even once.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t know if we’re ready,” I said, immediately regretting it. I sounded lame, and it was a lie. I knew Emma was having sex. I knew Spencer had been, too, before me. It was a lack of desire I felt—not lack of readiness. I muttered, “I just feel like we don’t really connect . . . that way.” Emma stayed silent. “It’s like we don’t have any chemistry or something,” I added quickly. I pressed my face into my pillow and rolled toward the wall, hoping to smother any further words that might try and slip out.

  “Hmm, I see,” she hummed knowingly, as if she’d come to understand something about me I couldn’t, had discovered some detail in me I had overlooked in myself. “Makes sense.”

  I wanted to yell, Why does it make sense to you and not me? Why, if I liked Spencer, didn’t I desire him? I wanted to open my mouth and have all the words trapped in my throat unspool like ribbon. I wanted to take her back with me to a year earlier, onto the mattress in her room, and be braver, bolder with her. I wanted to make her see, to really understand. But every time I opened my mouth to say more, the words didn’t come. Eventually, Emma let me go. She sounded a bit hurt, as if she sensed I’d not been totally honest.

  The next day I went to Spencer’s thinking about Emma’s question. About sex. About her. About what I was unable to say a year earlier, and what I had not been able to explain the night before.

  “You’re quiet,” Spencer said. We sat next to each other on the couch.

  “You’re always quiet,” I said.

  He suggested we smoke a joint in his room, and afterward we lay down on his plaid comforter. I curled up next to him. He drifted off, and I felt a familiar relief, just as I had a dozen other times that summer when it seemed like something physical might happen between us and it didn’t. Pressed against him, I thought back to when Emma leaned across me in her bed to put out her cigarette. As I replayed the memory in my mind, this time I didn’t swallow the words that rose in my throat. Instead, I said them to myself: “My heart has never beat for you the way it did for her.”

  The next day Spencer and I went to Denny’s for coffee. We were both quiet. Finally I said, “I think we should break up.”

  29. SARA BOYFRIEND

  In the last weeks of grade eleven, Tegan and I walked home from school every day, even when the sky dumped summer rain in sheets without warning. It was liberating to strip off our jackets and lace them through the straps on our backpacks, lifting our arms to wave as friends’ cars passed. On one of those soggy afternoons, Cameron offered to tag along, carrying our guitar the full twelve blocks home. Cameron looked like a surfer. His bangs sprang up off his forehead in a cowlick. He had wide-set eyes, and his skin was as soft as that of any of the girls I’d kissed. Even though he dressed a lot preppier than the rest of our friends, he often turned up at raves, his cigarette drawing red lines in the air as he danced.

  When we arrived at our house, he lingered on the sidewalk. Tegan went inside.

  We sat down on the front steps.

  “We should start a band,” he said.

  “I’ll ask Tegan,” I said.

  “So . . .” His eyes were bloodshot. He was a little stoned.

  “So . . .” I said.

  “You don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend either,” he said, laughing.

  “What about a girlfriend?” I asked.

  “Nope.” He grinned.

  “I thought you liked older girls,” I said. He pressed his back up against the iron railing. “I just know that you might expect or want . . . sex.”

  “I just want to get to know you,” he said, and then leaned in to kiss me. His mouth tasted like smoke. His blue plaid coat smelled of cinnamon.

  I pulled away. “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

  The smile didn’t leave his face as he pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it.

  “Let me know about the band,” he said, standing up and flashing me a final grin before stepping off the curb and walking away.

  Once inside, I went upstairs to Tegan’s bedroom. The journal in which she kept her lyrics was spread out on her purple duvet, and the room was smoky with incense.

  “Cameron asked to be in our band.” I folded myself onto the bench seat next to the window. “And he asked me out.”

  “I think you should just tell him no. About the band, I mean.” She sounded annoyed.

  “Okay.” I stared out the window, thinking about the kiss. I was more than a little flattered that he liked me.

  “I might say yes, about the other thing,” I said casually.

  She shrugged. “Spencer and I broke up again,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. I’d seen Spencer a few days earlier and h
e’d told me as much. They were kind of like Naomi and me, never quite settled or satisfied with each other, but not really ready to let go either.

  “I don’t know. He’s boring me lately.”

  “You’re being kind of mean to him.”

  “I’m mean to him? You’re one to talk.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Naomi?”

  “What about her?”

  “Whatever.”

  “You don’t know a fucking thing about me and Naomi.” I stood up and left, slamming her bedroom door closed behind me.

  At first Cameron and I didn’t really refer to ourselves as boyfriend/girlfriend. He just started tagging along with Tegan and me to the movies and to our friends’ houses, calling me every day, and showing up with extra of whatever he was drinking or smoking. He never seemed to tire of asking me questions. I couldn’t think of a guy who’d ever really tried to get to know me. We talked about playing music and song writing, and he’d call me on the phone and ask me to play songs for him. In Broadcasting class he’d taught me to play drums, and he was always putting whatever instrument he had in his hands into mine. The boys we hung out with clammed up if you dared to ask them about their feelings, but Cameron went glassy-eyed more than once telling me about his. He was generous, affable. Everyone liked him, even Bruce.

  Bruce had stared down every one of our boyfriends as if he might grab them by the scruff of the neck and eject them from the house. He’d grown up with three sisters and was always telling us stories about the losers he’d had to chase away from the dinner table when he was a kid. The way he planted his meaty forearms around his plate after he’d loaded it up seemed like an unconscious behavior left over from childhood. I understood that when it came to boys, Tegan and I were in that defended space between his arms.

  Mom was more suspicious, eyeballing Cameron when he strolled bare-chested through our house with his T-shirt off and tucked into the back of his jeans.