by Sara Quin
“We won’t slam them again,” I said calmly. I shot Tegan a death stare.
“Figure it out,” he said, relenting. He put the door back on the hinges. “I’m tired of the two of you arguing over the telephone.”
Tears of frustration stung my eyes as he spoke. I wanted him to pick a side, even if it wasn’t mine. When my door was back on the hinges, I closed it gently and locked it.
After Bruce went to bed, I slipped down the stairs to the basement. Line 1 on the telephone was lit up, red. Tegan was on the phone with Alex. I hit Line 2 and dialed Naomi’s number.
“I hate my sister.”
“You don’t.”
“I do.”
“I hate when you two fight.”
“It’s ridiculous. She and Alex just sit there for hours saying nothing!” I said.
“We used to do that, too,” Naomi replied.
“They’re weird.”
“They just like each other.”
“Obviously,” I said.
Tegan’s attraction to her best friend was no surprise to me. I knew what a crush looked like. It wasn’t the giggling or hum of conversation through my bedroom wall that revealed her feelings so much as the intensity of her fights with Alex. Suspicion, jealousy, feelings bruised and broken. That’s what love sounded like. I was repulsed by her, threatened by her sloppiness, how easy she made it to suspect and confirm what was going on with her and Alex. Returned to our original sameness, even my secret shame was not entirely mine anymore.
“Do you think they’re hooking up?” Naomi asked me before we hung up.
“Ugh.”
She clicked her tongue. “Don’t be like that.”
“I don’t want to even think about it.”
When my love with Naomi was in bloom, we’d hidden ourselves behind locked doors. I felt the urge to invade Tegan’s privacy the way she’d invaded mine.
“I should go,” I said.
“Okay, well. Be nice to her.”
* * *
The next day Tegan and I launched into round two of our battle. Careful not to slam the doors, our fighting was contained within the boundary of our rooms. We hovered just at the edge of violence. With my hands curled into fists, she dared me to punch her.
“You’re going to hit me?” she taunted. “Do it, you psycho.” Her mouth curled into a smile.
We didn’t hear our mom open the front door or her steps on the stairs. Suddenly she crossed through my doorway and snapped the phone cord from the socket in the wall.
“I’m fucking done.” She wrapped the cord around the phone as she spoke, pushing past us and toward Tegan’s bedroom, where she took Tegan’s phone, too. I heard the muffled bells of the telephones in the hallway as she carried them to her bedroom and closed the door. Now bonded together in a fight against Mom, Tegan and I went to her door and knocked.
“That’s not fair!” Tegan yelled.
“They’re our phones!” I said.
Silence.
“Mom!”
“Another word about it and you’ll be grounded, too,” she said through the door.
“Fucking bitch,” I muttered under my breath.
Tegan turned, glancing only briefly at me.
“Fucking psycho,” she muttered, slamming her door behind her.
The next day no one in the house was on speaking terms. Perhaps to avoid the unbearable meal we were having with Mom upstairs in the kitchen, Bruce was eating the dinner he’d made for himself in the basement. As Mom was cleaning up the dishes, Tegan asked her for our allowance.
“I already gave it to you. If you want more money, get a job.”
“Dad gives you six hundred dollars a month for us in child support. Don’t you think we’re entitled to more than fifteen bucks a week?” Tegan asked.
I bolted up the stairs when the yelling started. Tegan was dead meat. Even I knew that she’d gone too far. Part of me was relieved to hear someone else express rage at her, while another part of me worried she’d be leaving the house in a body bag. When the fight arrived in the hallway outside Tegan’s bedroom, I listened with increasing worry. Mom’s voice was hoarse, anguished, outlining in excruciating detail our monthly expenses, and the sacrifices taking care of us required of her. I opened my door and tried to intervene, playing referee and then peacekeeper. Bruce joined me at the top of the stairs, calmly calling Mom’s name as if she were standing on a high window ledge. She turned and pushed past him down the stairs. She returned with two garbage bags.
“Pack your shit. You can go and live with your dad,” she said, throwing the bags at Tegan’s feet.
Tegan argued, at one point she begged, but eventually she grabbed some clothes and books and stuffed them into the bags as I looked on. When she was done, Mom tied them up and dragged them down the stairs to the front door. I heard Tegan sobbing, and then the front door closing. The house settled into a terrifying quiet. I hadn’t said a word but was afraid that I would be next.
At school the next morning, I saw Tegan in the student center. She had big, black circles under her eyes.
“Mom’s a psycho,” Tegan said. “I didn’t mean that she should give us all of Dad’s money.”
I knew that she was regretful, I could hear it in her voice. I knew Mom had to run a full cycle of rage. Maybe she deserved to.
“She’ll calm down,” I said.
Tegan called Mom the following week and apologized, and Mom agreed to let her come home. For a few days after she returned, there was peace in the house.
32. TEGAN WE’RE NOTHING LIKE THEM
Alex and I spent the fall falling in love.
“When did you know?”
“Always.”
“How did you know?”
“It was so obvious.”
“Was it always there between us?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t we do this sooner?”
“I don’t know.”
Obsessing over the most minute details of our friendship and its ascension into romance, we got lost in the small things.
“I can’t believe you like milk. How did I never know that?”
“I’m trying to imagine you on a bike, but I can’t . . .”
“Really?”
“I’m trying, but I can’t . . .”
“Try harder.”
“I am . . .”
We cavorted and coalesced under the microscope of infatuation, making even mundane facts seem riveting and essential. A spectrum of colors and feelings and tastes and a kind of touch that I’d only just figured out existed surged through me. I had never considered what it would be like to be in love until I was in it. It was a concept that felt out of reach before Alex, just beyond the scope. Even my most intense crushes on other girls hadn’t exercised so much dominance over me, and the boys even less. Truthfully, the boys had induced little but a constant desire to break up with them. But with Alex, I wanted to stretch out our beginning, I wanted to never reach our end. As I fell in love with her, I could think of nothing but her. I half listened in school, half studied for my tests, half completed my assignments, half lived when I wasn’t next to her. My desire for her didn’t make me sick, or sad about what it might mean. The way I felt about her helped me forget the stress I felt bricking itself inside me about university and my future, and the lack of clarity I had about both.
All week when we were apart from each other, Mom would nag me about my terrible grades, my lack of focus, my nonexistent plans for university. Her comments took small bites out of the secret desires I was storing up about playing music and what was happening between me and Alex. I only half listened to Mom as she tried to reason with me, pleading, “I want you to have an easier life than I did. I don’t want you to struggle like I did. You need to try harder. You need to do better.”
Reunited with Alex when the weekend came, tucked together in the dark of our rooms, she would reassure me, tending to the love between us, reminding me I was blooming, not wilting.
/> “You’re destined for something more important than university,” she said. “Fuck school. You’re going to get a record deal. You’re going to change the world.”
Drunk on her vision of my life to come, my fears blurred, and I felt soothed into seeing what she saw. I trusted her because she knew me better than anyone ever had. Having revealed myself totally to her, she took ownership of everything of mine, even my future.
In the meantime, Sara and I were fighting more than ever. She sensed what was happening between Alex and me, and for reasons unfathomable to me she started projecting an almost puritanical loathing at us. I screamed for Mom, demanding she intervene between us: “Get Sara out of my fucking room. Tell her to leave us alone!”
The happiness Alex and I exhibited only seemed to threaten Sara. It seemed like we were a reminder of what she and Naomi had lost. I burned with irrefutable confidence that she was just jealous of us. But a small part of me was worried Sara might be mad because she thought I was copying her. It nagged at me, and threatened to ruin the new love I was in. Alex and I spent a lot of time making up after fights that started when I’d brush Alex’s hand away if Sara entered a room, or grew cold to her to mask our intimacy. I knew I was straddling a fine line between sharing an incredible heady secret love with Alex and hiding who I was becoming with her behind closed doors. I remembered my disgust when Sara demanded privacy for her and Naomi after they got together; their desire to hide what was happening between them had felt shameful to me. Now I languished, in love with Alex, wanting at once to be open about it while also fearing shame was staining us.
“We will never be like they were. Ever,” I cried to Alex.
“Never,” Alex agreed.
We promised each other a different outcome than they had succumbed to, as we winded closer and closer to the path they’d taken. In the dark, behind closed doors, entwined in bed, we outlined the ways we’d always love each other; the lengths we’d go to guarantee we’d never fail as they had. How naive we were, so seized by love, to think we would end up any different.
33. SARA CAREER AND LIFE MANAGEMENT
To qualify for a high school diploma, it was mandatory to complete a semester of Career and Life Management (CALM). The curriculum was an array of topics including mental health, skill building in interpersonal relationships, career goals, and instruction on the proper way to fill out tax forms.
CALM wasn’t taken very seriously. Most days I dozed off during the films or whizzed through worksheets quickly so I could read a novel under my desk. Our CALM teacher, Dr. Morgan, seemed especially hapless when standing slumped at the front of the classroom. The fine hairs left on the top of his head were swept across his perspiring scalp. His sweaters were pilling and his corduroys—the same kind worn by most, if not all, of my male teachers—were rubbed white at the knees and below the sagging pockets on his backside. He was soft-spoken, but firm. A doctor of what? I don’t think he ever said.
The sexual education curriculum came halfway through the semester, once routines and decorum had been established. Perhaps to jolt us from our boredom, we were invited to welcome with enthusiastic applause a sexual education speaker from the Calgary Birth Control Association. Dr. Morgan briefly introduced a woman who looked to be in her early twenties. She had a voice that failed to quiet the murmur of conversation in the back of the room as she drew white chalk across the blackboard, outlining the day’s topic, STDs. She dropped the chalk on the rail below the board and smacked the white dust from her hands.
“So!” she said, smiling brightly at us. “Let’s talk about sexually transmitted diseases!”
“Can’t get AIDS unless you’re a fag,” Troy shouted between his hands from the back of the room. Troy was one of those boys who bullied everyone, including his friends, but especially teachers. His good looks and charisma made it seem like he was doing you a favor. He was used to being looked at and took every opportunity to spin the heads of the class in his direction.
The guest instructor’s neck stiffened, and she turned toward Dr. Morgan, who had taken a seat on a chair in the far corner of the room near his desk.
“Troy. Knock it off,” he said, still looking down at his notes.
Recalibrating, our guest began to speak again. She was interrupted a second time.
“Seriously, why the fuck do we need to learn about this shit?” Troy said. “Nobody in here is a fucking faggot.” I turned to look at him. His mouth was stretched into a lazy grin, his eyes nearly closed.
“Dr. Morgan!” I called loudly from my seat. Other students turned to stare at me, as if I were the disrupter.
“Troy, enough,” Dr. Morgan said, with some force.
“It’s true, though,” Troy said.
I turned around and yelled, “Shut up, Troy!”
“I’ll say whatever the fuck I want.” His smile curled. “Fags get AIDS.” He shrugged as if he were only stating a fact.
“Troy!” Dr. Morgan yelled, and then stood, tapping his clipboard nervously against his thigh. I heard coughs of laughter from the boys in the back row.
“Are you going to let him say these things?” I stood up from my seat; I felt the light-headed rush you get before you throw a punch.
“Let’s just everyone calm down,” Dr. Morgan said.
“Yes, calm down,” Troy said. He was slouched in his chair, his eyes locked on me.
“What if someone in this class is gay?” The dangerous sound of my voice silenced the room. With tears blurring my sight, I picked up my chair and hurled it over my classmates’ heads at Troy’s desk. The legs smashed the laminate of his desktop, bounced, and then crashed into another desk. The sound was spectacularly metallic. And loud. Troy’s hands jerked up across his face and he let out, “What the fuck!” as he stumbled from his seat, toppling his chair.
I grabbed my backpack and rushed to the door. In the hallway outside the classroom, I started to run. I didn’t know where I was going until I arrived at the Pit. When I burst through the door, Mr. Russel was sitting in his small office, working. I collapsed in the plastic chair next to his desk. Through heaving sobs that gathered and broke in my chest, I explained what had happened.
“He said that only fags get AIDS,” I cried. “And Dr. Morgan let him say it!” I cried into my hands. “He’s fucking pathetic.”
Mr. Russel’s face drained of color. Then, over the loudspeaker came an announcement: my full name, repeated twice, and a request to make my way to the principal’s office.
“Please, don’t make me go up there.”
Mr. Russel placed his hand flat on his cheek and another on his hip. Breathing out of his nose in one big huff, he said, “I have to tell them that you’re here.”
I nodded, and he lifted the telephone on his desk. “Yes, this is Mr. Russel. Ms. Quin is with me.”
He hung up and turned back to me. “Dr. Morgan is in the main office and he’d like to speak to you.” He rested his hand on my shoulder. “You’re not in trouble.”
When Mr. Russel and I walked through the doors of the main office, I felt self-conscious about how swollen and red my face was. I avoided the eyes of the secretary and followed Mr. Russel into a small room. Dr. Morgan was standing with another male staff member I didn’t recognize. Mr. Russel closed the door behind us, and I began to cry.
“I . . . didn’t mean to throw the chair.”
Dr. Morgan lifted his hands. “Troy’s been removed from the class.” He paused. “And I’m so sorry. He shouldn’t have said those things.”
“But you let him. You let him!” I said.
He looked grim, his jaw pulsing. His next words came out hoarse, as if he, too, might cry. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”
I fell into sobs then. “I don’t want to be in your class anymore.”
“I think we should go back downstairs. It’s enough,” Mr. Russel said softly.
“Troy is not welcome in the classroom, but you are,” said Dr. Morgan.
“I’m not coming back.�
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The male staff member standing with Dr. Morgan finally spoke, opening his eyes wide like an idea had just then popped into his head.
“Do you want to finish the year in the library?” He turned to Dr. Morgan. “I imagine you could give assignments and she could do them independent of the class?”
Dr. Morgan’s chin dipped to his chest. He sighed. “Of course, that would be fine.”
I was hiccuping, and my sleeve was damp from wiping snot and tears from my face. My head felt scooped out and hollow. “Okay,” I agreed.
We left the office, and I followed Mr. Russel through the student center and down to the Pit. He left me on a couch, where for the rest of the hour I pretended to organize the contents of my backpack. When the bell rang, I stood and thanked Mr. Russel. I found that I couldn’t quite meet his eyes. I wanted to tell him that I knew he was gay, and that I probably was, too. But I couldn’t. So I turned and walked out the door and back upstairs to my next class.
34. TEGAN DON’T BELIEVE THE THINGS THEY TELL YOU, THEY LIE
The rumpus room in Naomi’s basement felt muggy. We’d been drinking greedily all night, exercising our freedom in the absence of Naomi’s parents, who were away for the weekend. Sara and I had dragged along our guitars and were playing some of our new songs for Christina and Naomi and the other Frenchies crowded around. Naomi’s older brother, Kevin, whose bedroom was also in the basement, came out at one point and leaned on the back of the couch, watching with interest. When Naomi’s parents would go out of town, he’d supervise, which usually meant throwing a party where his older friends would ply us with alcohol and cigarettes. He played drums in a local band; their gear was strewn around the room. The four-year difference in age between us might as well have been ten. He had a job and went to university. We thought he was so cool.
“You guys are awesome. You should jam with my band sometime,” he said. “We need a singer and you guys are good.”
Few people aside from our friends and family had heard Sara and me play. And not many of them had been adults. His compliment fed the part of me hungry for validation from people older than us—adults who weren’t also related to us. We desperately wanted to be taken seriously. And Kevin’s offer felt serious.