High School

by Sara Quin

  When all the equipment was finally set, he told us there was no time for a sound check. Stunned, we carried our guitars backstage, where we cowered in silence. Tegan could no longer hide her anxiety and copied out our set list on a fresh strip of paper that she pulled from her backpack. We were up first. A trickle of students filed in and ordered drinks at the bar as we readied ourselves onstage. I worked up the courage to search the dark room and watched as the judges took their spots at a long table draped with advertising for the campus radio station and local entertainment magazines. My eyes found our mom, who was now joined by our dad and Bruce, our grandparents, and Tracy. None of our friends were visible.

  “They’re still in high school, so let’s give a big round of applause to our first act tonight, Sara and Tegan!”

  I heard a roar in the main foyer outside the bar. Beyond the glass, our friends peered in. A bouncer stood nearby with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “Yes, we are the underage teenagers,” Tegan said into the microphone. That got a laugh, and she began to sing a melody over the opening chords of our first song. Under the hot lights I felt exposed, blinded. There was a disorienting awareness that the audience was free to stare, and to scrutinize Tegan and me, as never before. I steadied my eyes on her face. Her songs were always a different length. She added and subtracted lines of the chorus, building and emphasizing the intensity of each section by bending the tempo faster and then slower. By the end of the song, she was tearing her hand across the strings and yelping in full voice: “Remember my name!”

  And then together in unison, we repeated the line again and again. “I really think I like you, I really do, I do.”

  When we finished, there was a polite smattering of applause from the room—and a crashing cheer from outside where our friends hooted and hollered.

  “Thank you! If we don’t win tonight, our mom is going to make us go to college,” Tegan said. I saw smiles stretch across the judges’ faces.

  Backstage after our set, I could feel my heart beating in my chest. I looked to Tegan, and she appeared as shaky as I did. “I was so nervous up there; I can’t remember anything I said!” I whispered to her as we packed our guitars into their cases. We were then escorted by security out of the venue and back into the foyer to our waiting friends.

  “From out here it sounded fucking awesome!” Christina shouted as everyone crowded around us. We loitered outside the bar, talking loudly and drawing the attention of older students, who watched us suspiciously. The music of our competitors spilled out through the open door. When the judges were ready to declare the winner, my head felt like it was underwater. There was a spike of noise and then Mom ran out the door of the bar shouting, “You won!”

  Our friends began pogoing and we all screeched loudly.

  Tegan swung her arm around my neck. “I knew we would win!”

  We broke apart and received Mom’s crushing hug. “I’m so fucking proud of you guys!”

  I could tell for the first time in a long time that she really was.

  * * *

  After the buzz of our victory wore off, Mom slipped back into parental mode, nagging us to keep studying for finals, and yelling up the stairwell when she got home from work for us to empty the dishwasher. We entered a pattern: school, work, tutor, study, practice. From the time I woke up in the morning until I climbed back into bed, my body threatened to collapse. After I shut off the light, adrenaline rocketed through my skull, keeping my eyes wide open until 3:00 a.m. I was overwhelmed. I wanted to win Garage Warz, to get good grades, to make Mom proud. It was as if winning the semifinal had startled me awake after years of unconsciousness. What had I been doing all this time? How would I ever catch up?

  For the Garage Warz final, Mom arranged for our friends to be allowed inside the bar in a roped-off section near the back. At the entrance to the bar, we were read the riot act about underage drinking while the security staff drew large X’s on the tops of our friends’ hands. There were six bands in the final, and we were slated to perform third. A man with an acoustic guitar started the night off but was quickly drowned out by the crowd. During the second band’s raucous set, Mom whispered in my ear, “You’re going to win. You’re just so different from all of this.” She swept her hand across the room.

  When it was time for our set, Tegan and I carried our guitars to the side of the stage and stood silently as the final pieces of the drum kit were carried off. The host introduced herself, beaming down at us in chunky platform shoes. “You’re all anyone is talking about,” she said. The sound guy in a Black Flag T-shirt helped carry our guitars to the stage and shuttled the empty cases under his arms behind the monitor booth. Everyone was being so helpful, friendly. It was dizzying. When we sat on the chairs behind the microphones, a cheer erupted from the bar. There was still music blasting from the speakers, and my head whipped to the right, searching for Tegan’s eyes. She shook her head subtly, warning me it wasn’t quite time to start. Neither of us could stop smiling.

  Finally, the host stepped up to a microphone and the music was stopped abruptly. “Let’s give a very big hand to these lovely young ladies, Sara and Tegan.” Mom let off a bright whistle between her fingers and our friends hammered their hands together and cheered. From the stage I could see Dad struggling with the video camera, and Bruce beside him, peering over his shoulder into the viewfinder. I thought I might throw up.

  “This is called ‘Here I Am,’ ” Tegan told the crowd before strumming the opening riff. When Tegan started to sing, I heard Stephanie let out a long screech in the crowd, and then a few other of our friends joined in. It was as if their voices were now part of the song. I felt goosebumps on my skin. When it was my turn to sing the countermelody that we’d practiced a thousand times, I felt my mouth stretch into a smile. I loved to balance Tegan’s growl with something soft and unexpected. We broke down into a quiet section that we slowly built into a deafening crescendo. Tegan’s strumming accelerated into the final moments of the song and I struggled to match her pace, our words and downstrokes jerking apart and then overlapping as a perfect double. Landing on the final lyric, she muted the strings, and in full unison, we belted out, “Here I am, I said. Here. I. Am.” It felt euphoric.

  “This is called ‘Collide,’ ” I said into the microphone.

  “I just sit here,” Tegan said, smirking. She rested her chin on top of her guitar, cranking her head toward me. She’d convinced me to do the song alone and as I started to sing, I worried it was a mistake. The noise in the room grew louder around me. I felt a growing anguish that I wasn’t able to keep their focus. I tried to push my voice the way Tegan sometimes did, right to the edge of my throat. With my jaw jutted forward until it felt like my ears were plugged, I mimicked her rasp as best I could. “But I’m so tired of pretending that I am so strong! When I don’t even know yet, what it is that makes you seem so wrong!”

  By the time I hit the chorus I sensed a shift of attention back to the stage, to me. It was like regaining balance after a near fall. There was a surge of adrenaline and heat. Then relief.

  “Did it go okay?” I asked Tegan side stage when our short set was finished.

  Her face was flushed. “It was fucking amazing!”

  We crossed to the bar and joined our friends and family.

  “They fucking loved you!” Mom squealed.

  “Proud of you, babe!” Dad said, hugging me.

  “You’re really good!” a judge said as she passed on her way to the bar. Even strangers began to approach us with compliments.

  I turned in circles looking for Tegan. She was beaming. I felt drawn to her. When she saw me, she dug a few business cards out of her back pocket. “People keep giving me these.”

  They were from music journalists and a radio station programmer. I stared down at them, not sure what to think.

  When the final band stepped onstage, the lead singer introduced herself to the crowd. “Sara and Tegan should win,” she said into the microphone
before launching into a song. Our friends once again broke into a cheer. I kept my gaze fixed on the stage, head spinning from the recognition. After their performance the host of Garage Warz climbed onstage and thanked the event sponsors and judges. Then she said, “I’ve looked over all the scores, and without a doubt, our first-place winner is Sara and Tegan!”

  Our friends exploded. Arms wrapped around us from every direction, crushing us in a chaos of hugs and body slams. It felt like we’d all won something. Tegan and I broke off to thank the judges and shake their hands.

  “A few of us are still relatively sober,” one of the judges reassured us.

  Most of the bar started to clear out after that, so Tegan and I gathered our guitars and backpacks. Near the exit, one of the judges who wrote for a local magazine was chatting with Mom and Bruce.

  “He wants to interview you,” Mom told us later in the car.

  Tegan and I couldn’t stop grinning.

  * * *

  The next week two local television stations were set to interview us. The first sent a camera crew and a host to our high school and filmed us after class in the empty theater.

  “You had the highest marks in the history of Garage Warz! What does that feel like?”

  “We’re so happy!”

  “You were bedroom artists before winning this competition! What’s next?”

  “Finals and graduation!”

  “Can you two read each other’s thoughts or feel each other’s pain?”

  I flinched. This type of twin-mind-reading nonsense always bothered me. “Um, no!”

  It was a rapid-fire interview, and we punctuated each answer with laughs and quick glances at each other for reassurance.

  “That went badly,” I said to Tegan when we emerged from the school into the parking lot. Walking home, we brainstormed better answers to future questions.

  Later that evening a second television crew was led up the stairs to my bedroom, where Tegan and I played a song while the cameraman stood on top of the mattress on my floor and filmed us from multiple angles. As he swept his lens past the books on my shelves and the CDs stacked below the stereo, our parents and the producer of the segment crowded into the doorway.

  “Here we are in the bedroom where they wrote the songs that made them 1998’s Garage Warz champions!” the host said into the camera before turning to us.

  “Well, one of the bedrooms,” I said.

  “We don’t share a room; I write my songs in my bedroom,” Tegan added.

  “So, you don’t write the songs together?”

  “No.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Well, when I’m done writing the song, Tegan comes into my room, and I play it for her, and she just adds stuff to make it cool.”

  “What are your songs about?”

  “They’re a reflection of how we feel, of what’s going on around us, of anything that’s happening in our lives.”

  When the segment aired the following night, nausea passed through my body as we materialized on-screen, slouched over our guitars on the couch in my bedroom. The posters on the wall seemed staged and sunbursts of glare from the camera obscured the faces of my heroes. I cringed when the camera panned to my cat Taya, who was asleep on the patchwork quilt of my bed. We looked dewy and plastic. Our face piercings looked like blemishes. We were familiar, and yet I didn’t recognize us.

  “My hair looks horrible,” I said.

  “Stop. You both look adorable!” Mom said. In the interview, our words were cut up and our answers turned into a string of giggles and eye rolls. “That was so cute!” Mom blurted out, hitting mute on the television.

  That was the problem. They’d made us cute.

  I was lying in bed still half asleep when Mom knocked on the door on Saturday morning. I turned over and opened my eyes. There was a peculiar look on her face, and she was holding a folded newspaper page in her hand. She placed it next to me and sat down stiffly on the edge of the mattress.

  “Everything has been so positive,” she said, then trailed off. I could see a small photo of me onstage at the Garage Warz final. The university newspaper had run a full-page review of the competition. There were images of six bands fanned out across the page. Each band was displayed like a trading card, as if each were an athlete, with statistics and a review of the performance. Next to each card, the words “KEEP IT” or “TRADE IT” were stamped in bold capital letters:

  If you have faith the local music scene will redeem its declining reputation, twins Sarah [sic] and Tegan will shatter it. Incomprehensibly, this acoustic duo of 16-year-old Ani DiFranco wannabees won Garage Warz. What the judges saw in this uninspired lesson in power cords [sic] we may never know. Without question, these two did not deserve to win. The judges’ mental faculties must have collapsed when Sarah [sic] and Tegan’s high school class unleashed wails of Beatlemaniacal proportions. No explanation of their victory is forthcoming. It must have been their oh-so-hip piercings.

  Next to our trading card, and my face, were the words “TRADE IT.”

  “It’s bullshit, Sara. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” Mom clasped her hands together as if to stop herself from tearing the page in half.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” I managed. “I don’t care.”

  She turned and left my room, softly closing the door behind her. I pushed the paper onto the floor, pulled my knees to my chest, and sobbed into the mattress.

  * * *

  When Calgary’s VOX magazine came out the following week, our faces filled the entire cover. We dangled from above, our two heads floating in a swatch of surreal blue sky. We looked cool. We looked very cool. Copies were stacked at the entrance of Crescent Heights. I snatched one up, reeling between excitement and panic. Inside, the journalist gushed about our Garage Warz set, calling us “the future of folk.” The sting of our bad review from the previous week was diminished. I let myself feel as good as this writer said we were. I rolled it up and stuffed it into my backpack.

  At our table in the student center our friends cheered for us when we walked up.

  “Signature, please!” Christina said, pushing a copy of VOX toward me.

  “Stop, please,” I said, blushing.

  Zoe side hugged me when I sat down next to her, letting out a squeal into my ear.

  “You’re so famous now!” she said, winking at me.

  It felt perfect and embarrassing—the way I sometimes felt on our birthday, or after I’d broken my arm. I wanted to bask in the glow of their attention, and also disappear.

  The first sign that something had changed drastically in my life came in my second-period biology class. A student who had never spoken to me before asked if it was true that I was one of the twins on the cover of VOX.

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “What high school did you go to last year?”

  “This one.”

  She and her friends laughed.

  For two and a half years, they’d never noticed me. But now they did.

  38. TEGAN THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST

  Winning Garage Warz set a number of things in motion. After we won, it felt like all the local press wanted to talk to us. Our phone rang off the hook; our voicemail was always full. We got offered opening slots for bands coming through Calgary and were invited to host an open mic night at a club on Seventeenth Avenue, and the local news visited our school to do a big piece on us. People started to recognize us, and not just at school. When we were on the bus people would stare, and during a shift at the coffee shop where I worked a guy dropped a newspaper down while I made change and said, “That you?” It felt like we were everywhere, and I loved the feeling. It was overwhelming in the best way, and I floated through the first weeks of it with the confidence and audacity of someone who has had their first taste of success and thinks they’ve already “made it.”

  I loved the interviews in particular. Talking felt instinctive, as if navigating questions and filling time on the radio were ge
netic traits, like our eye color or the shape of our faces. I thrived under the shower of compliments and positive reinforcement we got from the adults who leaned in around us, dissecting our “process” and “relationship” and “future.” Until Garage Warz, my “future” had been a giant black hole that kept me up at night, dragged me down as I studied, and created tension when anyone pressed me about it. All of a sudden, I’d gone from invisible to notable. Sara and I had a future. And everyone wanted to hear about it.

  While I let myself drift higher and higher, Sara remained firmly planted in reality. I’d gone into overdrive dreaming and scheming, but Sara was running on empty, swiping out of the air everything I conjured for us. She was skeptical about all the attention, unsure of herself, and questioned if we were any good at all. When our mom gave her blessing for us to take a year off after we graduated, something we’d been desperate for her to consent to, I was elated.

  Sara just shrugged and said, “I still might go to university, I don’t know.”

  University had been a source of so much turmoil and tears all year that it felt deliberately contentious to not be excited by Mom’s change of heart. But she wasn’t.

  “Who cares?” I said to her when she came to me upset about the one bad review we got after we won Garage Warz. “So, some random girl thinks we should be traded. What the fuck does that even mean? Who cares?”

  Sara had taken the paper I’d tossed off the bed and left my room without a word. She cared.

  But what eclipsed Sara and her feelings completely was me: what I wanted, what I felt, what I saw. A lifetime of calibrating myself alongside her ended abruptly. I couldn’t empathize, I couldn’t relate, and I didn’t want to try. The things she might have been struggling with and why were obscured by an overgrowth of ignorance and lack of compassion on my part.