High School

by Sara Quin

  Then Veda said into the microphone, “We think we should hear another one, what do you think?”

  The crowd went wild.

  “It couldn’t have gone better,” Mom assured us in the Jeep afterward. “You sold every tape!”

  “All of them?” I shouted.

  “All of them! The girl selling them was practically throwing them at people.”

  As I fell asleep that night, my face hurt from smiling.

  The drive back to Calgary felt impossibly long; our first day back at school excruciating. All I could think about was getting home and checking our voicemail. We nearly ran home after school. Rushing inside, we fought to be the first to the phone as we clambered up the stairs to our rooms. Tossing my bag onto my couch, I fell onto my mattress and grabbed the receiver.

  “Pick up!” Sara yelled from her room.

  “What?”

  “Listen!”

  “Hey, this Bryan from PolyGram, we met at the Press Club, I promised I’d call. Now I’m calling. Give me a ring back. I’d like to come to visit you guys, hear some more music, maybe take you to a few studios . . .”

  “There’s more,” Sara said as the machine beeped again.

  “Hey this is Don from EMI, saw your showcase in Vancouver, it was memorable and powerful. We’d love to talk about what you guys are going to do next year after you graduate.”

  I hung up the phone and ran into Sara’s room.

  “There’s more.” She laughed, still holding the phone to her head. “There’s so many.”

  “What do we do?” I yelled.

  “I don’t know!” she yelled back.

  “Well, who should we call?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Let’s call Mom,” I suggested. “She’s gonna freak.”

  Sara nodded thoughtfully. “She’ll know what we should do.”

  43. SARA I NEED SPACE

  Mom called it a separation, but I had my doubts.

  “I need space,” she said. “I’m tired of trying.”

  It didn’t come as a shock, but maybe only the first divorce does. Bruce and Mom had been fighting constantly, and Mom had been sleeping on the living room couch for six months. It seemed like the only time we saw them together was when we performed shows or after the drives they sometimes took alone at night when they didn’t want us to hear them arguing. When Mom offered to drive us to Vancouver alone for New Music West, it should have warned us that something was up. Vancouver was Bruce’s city, and he’d always told us that he would be moving back to Vancouver Island, where he’d grown up, after he retired. It felt strange without him, as if Bruce had died, or had never existed at all.

  “Is it about us?” I asked.

  “No, of course not. We’re different people than when we first met. I changed,” she said. “He didn’t.”

  She had changed. When she met Bruce, she was a single parent, attending college, and struggling to make ends meet. Now she was thirty-nine, with a master’s degree and a career. But Bruce had changed, too. That tough kid with a sports car who’d shown up at our house to woo Mom ten years earlier had grown into a dad Tegan and I could count on. I’d always assumed that Tegan and I were the ones responsible for the tension between them. It had never occurred to me that while we were locking our doors to keep each other out, they’d been doing the same thing to each other.

  She and Bruce had a plan. They’d sell our house in the summer; Bruce would move back to the suburbs in the fall. She’d found a home in Crescent Heights with a basement suite for Tegan and me. We drove by in the Jeep, just the three of us, idling out front as the sun went down. The house was on a corner lot, with a wide porch and a big yard.

  “It’s what I’ve always wanted,” she said. “There’s a separate entrance, so you can come and go as you please.”

  With her hands clasped together, it was as if she were begging for permission. We nodded our approval.

  Moving was an addiction in our family; a new home was the perfect bandage to quickly wrap around any wound. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this new house was her way of breaking up with us, too. We were almost eighteen, about to graduate high school. Finally moving toward a future all our own. She wasn’t going to let herself be left behind.

  * * *

  After school the next day, Bruce took Tegan and me out for dinner.

  “I know that your mother told you what’s going on with us,” Bruce said when we were seated in the booth at Denny’s. He looked tired; the bags under his eyes were dark as bruises. Through the restaurant’s dirty window, I set my eyes on Bruce’s Camaro in the parking lot. Tegan fidgeted with the paper torn from her straw.

  “It’s not what I want, but once your mom’s decided something—”

  “Nothing’s going to change with us,” Tegan said, looking to me for support.

  “It doesn’t matter where you live because you’re still going to be our dad,” I added.

  “I tell people that all the time: ‘Doesn’t matter if they’re not biologically mine, they’re my daughters, and they always will be.’ ” His face was flushed, his eyes wet.

  Almost as far back as my memory went, Bruce had been a constant. He’d brought an entire world into our house. We loved our dad, but with Bruce we’d become a family.

  “When you’re eighty we’re going to push your wheelchair out into the sun, so you can look at the ocean,” I said.

  “But if you’re grumpy, we’ll push you straight in the water,” Tegan added.

  He laughed. “Sounds about right.”

  44. TEGAN COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

  We were outside my house in Alex’s parents’ car when I told her that Mom and Bruce were planning on splitting up after we graduated.

  “How come you don’t seem that upset?”

  “I don’t know. I am.” I felt defensive. As if I owed her a performance of sadness, even though I didn’t have one in me. I pressed my finger into the leather, picked at the stitching of the seat under me. “It’s just . . . I mean, who knows what will happen? They said ‘separating,’ so maybe it’s just temporary. Anyway, they don’t seem happy.”

  “Right, but do you think they’ll go to counseling? Or try to work it out? I mean, have they?”

  “No. I don’t think they will. They’ve been processing this for months. All they do is talk, and this is where that got them. My mom said they’re selling the house this summer. She wants to buy something near here—an old house. We’re going to move in the fall when our house sells. She’s already found a house, apparently. She told Sara and me she wants to live in a house without a gym in the basement. Without a man stomping around. And Bruce wants to build another McMansion in the suburbs. And she’s tired of moving. They just want different things.”

  “Does it make you sad? Do you want them to stay together?”

  I groaned.

  “What?”

  “People should stay together only if they make each other happy. And they don’t seem happy. So it’s not that I’m not sad, I’m just like, not selfish enough to want them to be unhappy together, for my sake. You know? I’d rather they both be happy, apart, than arguing in the Jeep in front of the house every night.”

  I started to feel like we were talking about us instead of them. Often Bruce and Mom left with the intention of seeing a movie, and then spent the night out front “talking,” and lately Alex and I were spending more time “talking” up the street in her car, too.

  “But they should try, right? To fix it, to save it?”

  “They did try. They’re just done trying. Or at least my mom is. It isn’t savable, or fixable, I guess. Some love doesn’t last forever, you know? That’s just how it goes.”

  “That makes me sad.”

  “Not me.”

  “What if we’re like them?”

  “Together for ten years?”

  She laughed. “No, what if we break up?”

  “Alex, we’re not like them. We’re us.”

&nbs
p; In the shadows between the streetlamps, we talked ourselves a great distance that night, first in circles, then in long, rambling lines, winding ourselves around each other until we had convinced ourselves we’d survive anything life threw at us, as long as we had each other.

  45. SARA CONFESSION

  It was one of the last Fridays of the school year, and Spencer offered to throw a party at his house.

  “There’s so many crazy things happening to you guys, huh?” Zoe was drunk, one of her eyes half closed. She rested her bare feet in her hands as she spoke.

  I smiled, letting my knee rest against hers.

  “Our mom says we can’t sign the record contract until September. She wants us to be eighteen.”

  “I’m jealous. You’ll probably get out of Calgary before I do,” she said.

  “What do you want to do next year?”

  “I’m going to go to Los Angeles and be a backup dancer for Janet Jackson.”

  I wanted to tell her how everything I knew about L.A. made me think of her—vast, permanent things, like the sun. How I’d imagined myself a thousand times living with her in the shabby apartment from the photograph she’d taped to her bedroom wall—surrounded by the pyramid of beautiful girls she’d lived and danced with the previous summer.

  “I’d trade all of it for you,” I blurted out.

  She laughed.

  “I mean it. You’re the only thing I think about.”

  And then she wasn’t smiling anymore.

  She turned to the door as if her boyfriend might be waiting right outside. “Dustin,” she said. “I should go.”

  I sat on the floor with my head in my hands after she’d shut the door behind her. Panic and curiosity gnawed at my guts. I rejoined my friends in the living room, pulling my toque a little lower over my eyes. A few minutes later I watched Zoe taking wobbly steps over everyone’s legs and the backpacks littering the carpet. Her boyfriend, Dustin, was doing the same, their hands interlocked. They found a spot near the wall and sat down together. In his tracksuit, he looked like the coach of a sports team, or a youth minister. He was a born-again Christian and didn’t swear or drink alcohol. He’d started showing up at raves with Diego the previous summer. When he and Zoe started dating, I took solace in the fact that his religious beliefs prevented him from having sex with her. Over the summer we’d gone to see All Over Me in the theater. It had a gay story line, and during the scenes where the two leads were having sex, Dustin kept his head bowed, refusing to watch. Afterward we’d laughed behind his back. But it made me furious.

  When Spencer finally cleared us out of his parents’ house after midnight, I watched Zoe climb into Dustin’s yellow sports car, her face streaked with tears.

  On Sunday morning I woke with a fireball in my guts worse than any hangover. I was acidic with regret. I called Dad and asked if it would be okay for me to stay with him that night. When I couldn’t stand to be at home or I was feeling guilty about something I’d done, the sterility of our bedroom at his house—the bunk beds we’d had since we were five years old, the comforters from before that—was a place to reset, to disappear.

  After dinner I worked a little on my homework, but my thoughts raced back to my confession to Zoe again and again. At bedtime I was crawling out of my skin. It was unbearable to imagine showing up to school without talking to her first. There was a single phone in the house, and it sat next to Dad’s bed. I asked his permission to use it, then snooped in his closet, holding his clothes up to myself in the mirror while I worked up the courage to call her. Finally, I lifted the phone and dialed, pacing in time with the ringing.

  I felt so startled when she answered that I almost hung up.

  We made small talk. I could hear her mother’s voice and the television in the background. When she moved to the bedroom and the line grew quiet, I gritted my teeth and said what I’d spent all day rehearsing.

  “I thought we should talk about last night.” I buried my face in my shirt. Years of drunken hookups and flashes of undefined moments between us clouded my vision. Why had I waited so long to talk about it with her?

  “Dustin asked if there was something going on between us.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told him that we were just talking, and that you told me . . .” She stopped.

  I pressed my face to the metallic screen of the open window. I shifted the phone from one ear to the other. “That I like you,” I said. My jaw was as tight as a fist. I waited for her to respond, a hundred steps ahead, imagining with her a future that I’d never quite allowed myself to see before with a girl.

  “I don’t feel that way about you,” she said softly. “I don’t like girls.”

  It was as if I were sucked into a void alone, the finality of her words as permanent as death.

  After we’d hung up, I sat for a long time in the bathroom, crying into one of Dad’s threadbare towels.

  Shutting off the lights later, I lay down on the bottom bunk. I slept in fits. My mind touched down on her words again and again. I don’t feel that way about you. In the morning, my body felt numb.

  I arrived late for first period, and quickly walked between classes, avoiding the student center and hallways. Steeling myself at lunchtime, I met Tegan outside the school and we walked to the lawn where our friends were sitting together on the grass. Zoe was there, of course, distressingly cute in striped overalls.

  Stephanie bounded toward me, her cheeks pink. “Hi!” She rested a consoling hand on my shoulder. “You okay?”

  I was afraid I might cry.

  “I gotta meet Diego.” She hugged me goodbye.

  Zoe’s face softened as I joined her at the outer edge of the group. Here was the cause of my suffering, but also the cure. Was it possible I felt more in love now that I knew she didn’t like me? Or was it the intimacy of my confession that bound her closer?

  “How was your sleep?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said, grabbing fistfuls of grass between my fingers. “Did you tell Stephanie?”

  She went pale.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I could tell that she knew.”

  “I only told her because, well, I guess I just tell her everything.”

  I changed the subject, and at the afternoon bell, we went our separate ways back to school. For the rest of the day I thought of all the boys who’d asked me out, who I’d laughed about with friends, or had broken up with and never spoken to again. Had I hurt any of them like this? It was impossible to imagine ever having that kind of power.

  I went home that day with pages of new lyrics furiously etched with thick pencil in my notebook. Words that screamed back at me from the page. In my bedroom I sat cross-legged on the carpet with my guitar and began to work on a new song. It was the only thing I knew how to do to make myself feel better.

  “This is the last song that I’ll write for you. This is the last song that I’ll sing for you. This is your last song.” Singing those words, I felt tears roll off my chin.

  That night I woke up anguished, replaying the conversation with Zoe again in my head until I thought I might be sick. I crept to the bathroom and once again sat sobbing into a towel. When I’d exhausted myself, I stood looking out the window at the moon. I’m gay. It was the very first time I had allowed myself to say the words I had been desperately afraid of. From that night forward, I carried the words in my mouth, tempted to tell everyone and no one.

  46. TEGAN I WAS ALREADY GONE

  On my last official day at Crescent Heights, I had one exam. My Math 30 final. I spent the hours before it cramming with Alex—she trying to keep me focused, me desperately trying to distract her. I had been preparing for it for months and I felt ready.

  Math 30 had been my sole academic focus second semester. Although I imagined a future for myself without university in it, I would need that credit if I ever decided to go. I didn’t have the prerequisite to take the class so to get in I had to agree to get a tutor, to keep a grade of sixty-five or
higher, and to never miss a class, or the teacher would kick me out. When I got strep throat and missed a whole week of school in the winter, Mom still woke me up and drove me so the teacher wouldn’t fail me. I wanted to prove him wrong. And prove that all the dumb stuff I’d done in high school didn’t mean I was dumb. At times it also felt like I was proving something to Mom. That I’d heard all those pleas and lectures she’d given us the last three years about her life and how hard it had been for her to raise us and to go back to school as an adult. Those mornings she drove me when I was sick it felt like she and I were on the same team, for the first time in a long time. And it felt good.

  A few days before our final exams, I tried to enjoy watching our graduating class walk the stage at the Jubilee Auditorium to collect their diplomas, but I felt so preoccupied. Swiveling my head to take in the massive three-story performing arts center, I couldn’t help but imagine the day when Sara and I would come back there—to perform, not just collect a meaningless diploma. That’s what I wanted. Onstage, taking the rolled-up paper from the principal, I was sure he wouldn’t have been able to tell me my name had I asked him. He never even met my eyes. I stopped briefly at the front of the stage, looked out at the theater, and smiled. Below me, Bruce snapped a photo. Behind him, my friends cheered.