High School

by Sara Quin

  At the graduation dinner I watched impatiently as my classmates hugged one another and said tearful goodbyes around me. I nodded and made promises to stay in touch with kids I would never talk to again. “Who are all those people?” I asked Christina. “I barely recognize any of the kids getting awards. Did we go to a different school?”

  “We did do a lot of drugs at the start of high school. Maybe we met them in grade ten?”

  We howled at that.

  At the after-party, I felt the divide between our friends more than ever. Stephanie and Zoe had rented a limo, and I’d gone with Spencer in his dad’s beat-up Nissan.

  “You’re not taking this seriously,” I quipped to him the third time I asked him to dance and he said no, or just laughed.

  “You are?”

  “I guess not.”

  Graduation was nothing like the movies. Somehow it was even more disappointing.

  At home, I tried to feel something about the news that Bruce and Mom were splitting up. As they divided their things and made jokes about it, I mostly just felt numb. Their separation, like those final moments at school with my friends and other classmates, all aired on mute.

  All I wanted was to finish my exams, to pack up my room, to wait out the months before our eighteenth birthday, and then sign the contract from PolyGram sitting on the desk in the kitchen. After that, everything was going to be about getting out of Calgary, getting on with the rest of my life.

  While I crammed for my exams those final days of June, I tried to see Alex every second I could. She was leaving when she finished her exams for one last summer at camp, a choice she made that further injured the already hurt love between us. I’d wept when she told me. She had her reasons—none of which I could understand.

  “But I thought we were spending the summer together before you left for France.”

  “We’ll see each other before I leave, then at Christmas, maybe even for my birthday. Then I’ll come back next summer, and we can spend that one together.”

  But I had my sights set on a different kind of future than the one Alex had ordained for herself. Or us. I wanted to move to Vancouver after we signed our record deal in the fall. Mom was going to move into her own house, and I didn’t want to get stuck in a basement suite with Sara forever. At night, instead of crowding my head with formulas for my math final, I constructed equations to get myself to Vancouver, where everything I imagined was waiting for me.

  The afternoon of my math final, Alex filled eight pages in our journal about the love we’d shared that year, the friendship we’d built the two before, and the life she imagined might be waiting for us both if we stuck it out. Though painfully beautiful, like Mom and Bruce’s split, or graduation, or final exams, or the last days of my education, it failed to capture my full attention. I dropped it on the bed after I read it, and left for school without giving it another thought.

  I had no possible way of knowing at that moment how devastating her departure would be that fall. How difficult I’d find it to fill the space in my life she’d left empty. How insurmountable coming out and making our relationship official would feel when she returned from France a year later, and the secret between us, once ripe, had gone rotten. Just like how it was impossible for me then to imagine how long it would actually take to get a real record deal, or how intoxicating and all-encompassing building a career with Sara would actually be. How much harm we’d inflict on each other, and how much damage the industry would cause as we made a career for ourselves. The volume on the life I had lived before that moment was turned all the way down; the questions or the concerns I might have had were silent. As I walked the twelve blocks to Crescent Heights for the final time, all I heard was music.

  SARA EXPELLED

  We signed a demo deal with PolyGram Records on our eighteenth birthday. Tegan and I celebrated by shaving our heads. When the stylist chopped my hair off at my neck, it felt as if a terrible mass had been severed from my skull. The act was violent, and the relief, immediate. She held up the ponytail in her hand like a limb, waving it at me in the mirror. She took the clippers to my head next. I closed my eyes.

  “You look exactly like yourself,” my aunt told us later when Tegan and I arrived at our birthday party.

  I knew exactly what she meant. It was as if I could finally pull my shoulders back after years of paralysis. Before bed I stood in the bathroom mirror marveling at the transformation. I was convinced that Zoe would reconsider her rejection if she saw me looking so much like myself. I felt like someone new, someone with a second chance.

  A few weeks later Tegan and I moved with Mom to the new house in Crescent Heights. Zoe showed up to our housewarming party, tanned from her latest trip to Los Angeles. I could hardly hide my joy when she admitted that she and Dustin had called it quits. We made plans to hang out the following night, and she arrived at the house flushed, her skin radiating warmth. I played her some of the demos Tegan and I had recorded, songs I’d written for her, shyly staring at the floor as she sat cross-legged in front of the speaker.

  Just when I thought she was preparing to leave, she leaned over and kissed me.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for us to get caught.

  It was early in the morning a few weeks later, the first time I’d slept over at her house since we’d started dating. The phone rang, and we both startled awake in her single bed. Zoe jumped from under the covers, leaving the receiver off the hook, on the carpet. After she disappeared up the stairs, I lifted the telephone to my ear, holding my breath.

  It was her mother, calling from work.

  “I saw you two in bed together.”

  Zoe’s mother’s voice was like a hand around my throat. “Get her out of the house, right now.”

  I dropped the phone as if I’d been stung. Her mother was furious. She wanted me expelled. I dressed quickly, and sat numbly on the unmade bed. When Zoe returned to her bedroom, she was white as chalk.

  “My mom knows about us,” she said, biting at her lip. I was doing the same. I tasted blood in my mouth. There was a soft knock at the door.

  “Are you two . . . decent?” Her father’s deep voice raised new goosebumps on my skin.

  “Yes, we’re decent.” Zoe sat next to me.

  He opened the door and took a seat on the chair across from us. His skin carried the scent of aftershave and alcohol. He looked tired; there were bags under his eyes.

  “I want you both to know that I don’t care if you’re—” He stopped short and looked at Zoe. “Sara’s a lot cuter than Dustin,” he said.

  I let out a punch of air from my lungs, but Zoe’s brow remained furrowed.

  “Your mom will get over it,” her dad said.

  After he’d gone back upstairs, Zoe and I finished dressing in silence. Making the bed, I realized now how careless we’d been to think we could share the single mattress without raising suspicions. We weren’t in high school anymore.

  “I’ll drive you to work,” Zoe said, passing her hand across the back of my head, a gesture so tender I nearly collapsed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  * * *

  That night, I waited at home for hours, too afraid to call Zoe’s house in case her mom picked up. At midnight, through the bars in my basement window, I saw a pair of legs and rushed to the back door to let her in. In my room we cried together on my bed, clutching at each other’s faces. She promised that everything with her mom was settled, but we both knew that wasn’t true. To protect us, she’d been forced to define us, and that was a step into the unknown. My heart swelled dangerously in my chest. I wanted to be that brave, but I wasn’t. Not then.

  The following week, Zoe and I went to reggae night at the Night Gallery. We drank half a dozen screwdrivers and danced until after midnight. We took an expensive taxi back to my house, singing Bob Marley songs out the window. In the morning, she insisted I stay in bed when the alarm went off at sev
en. Upstairs in the kitchen, I heard her talking with my mom, the kettle whistling, and then the door closing behind her. When I woke up at ten, I called her at work to see how she was feeling.

  “Oh my god, you gave me a hickey!” she whispered.

  “No!”

  “Yes!” She laughed. “A coworker spotted it the second I walked in.”

  “I’m so trashy!” I covered my eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  All day long at work I felt spun out by desire recounting our night in my head, even the sloppy parts I couldn’t quite remember. I was Zoe’s girlfriend and I had given her a hickey. I was the luckiest person on earth.

  After my shift, Mom picked me up at work. Just over the hump of my hangover, I rested my head on the window, nodding off a bit. When we pulled up to the house, she turned the car off but didn’t undo her seat belt.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Zoe is sure over a lot.” Her voice was curt. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yeah.”

  “Is she still dating Dustin?”

  “No, they broke up.”

  “Is she seeing someone new?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does she go out to bars a lot? Hook up with random guys? Or—”

  “I don’t know! Why are you asking such weird questions?”

  “I’m just wondering how it is that she ended up with a hickey on her neck if you’re the only person she’s spending time with. Did you give it to her?”

  My heart boomed in my ears. “Yes.”

  “So, you’re a lesbian.”

  Out of her mouth, the word sounded grotesque.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “I don’t know any girls who aren’t lesbians that give other girls hickeys.”

  “I’m not a lesbian! I guess—I don’t know. Maybe I’m bi.” It felt like half the truth.

  Her knuckles went white and then red as she opened and closed her fists on the steering wheel. “So, you’ve been lying to me for how long?”

  “What do you mean ‘lying’?”

  “You and Naomi?” She spun her head to look at me, slamming her hand on the steering wheel. “The entire time you’ve been lying to me!”

  “What does this have to do with Naomi?”

  “Zoe isn’t allowed to stay overnight at the house anymore.”

  “That’s not fair!”

  “Your sister isn’t allowed to have her boyfriend sleep over, and you . . .”

  My face broke into a smirk. “I’m eighteen! I pay rent! I can have whoever I want sleep over,” I said. We pulled into the driveway. I reached for the handle of the car door.

  “It’s my house,” she hissed.

  “Then I’ll move out.”

  I leapt from the car and across the front lawn. Flipping the latch on the fence to the backyard, I slammed it closed behind me. At the door, I fumbled with the keys in the lock, dropping them on the cement. I heard Mom’s steps on the front porch; she wasn’t following me. Inside the house, the interior door to her suite was closed. In my bedroom, I shut and locked the door. Although I had been hiding it in plain sight all those years, my sexuality was a secret no more.

  For three days, I crept in and out of the house, my guts knotted with cramps. I told an unsparing account of our conversation to Zoe over the telephone, warning her to stay away until things blew over. I promised that I wouldn’t accept anything less than an apology. “I’m eighteen,” I repeated again and again. “It’s my life.”

  On the fourth day, I collected my stuff to take over to Zoe’s house. Tegan was watching a movie on the small television in the living room. I didn’t know how much she knew about what was going on with Mom or Zoe, and though I knew she had her own secrets to protect, I read her silence as betrayal.

  “Mom left you something in the bathroom,” Tegan said, snickering.

  “What?”

  She opened her eyes wide, a warning that it wasn’t a gift I’d want.

  Flicking the light of the bathroom on, I saw on the counter a small wicker basket spilling over with dental dams and a brochure about safe sex for lesbians. Picking it up, I carried it like garbage to the kitchen, where I threw it in a black trash bag.

  Upstairs at Mom’s bedroom door, my shame hardened into anger. In the darkness I could see that she was lying in bed under the covers. “Mom.”

  “What.”

  “You’re just going to ignore me?”

  “You lied to me.”

  “Why did you leave that stuff in the bathroom?”

  “If you’re going to have lesbian sex, you should be having safe lesbian sex.”

  “Why are you being like this?”

  “You lied to me,” she repeated.

  “I wasn’t ready to talk about it.”

  “I asked you if you liked girls more than once, and you lied to my face.”

  “It wasn’t your business.”

  “You slept with Naomi right under our noses for years.”

  “Well, look how you’re acting.”

  “I’m your mother! I deserved to know!”

  “Well, now you know that I’m dating Zoe!”

  “Which you weren’t planning on telling me about.”

  “That’s not true! I would have told you.”

  “I had to figure it out from a hickey on her neck.”

  “It just happened!”

  “Like a slut, parading through the kitchen, showing off.”

  “What are you fucking talking about?”

  “I don’t even know how I can trust anything you say.”

  “You’re being horrible! And rude!”

  “I wanted you to have a great life, to get married, to have a family—”

  “I can still do those things!”

  “Do you know how worried I am for you?”

  “You don’t have to worry about me! I’m going to be fine.”

  She was silent.

  “Mom!”

  “Do whatever you want.”

  * * *

  After the holidays, Zoe was preparing to leave for a six-month dance trip to Toronto, so I occupied myself with the weekly shows Tegan and I were performing at coffee shops around the city. We were as divided as we’d ever been, and disagreements about our music career became increasingly acrimonious. We’d replaced our fights over the telephone with wrestling matches over the computer upstairs in Mom’s suite, screaming at each other as the dial-up modem sputtered to life.

  Mom didn’t intervene anymore. Instead, she’d push us back toward the thick wooden door at the top of the stairs. “Get out of my house if you’re going to treat each other like that.”

  After these confrontations, we’d treat each other to days of silence. We passed each other in the hallway of our suite without so much as a nod. The only remedy was a performance, the salve of an audience. The thick callouses that built up between us wore away as we laughed and told stories into the microphones.

  * * *

  The week Zoe left for Toronto, it was bitterly cold and the entire city was white with snow. We traveled between each other’s houses, frostbitten and desperate to spend every waking moment with each other. On our final night, we were dancing to Janet Jackson in the kitchen when I caught Mom watching us from the dining room. A rush of fear, so familiar it was instinctive, made me pull away from Zoe. I busied myself with the stove.

  “Sonia, come dance with us!” Zoe grabbed for Mom’s hand, but Mom laughed, shrugging her off.

  Years later, Mom told me that was the moment she realized I would be okay. Watching Zoe and I dance together, she could see for the first time that I was truly happy.

  “Maybe,” she admitted, “happier than I’ve ever been in my own life.”

  TEGAN UNDER FEET LIKE OURS

  Alex left at the start of September, and I missed her down to my marrow the second the wheels of her plane left the tarmac. As I watched the aircraft disappear into the clouds, I cried so hard I thought I might throw up. Back at home I sobbed the entire
day, only getting out of bed once to pee. That night Sara slept in my bed with me. Relating how hard, how painful it had been for her when Naomi left for Montreal, she reassured me it would get easier, that I would survive. When Zoe left for Toronto, I tried to return the favor by reminding Sara of the things she’d said to me that first night after Alex left for school. For a while, in mourning, both of us alone, Sara and I were brought closer together those first few months after we graduated.

  Bridgette, one of the Frenchies, got me a job at the same coffee shop she worked at downtown. I saved every tip and paycheck so that I could quit at Christmas. “No way am I getting stuck here,” I told Bridgette one shift as the two of us scrubbed the coffeepots together. “Making cappuccinos for stockbrokers and grumpy shoppers is too soul sucking for me. I can’t do it.”

  The record deal from PolyGram sat in the kitchen until Sara and I signed it on September 19, 1998, the morning of our eighteenth birthday. Mom faxed it when she got to work that morning, and that afternoon Sara and I went to a hair salon and shaved our heads.

  After we signed the deal, Bryan Potvin, the A&R from PolyGram whom we’d met at New Music West, suggested we visit Toronto to play some showcases for the other label executives. Sara and I went alone; it was our first time flying without our parents. We didn’t have a credit card or a cell phone, so when we landed at midnight, we called home collect from a pay phone at the airport to tell Mom we were safe. I felt scared but tried to hide it from Sara, who seemed miserable.

  We were staying with Bruce’s aunt, a woman we’d met once, who had offered to put us up for the week. When we woke up that first morning, from the thirty-sixth floor, I was surprised to see the ocean outside her windows. At breakfast, she explained it was Lake Ontario. Toronto was massive, overwhelming, steaming, and stinky. Its brick buildings and streetcars seemed foreign. Sara and I hungrily accepted money from Bruce’s aunt when she left for work; we’d brought almost no money with us. We silently wandered the mall near our aunt’s house and saw dollar movies to fill the afternoons before our showcases that week.