by Sara Quin
Her face softened, and she placed the paper next to me on the bed. “You know, when I was fifteen—”
“Mom, I don’t want to hear again about how you kissed a girl at boarding school!”
She flinched. “Well, in the future, if you don’t want people to read your thoughts, then don’t leave them where everyone can find them.”
A few weeks later, Tegan found my stash of letters, pulled them straight from the gut of my hiding place. “Stay out of my shit!” I hollered at her, ripping the papers from her hands, then slamming both our bedroom doors so hard the windows rattled. I cut each page into strips and threw them in the garbage. Then I called Naomi and told her what I’d done.
“I wish you hadn’t thrown them away. They were so beautiful.”
“No one in this house respects me or my privacy!”
I knew both Mom and Tegan were trying to figure out what was going on with me. But the harder they looked, the more I wanted to retreat. I was afraid of being caught in a trap.
I wasn’t just kissing girls.
I was in love with my best friend.
* * *
When I met Naomi on the first day of grade nine, I had never seen a girl quite like her. The short skirts and tall, striped socks she wore in a rainbow of colors became my obsession. Because she was sequestered with her French peers in private classrooms, I caught only glimpses of her and her best friend, Christina, in the hallway between bells. Her walk was more of a march, and her heavy backpack was like a turtle’s shell, always pulled up high on her back. When she smiled at me, my reflex was to place my hands out in defense. I met her gaze and later searched those moments endlessly for meaning as I succumbed to the intricate fantasies unfolding in a constant loop in my mind. My grades plummeted.
Basketball tryouts gave Tegan and me an excuse to finally meet her. She bounced over to us with her hand out: “Hi! I’m Naomi!”
She seemed so confident. I felt off-balance, giddy. We were the same height, and when I spoke, she leaned in close to my face. Her entire head snapped back on her neck when she laughed.
Our team was awful, but tournaments on the weekend meant sleepovers and sleepless nights eating cookie dough and lying together in her brother’s waterbed. Eventually, the sexual tension between Naomi and me was increasingly hard to mask, and I began to leave Tegan out of our sleepovers. We watched Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction with our legs draped across each other and found reasons to hold hands or stay locked in eye contact. We exploited the intimacy acceptable between girls of our age with sleepovers every weekend and marathon phone calls that stretched into hours each night after school. Our handwritten notes became so numerous that we grew bolder and began to collect them in colorful folders. But despite the pleasure of it all, my feelings were far from simple.
One night, alone in my bed with Naomi, I admitted how guilty I felt about excluding Tegan from our hanging out. “I feel so bad for her.”
“I get it,” she said. “Christina says she feels like she never sees me anymore.”
It was during one of those conversations that Naomi slowly drew me across a line I’d never dared to cross before with a girl. After months of unbearable tension between us, she suddenly reached out in the dark and ran her thumb along my lips and my ear.
“Is this okay? I’ve wanted to kiss you for a very long time.”
After the kiss, I wordlessly disappeared into the bathroom. I sat on the edge of the bathtub waiting to throw up, and eventually did. Splashing water and a glob of toothpaste into my mouth, I quietly climbed back into the bed and under the covers.
Later, in the dark, she said, “I still like boys.”
“I do, too,” I said. Only after the words left my mouth did I realize this was a lie.
In the following weeks, I didn’t want to do more. “I just like kissing you.” I’d repeat it like a warning.
“But I want to do more,” she replied one night. And, so, like with our first kiss, she led me exactly where I wanted to go.
* * *
There was no school on Friday, so on Thursday night Tegan and I went to Christina’s for a sleepover. I had never discussed with Christina the fact that she’d been Naomi’s sole best friend before meeting me, but it was a source of tension nonetheless.
“Is it okay if I call Naomi?” I asked nervously.
“Why?”
“We’re hanging out tomorrow.”
“She told me she had too much homework to hang out,” Christina said. I shrugged.
“Whatever,” she said, turning up the TV.
I went into Christina’s bedroom and dialed Naomi’s number.
“Hi!” I said, smiling when I heard her voice.
“I wish I was there,” she said. “What are you getting up to?”
“We might do something that you hate.”
“You won’t get any sleep if you do that tonight.” She sounded angry.
We’d fought about drugs in the past, and I didn’t want to let her down. I carefully copied the instructions for the bus I needed to take to her school the next day and reassured her one last time that I’d be there on time. After I hung up, I joined Tegan and Christina in the living room, where they were calling around to find acid. Christina’s mom was working the midnight shift, so we knew we’d be unchaperoned till the morning. Tegan called our friend Garrett, who offered to drop the drugs off at the apartment.
“Let’s just do it,” Tegan said, and cupped the phone. “Right?”
We gave her the thumbs up. When Garrett got to Christina’s, he kept passing his Snapple around for people to take sips, and after we were high he told us he’d poisoned the bottle.
“You’re ruining our trip!” Christina said, pushing him out the door.
Christina turned the television to MuchMusic. We sat dazed on the futon, twisting the couch cushions between our hands. I stood and walked down the dark hallway to the bathroom. Sitting on the tiled floor with my toes stuck under the gap and my knees pressed to the wood grain, I placed my forehead against the door. I was too high; the panic expanded in my chest. I dug my nails into my jeans and the skin of my calf.
“We need fresh air!” Christina screamed through the door.
Yes, fresh air.
We were in the snow outside the apartment complex, running our hands along the banks of ice, when Heather, Christina’s older sister, appeared on the balcony.
“Get inside, someone will see you!” she screamed through a clenched jaw. Rolling in the snow, we laughed and laughed. “Someone will see us!” we chanted to each other.
We were awake past sunrise; we slipped in and out of waking dreams. When I finally crawled from the mattress and into the bathroom, I stared at my stoned reflection and then quietly shut the door of the apartment behind me.
There was a fresh dusting of snow on the sidewalk, and I left deep shoe prints up the street to the bus stop. I stood shivering next to the bench inside the shelter, too cold to sit down on the frosted planks of wood. Unsure of how much time had passed, I walked across the street to a pay phone and plugged a frozen quarter in the slot. I dialed the bus directory, pressing the cold plastic earpiece to my head. The bus was thirteen minutes away. I’d miss the connection to my second bus downtown for sure. I was going to be late.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered through numb lips when I walked through the door of Naomi’s house hours later. Her cheeks were pink, warm. Her hair was done up in Princess Leia buns, my favorite of her intricate hairdos. I knew she’d done it special for me.
“You must be hungry,” she said. We went to the kitchen where she made me a sandwich. I picked at the food, not yet ready to put anything into my stomach. I looked pathetic, and she led me upstairs to her bedroom where we lay on her single bed and talked.
I told her the story of our night over and over again, my eyes spilling tears onto her pillow. She was laughing, catching my tears with her thumbs. Sliding her leg between mine, her green eyes watched me as I drifted off to sleep.<
br />
It was the sound of the door that woke me up. Naomi’s mom’s face appeared and then disappeared back into the hall. Naomi woke up, too.
“Your mom was just in here. She saw us.”
Naomi said nothing, but she flipped over and opened the door.
“Mom?” she called down the stairs.
“Just seeing if you girls were home safe!”
“It’s fine,” Naomi said and rolled back over to face me.
When Naomi called the next day, she was crying. “After you left, Mom asked me what we were doing sleeping like that. She saw us on the bed holding each other. She said girls aren’t supposed to do that.”
I felt dizzy. “What did you say?”
“I told her we’re just best friends, and sometimes we cuddle.”
“And . . .”
“She said you couldn’t sleep here anymore.” Naomi broke down in sobs.
Tears sprang from my eyes. I wrapped the telephone cord around my wrist until the veins on my hand swelled with blood. “I’ll talk to my mom. Maybe she can talk to yours?”
“Okay.”
Downstairs in the living room, I sat on the couch next to Mom. Her lap, as always, was guarded by our male cat, Taz. I reached out and pet his back, and he began to purr softly. I didn’t quite know what to say. “Can I talk to you?” I asked.
She pointed the remote to pause a recording of Days of Our Lives. “What’s up?”
“Yeah, so, Naomi’s mom saw us, sleeping. On Naomi’s bed together. Her single bed, like close together.”
The conversation jerked and started. It felt honest when I repeated, “We are just friends. We weren’t doing anything!” because we hadn’t been doing anything—on that day. I didn’t consider it a lie when I promised her that if I were gay, I’d tell her. Because I didn’t think I was gay.
She sighed. “I’ll call her mother.”
“Thank you!”
I went upstairs and quickly called Naomi with the good news.
“I think it’s going to be okay,” I said.
The words she spoke next sounded flat in my ears: “I think we need to go back to just being friends.”
* * *
When Dad grabbed Tegan and me Saturday morning from Mom’s, the first thing that he asked when we climbed into the car was, “No Naomi?”
He enjoyed having her around almost as much as I did. I didn’t tell him that Naomi and I hadn’t spoken in a week, the longest period of time we’d been out of touch since we’d met. Instead, I made up a lie, telling him that maybe she’d come over on her own later that day. Dad was in a good mood; his blue eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror as I spoke. He had the rock station blasting out the speakers. His hand gestures, and the way he laughed and then drew his face into a dark pout, reminded me of me. And Tegan. He was half Bruce’s size, lean and short. On the weekend he wore sweatpants, nearly disintegrated at the knees, and T-shirts that he pulled at relentlessly until he’d stretched the necks low and wide around his throat. We rarely saw him out of this uniform. He wore the same gray hooded sweatshirt under his bulky letterman jacket branded with the logo of the housing company he worked for, no matter how low the temperature plunged in winter. He hated socks and didn’t wear them. That he wasn’t suffering from one of his migraines meant that we would spend the day running his errands.
When we got to his house in the late afternoon, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I dialed Naomi’s number and pleaded my case. “I need to see you. Nothing has to happen between us, I promise.”
“I’d have to see if my brother can drive me,” she replied.
“Please, please, you know how much better it is when you’re here.”
She agreed.
When Naomi arrived, Dad drove the three of us to Blockbuster, and we walked up and down the aisles arguing over movies just like we used to in grade nine. When we were young, Dad never checked the advisory on the back of the cases, and we often ended up awkwardly sitting with him through sexually mature or violent films that we knew not to tell Mom about. He also didn’t mind our penchant for repeat viewings of classics like Goonies, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Labyrinth.
“Should we rent Bound again?” I winked at Naomi.
“I didn’t really like that one.” She moved down the shelf, picking up boxes and reading quietly to herself. There weren’t very many movies that featured two girls kissing or having sex, but if they existed, I knew about them. Maybe tonight wasn’t the right occasion; I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.
Back at the house, I stretched out in front of the gas fireplace, while Naomi and Tegan shared the couch with Dad. I replayed every possible scenario in my head about what might happen when we went upstairs to bed. When Naomi started sleeping over, Dad had suggested that we might be more comfortable in his bedroom and offered to crash on the couch. Tonight, there didn’t seem to be a way to address a different sleeping arrangement without making things really weird. Still, I selfishly wanted to be alone with her.
When the movie finished, I charged up the stairs ahead of Tegan and Naomi, and instead of turning down the hall to Dad’s room, I went into the bedroom that Tegan and I shared. It was empty except for a set of bunk beds, and a My Girl movie poster that we hung up as a joke. I rolled onto the lower bunk bed, and Tegan climbed up to the top. Naomi joined me on the bottom and rested her leg casually against mine.
“That movie was fucking awesome,” Tegan said.
“You two always pick bad movies,” Naomi teased.
As we joked back and forth, I felt my body go slack. The fist in my stomach unclenched.
“I’m going to get ready for bed,” Tegan said, and dropped down from above onto the carpet.
“Me, too!” Naomi said, rolling off the mattress.
“Me three.” My heart skipped a beat. I waited for what would happen next.
“Goodnight, Tegan!” Naomi said, turning down the hall to Dad’s bedroom.
“Night,” Tegan said, closing the door to the bathroom.
When Naomi and I finished brushing our teeth in Dad’s bathroom, I twisted the lock on the door to his bedroom as silently as I could, hoping Naomi didn’t hear me do it.
“Are you wheezing?” Naomi asked me as I climbed into the waterbed.
“I guess a little.” I had asthma attacks every now and then.
She rolled over and placed her hand on my chest, watching me in the dark. My heart thundered in my ears, and my shallow breaths made the asthma attack worse. I sat up.
“I hate this,” I said. “I feel so bad.”
“I know. I really missed you this week. I just needed some time apart.”
“I don’t want that. We’re already at different schools. I never see you!”
We went in circles like that for an hour. I was pleading with her, but for what? Reassurance? Sex? How did I become the only one who wanted this?
“What are we?” I asked.
For a long time, she didn’t answer. Then she said, “I like boys. But sometimes I like you, too.”
The part of me that trusted her disappeared with a violent swoosh. Her body became her mother’s, a stranger.
“Well, I just like you,” I said.
We lay still for so long that I was afraid that she’d fallen asleep. I couldn’t bear to look over at her, but eventually, she turned and rolled on top of me.
“I want to,” she whispered.
In the morning we ignored what happened the night before. In the car on the way to her house, she was back to normal. Before she closed the door outside her home, she leaned into the car and said, “I’m seeing you on Friday, right?”
7. TEGAN YOU CAN’T SAY “FAG”
“Open the door, now.”
I paused the CD I was listening to in my room, Nirvana’s In Utero, and shouted, “What?”
“Open the door.”
I sighed and stood up. Flinging open my door I said, “What,” a second time.
“Excuse me?” Bruce was in his wor
kout clothes, a pair of black weight-lifters’ pants and a Gold’s Gym tank top from a visit to Atlanta we’d made a few years earlier. His face was red, but it was clear he hadn’t just worked out—he was just pissed off.
“Can I help you?”
“Yes, you can turn that off.”
“Why? It’s Nirvana.”
“Because I said so.”
“Can’t I just turn it down?”
“No. Turn it off. I’m tired of hearing that song.”
“What song?” I had been blasting the song “Rape Me” when he banged on my door.
“I’m not going to say the name of it, Tegan. Just turn it off.” He went to go back down the stairs.
“Have you even listened to the lyrics?” I called after him. “It’s actually an anti-rape song, Bruce. Kurt was showing support for women. If you listened to the lyrics instead of just judging it because you don’t like the word ‘rape’ and how it makes you feel, you might understand that.”
Stopping halfway down the stairs, Bruce turned and glowered at me through the banister spindles. “This is not a debate. I’m not arguing with you. I’m the parent, you’re the child, and I said to turn it off. So, do it.”
“Why are you telling me what music I can listen to?”
I could see his jaw clench, the muscle on either side was pushing through the skin as he pressed his teeth together. He was fuming, but so was I.
“I’m not telling you what music you can listen to. What I said was for you to turn off that song. Now.”
“No, you said to turn off the whole CD actually—”
“You’re pushing me right now, Tegan. In two seconds, I’m going to take your stereo and all your CDs, and you’re not going to have any music to listen to for the rest of the week. Don’t play them again.”
“You said the other day you like ‘Teen Spirit’—”
“No, I didn’t.”
“That’s a lie. You absolutely did. We were in the truck—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about; I think Nirvana sucks.”
Back and forth like brother and sister, rather than parent and child, we interrupted each other until Sara’s door flew open. “What the hell is going on out here?”
