by Sara Quin
“He sounds really good!” I said to Grace.
“He is, right? But he’s so shy.” Grace looked back toward the sound of his voice, pulling at the two dark braids of hair hanging over her ears.
“If I could sing, I’d be like Courtney Love!” Christina said, standing up and taking a rock star–like posture. She held an invisible mic and thrashed her long blond hair.
“No one should ever hear me sing,” Naomi said. “I can’t carry a tune to save my life.”
Christina collapsed back to the floor, out of breath. “It’s hard work being a rock star!”
Grace said, “Let’s knock and see if he’ll let us listen.” She went to her closet and pulled a small bottle of vodka from under a pile of clothes. “But first.” She splashed the clear liquid into our Slurpee cups with a mischievous grin. We filed out of the room, standing in a huddle outside Daniel’s door, chewing on our boozy straws.
“Danny?” Grace touched the door lightly.
“Yeah?”
“Can we listen?” Naomi asked. I pinched the back of her arm. She turned and smiled, winking at me.
There was a pause and then the click of the door unlocking. We followed Grace into the room. Daniel shut the door behind us and locked it. The blinds were closed tightly, and the only natural light refracted on the floor and wall through a bent piece of plastic near the bottom of the window. Daniel turned on the bedside lamp and lit a cigarette. The walls were covered with band posters and psychedelic artwork. I could smell the skunky weed from the plastic bag near his stereo. I sat on the floor in the corner, next to Tegan.
“We want to hear you play!” Christina, always the bravest among us, blurted out.
“Yeah?” Daniel smiled, revealing a set of small sharp teeth. He pulled his hair from its elastic band and let it fall to his shoulders. He picked up his electric guitar and sat down cross-legged in front of his amp. His fingers were pale and fine, and they climbed on the strings like the legs of an insect. His vocals sounded shredded and strained, then sorrowful and tender.
When he’d finished, Tegan said, “You’re really great, Daniel.”
His face blushed scarlet. “I’m not that great.” He took deep breaths through the filter of his cigarette and blew smoke up toward the closed window.
“Sara and Tegan write songs, too,” Christina said, when Daniel leaned the guitar against the amp. Then, realizing she’d revealed a secret, she mouthed “Sorry” in our direction.
“Let’s hear one,” Daniel said.
“Yes!” Grace echoed, sitting up and crossing her legs.
Tegan and I locked eyes. My heart was racing. Daniel extended the neck of the instrument to me. I put my Slurpee cup on the carpet, wiped my hands on the knees of my jeans. I placed the electric guitar across my lap. It felt like a weapon, sleek and dangerous. I held it to my chest, ran my fingers along the strings. Little squeaks rang out of the amp. Tegan and I had spent weeks writing songs on only two strings. The rest had snapped when we’d wound them too tight. I didn’t dare touch the tuning pegs on Daniel’s guitar. Instead, I shifted my fingers into a familiar shape, struggling to make use of the extra strings.
I strummed Daniel’s pick against the strings and began to sing. I was dazzled by the energy bouncing between the walls. My face throbbed with heat. Every time I made a surprising switch between quiet and loud, sad and happy, the air cracked around us like it had been whacked with something solid. Tegan’s voice in the chorus split the song into stereo. I’m alive! Look at me! She screams, I’m alive! Hello, it’s me! When we finished, I felt tipsy and buoyant. I turned the neck of the guitar back in Daniel’s direction, but his hands didn’t move.
“Are there more?” he asked.
* * *
That night in my bed, Naomi watched me in the near dark for a long time. We lay on our sides facing each other.
“I didn’t realize you could do that,” she said.
“Do what?”
“You know what,” she said, sitting up. “You write and play songs!”
I laughed. “I guess so.”
“But how did you learn to do it?”
“I don’t know. I just tried, and I could.”
I wasn’t sure how to explain it. It was instinct but also mimicry. Hold your hand this way, move the other fast or slow, open your mouth and sing.
She squinted hard at me, shaking her head. “You’re really good.” Long after she had fallen asleep, I lay awake replaying her praise, grinning at the ceiling.
13. TEGAN A SUMMER ABROAD
The month of July Dad was house-sitting for our aunt and uncle. He offered to let us stay at the sprawling lake house in southwest Calgary the first weekend of summer without him. The affluent neighborhood where the house was might as well have been a different city; it felt so exotic compared to northeast Calgary, where we lived. We were ecstatic. It was the closest thing to a summer vacation we were going to get.
“Invite some friends,” Dad said over the phone. “I’ll steer clear, just don’t burn the place down.”
Sara invited Naomi, and I called and invited Alex.
Naomi had met Alex during the second semester of grade ten. She mentioned her to me one Sunday while she and Sara were studying at our house. “There’s this girl in my social studies class that I think would make the perfect best friend for you.”
I’d blushed, assuming the suggestion was motivated by the lingering guilt Naomi had.
“I talked to her,” Sara said, not looking up from the assignment in front of her. “Alex. She has a sexy voice.”
“Oh, does she?” Naomi giggled, tickling Sara’s side while she did.
I sighed deeply. “I don’t know, it feels . . . weird. Like a setup or something.”
“It’s not weird. I already told her all about you, and that you need a best friend.”
“I thought you said the Aberhart kids were all stuck up? Snobby rich kids who aren’t allowed to come to the northeast?”
“She’s not like the other Aberhart kids, she’s like us. She’s really cool. You’re going to love her.”
Eventually Naomi and Sara talked me into having a conversation with Alex on the phone. “Just trust me, you’ll like her,” Naomi said sweetly from next to Sara.
“Fine.” I was intrigued.
The following day I was hanging out in my room when Sara yelled to me, “Tegan, pick up the phone!”
“Hello?”
“Oh, hi!”
The line clicked as Sara hung up.
“Hello?” I repeated.
“Hi, sorry. It’s Alex. Naomi’s friend from Aberhart . . .”
“Oh, hi! Um . . . nice to meet you?”
“It’s nice to meet you, too.”
We both waited in silence.
“This is weird,” I said.
Alex burst out laughing. I liked her laugh.
Staring up at my ceiling and listening to her talk, I found myself relaxing, my shoulders sinking deeper into my bed. Naomi was right—Alex was funny, sweet, not snobby or stuck up at all. We liked a lot of the same music, and she offered to take us to a Value Village in the northwest sometime.
“They have so many striped sweaters there,” she said.
“Cool.”
After we hung up, I let out a breath of air I had no idea I’d been holding in. I lay there for a minute with the phone off the hook, the receiver still in my hand.
“Tegan, hang up the fucking phone. I need to call Naomi back!” Sara yelled from her room.
“Fuck,” I said, floundering to get the receiver back on the hook.
* * *
That Friday we met at McDonald’s downtown. I spotted Alex as I made my way toward the back corner where she was sitting with Naomi and the Frenchies. Between the waves of shoulder-length brown hair falling loosely on either side of her face was a set of brown eyes rimmed in thick lashes. A bright smile spread as I approached. Balancing the two-cheeseburger meal piled on the plastic tray in my hands, I awkwar
dly slipped into the plastic booth next to her.
“I’m Alex,” she said, extending her hand.
I laughed. “I know everyone else here, so I assumed. But just in case you weren’t sure, I’m Tegan.”
“Oh, I know,” she said seriously as we shook hands. “I can already tell you and Sara apart. You look really different, actually.”
“Thank you for noticing.” I tugged at the sleeves of my jacket to take it off. She grabbed at the end of the bright orange cuff closest to her and yanked.
“Thanks,” I said, blushing.
“I love this,” she said, pawing the neon nylon in her hand. “Where did you find it?”
“Value Village.”
“Oh, I love it.”
Unwrapping the yellow paper from my burger, I asked her about her siblings, school, and speed skating. Naomi had told me she trained twice a day, six days a week.
“Yeah it’s a lot,” Alex said. “But I love it. I started skating when I was little. Practically at the same time as when I started to walk.”
“Wow, how do you have time for homework or friends?”
“I don’t.” After a pause, she threw in, “But don’t worry, I’ll make time for you.”
And she did.
That winter, Sara and I would meet Naomi on Friday afternoons after school, and the three of us would take the bus to the track Alex trained at to watch her skate. In person, she could be self-deprecating, awkward, nervous. But on the ice, she was confident, at ease, smooth. We’d cheer and wave as she flew past, forgetting for a second that we were flanked by serious sports moms in tracksuits, there to watch their kids build bright futures for themselves. We stood out in the stands in our rainbow sweaters and shapeless pants. But when Alex would finish and change, rushing to meet us by the exit, her own secondhand sweaters and skate shoes exposed her differences from the kids she practiced with. She was more like us than them, and as we bundled ourselves up and pushed into the cold, I felt like she belonged with us, with me. From there we’d take the CTrain with her to a Pizza Hut near her house and sit for hours, eating and talking. Her appetite for details about my life, our school, and the neighborhood we grew up in seemed insatiable. I felt interesting, unique, worthy of study under her curious eye.
“Didn’t I tell you she was perfect for you?” Naomi said to me one night on the train back to the northeast.
“She is,” I said, turning toward the dark glass to hide the blush rushing across my cheeks.
By spring, Alex called me almost every night. And in the dark, pressed against the receiver, I found it easier to talk to her than anyone I had ever known. She pried without being pushy, unraveling me slowly. Unsatisfied with an answer I might give to a personal question she had asked, she’d laugh and press me to be more honest. Her directness was disarming, and I wanted to be disarmed. Bit by bit, I passed pieces of myself to her through the telephone lines connecting us, and she did the same.
* * *
Dad offered to drive the four of us to the southwest. He dropped us off in front of my aunt and uncle’s bungalow just before lunch: “You know the number for 911?”
We waved as his gray Honda Accord sped off. Inside the house, Sara and I gave Naomi and Alex a tour. In the days leading up to the weekend away at my aunt and uncle’s, I had become consumed with the details: Where would the four of us sleep? Two to a bed? All four in one? Sleeping bags in the living room? What kind of bathing suit should I bring? Could I get away with wearing a T-shirt over it? Would Alex think we were rich because our aunt and uncle were? Would she be disappointed later that summer when she saw our house? How much smaller it was? Would she be horrified when she saw our dad’s small two-bedroom apartment? But mostly I worried about Naomi and Sara. How much did Alex know about what was going on with them? And how would two days in close quarters go if she didn’t know?
“This is really nice,” Alex said as we moved through the airy, comfortable rooms, peeking into closets looking for towels to take to the lake. I offered to carry all the striped towels so I could hide my body and the black suit I’d borrowed from my mom. I tossed them down and dove into the water as soon as I could.
“Nice form,” Alex said from the dock when I surfaced. She cannonballed in, and we exploded into laughter when she popped up next to me.
We swam all afternoon, self-consciously sunning ourselves on the wooden deck; the paint was peeling off and it left tiny ticks of brown on our suits.
“In the winter we come here and skate the whole thing,” I said, pointing toward the horizon from the dock later. “There’s a clubhouse on that side of the lake. And they make a skating rink in the winter and serve hot chocolate.”
“That’s really fancy.”
“Yeah, our dad always jokes that it’s the one day a year where they let us ‘poor folks’ in.” I blushed as I said it. I didn’t want Alex to think we were poor, even though compared to our aunt and uncle we kind of were.
“My uncle’s family took my dad in after his mom abandoned him,” I explained. “They were his foster family.”
“That’s so sad. How old was he?”
“Eleven or twelve, I think,” Sara said.
“Awful.” Naomi shook her head. “Your dad is so sweet. I like him a lot. He’s funny. He talks to you guys like you’re adults.”
“Wait until you meet Sonia,” Naomi said. “She’s so cool. She doesn’t even seem like a mom.”
It was nice not to feel like the third wheel; with Alex there things felt balanced. It felt easy, relaxed between us all. That night we ordered pizza and then applied aloe vera to our sunburned skin and fell into a tired quiet as we watched My So-Called Life in the sunken living room, our tanned limbs stretched out in front of us. As the sun slipped behind the trees and the room got dark, Sara stood and wordlessly headed toward the guest bedroom. Naomi followed. My stomach lurched.
“Have a good sleep,” Naomi called over her shoulder. Sara was already out of sight.
“Should we stay out here?” Alex asked, confused. “Or . . . follow them?” We’d been to sleepovers at Alex’s and Christina’s quite a few times. But those group sleepovers were crowded affairs where everyone packed into sleeping bags on a bedroom floor together. I wasn’t sure what we should do.
“I’ll get sleeping bags from the basement. We can just stay out here if that’s okay?”
“Fun.”
I felt relieved to be past what I had worried might be an awkward moment. But the second the light was off, the energy between us shifted.
“Is it hard for you?”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“You know, Naomi and Sara.”
“Which part?”
“That they . . . do that. Leave you.”
“No,” I answered quickly.
Alex stayed quiet. I felt compelled to explain further, but was terrified to reveal Sara and Naomi’s secret, especially when they were just down the hall. I felt loyal to them. But I also felt torn, because I didn’t want to keep anything from Alex. I labored over what to say, then realized she’d fallen asleep. I knew I would eventually tell her everything. I needed to unburden myself. I hadn’t realized how heavy the secret weighed on me until someone had asked.
* * *
Alex didn’t bring up the subject of Naomi and Sara after we went home. I wondered if maybe all the awkwardness and tension that night had just been in my head. Then Alex left for Japan with her family for the rest of July. She promised me that the second she was back she would come over for a sleepover.
“I promise. I have to see your room before you move.”
The month Alex was away with her family crawled by. I was stuck babysitting my little cousin Ashley and was back to feeling like the third wheel with Naomi and Sara. The two of us fought more than we had in months, and I felt miserable in their company without Alex to balance things, and even more miserable when they stayed at Naomi’s to avoid me. But, as promised, the second Alex was home from Japan, she made plans
to sleep over. Naomi came, too, and we waited anxiously on the front lawn for her to arrive. Ushering Alex into the house after her mom dropped her off, we dragged her on a tour and eventually landed in my room, where we spent hours looking at photo albums.
“I love this one,” Alex said, slipping out one of me at seven, hamming it up for the camera in a green T-shirt on a camping trip. “Can I take it?”
“Of course,” I said, blushing. I would find a way to replace the missing photo later. Bruce kept the albums meticulously organized in his basement office.
Mom took us to McDonald’s for dinner, and after, around the table in our kitchen, we played songs on the vintage jukebox my grampa had restored and drank Coke from large mason jars as we extracted information from Alex about her trip to Japan. None of us had set foot off the continent, so we sat in rapt attention as she dispensed even the smallest details of her trip.
Before bed Alex pulled a necklace from her backpack. It was a Japanese coin on a nylon string. Pulling down her shirt collar, she showed me the duplicate she wore; she’d crafted them herself. “They’re best friend necklaces,” she said proudly.
I watched myself blush in the mirror as she tied mine around my neck. “I love it, thank you,” I said, flinging my arms around her.
Though I had known since Naomi had first mentioned her that we were supposed to be becoming best friends, we’d never said the words until that night. I would have never dared to say them first and I felt happiness gushing inside me as I played with the coin around my neck. It had taken sixteen years, but I finally had a best friend of my own.
“Should we sleep in my bed? Or downstairs?” I asked after we’d changed into pajamas.
“Your bed,” Alex said, tossing herself onto it as she did. “Oh my god, I’ve been dreaming of this famous bed of yours. It is the most comfortable bed ever.”
I turned out the light and climbed in next to her. And then I told her everything—how hard it had been to lose Naomi and Sara, how confusing, how lonely. How I had hoped Kayla might become my best friend again when school started, but then she hadn’t. When I cried, she held my hand, and when I stopped to find the right words, she waited. As we talked I felt the weight I’d carried all year lift from my body. Later, after we fell silent and Alex fell asleep, I realized Mom had been right. What I had needed all along was a best friend of my own.
