by Sara Quin
#1 When you touch me in certain areas and then pull away, you make me want it so much more.
#2 Put my hand somewhere on your body, that way I know what you like.
Those words vibrated through me like she was right in the room with me. I reread the note dozens of times. And when she called me to ask if I liked it, I was totally honest.
“Very much,” I said.
“Now you really owe me!” she said before we hung up.
But I couldn’t push beyond the frame of what we’d already done without feeling a rush of fear. Sometimes I imagine your drama teacher is watching us when we have sex, I wrote in my wobbly handwriting, then tore the paper into pieces, my face flaming hot. That was my fantasy. I wanted a witness. A year later, we finally had one.
* * *
Stephanie and I were in drama class when she handed me a folded piece of paper. I took the note from her, studying it briefly. I didn’t need to open it; I had practically memorized both sides, the crease of the folds were soft with use.
“I read the whole thing,” she admitted, brushing her hand over her shaved head. “It was jammed under the cushion of the chair you gave me.”
“Oh.” I swallowed, though my mouth had gone dry.
I’d given Stephanie the overstuffed chair from my bedroom when we’d moved at the end of the summer.
Stephanie’s eyes bugged out. “Do you do that stuff for real?”
I shoved the note in my back pocket. I looked down at my feet.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” she said quickly. “But, you can if you want to.”
I tried to ignore the panic welling up in my body. “It’s nothing. We were just joking around.”
“Whatever,” she said, and returned to studying her script.
Stephanie was a notorious keeper of secrets. Friends were always making confessions to her. She didn’t take advantage of what she knew, didn’t ever gossip. But in this case, I felt like she had something on me. That the power dynamic between us was irrevocably changed.
I was ashamed I’d carelessly exposed Naomi’s fantasies. Though the words in the note weren’t mine, they implicated me as much as they did Naomi. The paper in my pocket felt contaminated. I felt like I was carrying pornography. Throughout the day I compulsively patted my jeans to make sure it was still there against my thigh.
Once I arrived home, I returned the note to the cardboard box in my closet. I pushed it farther into the darkness and covered the whole box with a mound of clothes.
The ring of the phone sent me shooting across the room.
“Hello?” I said as I gasped for breath.
“Hello?” Tegan called out at the same exact time.
“Hi,” Naomi said. “I have both of you!”
“I’ve got it!” I yelled into the air.
“Sorry that my sister is such an asshole, Naomi,” Tegan said and hung up.
I waited to be sure that she was off the line.
“Hello?” Naomi said. “Did I lose you?”
“No, I’m here. You won’t believe what happened.” I lowered my voice, imagining Tegan with her ear pressed to the wall listening in.
“What?”
“Stephanie found one of the notes you wrote me last year.”
“Which note?”
“Where you talk about your fantasies.”
“Oh god, did she read it?”
“She read it.”
I closed my eyes, waiting for her response.
“It’s no big deal,” Naomi said.
“Really?”
“It’s obvious we’re more than friends. Stephanie’s not an idiot.”
“So, you’re not mad at me?”
“No! I just feel gross, like, she probably thinks I’m some sex-crazed weirdo. We used to be so into each other.”
“And we aren’t now?” I asked.
“It was different then.”
And just like that, I knew we were drifting apart.
My next thought knocked the wind out of me: what I’d felt for Naomi the previous year, I’d feel again someday, but for someone else. It was like realizing for the first time that we all eventually die.
17. TEGAN WHY DOESN’T THIS FEEL RIGHT?
Before Halloween Emma called and asked flat out if I liked Spencer. I was not someone who gossiped about liking boys. In fact, I repelled such talk. The histrionics girls displayed for boys was a mystery to me. I just couldn’t relate. So, I avoided all discussion of it. Which was why I was caught off guard. This was no casual inquiry from Emma. We didn’t do boy talk. She was the nucleus of the Abbeydale crew, had grown up next door to Spencer, and was clearly calling inquiring on behalf of him.
“Yeah . . .”
“Is that . . . a yes?” I heard her husky laugh in my ear.
“Yes.” I pressed my face into my pillow.
It’s happening, I thought after we hung up. Spencer’s finally going to ask me out.
Spencer and Kayla broke up in the second semester of grade ten. They remained friends, but eventually Kayla got a new boyfriend, gravitating to a table across the student center where he and his friends ate lunch. After that we saw her less and less, but in her absence, and with her blessing, Spencer and I grew closer. In the spring he briefly dated another girl from the Abbeydale bus stop named Corrine, but after they broke up, he started calling me more and more. After Spencer got his driver’s license, Bruce agreed to let him drive Sara and me to school. And then over the summer, we hung out in the free time we had between his part-time job as a welder’s assistant at the dump truck shop and my babysitting job watching my cousin Ashley.
I felt things change between us one afternoon when he offered to come along with Ashley and me to the wave pool. When we got there, we both admitted shyly we didn’t want to wear our bathing suits in front of the other, so we paid Ashley’s entrance fee and sent her in alone.
“I feel bad,” he admitted. We were standing in the viewing deck suspended over the pool. “She looks so small.”
“Yeah, I feel bad, too,” I said as I watched Ashley’s tiny frame hopping up and down in the crowded waves alone below. After a long pause, I added, “Maybe you should go in and swim with her? I can just watch from here.”
“No fucking way.”
We both cracked up, and he pushed me toward the edge, then pulled me back and threw his arm around my shoulders. He held me against him for a long time. My harmless crush, which had simmered throughout grade ten, began to boil.
Even though we lived within walking distance to school now, on the first day of grade eleven, Spencer offered to pick up Sara and me.
“My dad’s letting me take his sixty-eight Mustang today. This one time only.”
After that, it just became a thing. Whenever he drove us, I always sat in the passenger seat up front. And if I went to a friend’s house or was busy after school, Sara would walk home. When we went to Denny’s, Spencer sat next to me in the booth, pressed against my arm, even when we were the only two in it. For once I didn’t avoid the intimacy sprouting up between us the way I had in the past when a boy seemed to like me. Convinced Spencer was different from other boys, I embraced the affection and familiarity that formed between the two of us that fall. I accepted the seat he saved at lunch for me, excitedly took the phone calls we had before bed, and when our friends joked that we were acting like we were dating, I didn’t argue with them.
After Emma called, every second felt like the second before Spencer might ask me out. But he didn’t ask for nearly another month. It was an unusually nice Sunday in October. He took me to the Crescent Heights student parking lot to teach me to drive standard. Placing his paw of a left hand over my right hand on the stick shift between us, I attributed the awkwardness of it to learning to drive and put it out of my mind as he patiently directed me through the impossibly difficult series of steps of shifting from gear to gear.
After, we sat in front of my house talking, leaning against his dad’s maroon Nissan Ma
xima with our jackets off, letting the sun warm our skin. This is the moment, I thought. It has to be.
“I should get the car back to my dad.”
I fiddled with my jacket impatiently and leaned in through the open window on the driver’s side of the car. “Thanks for the lesson.”
“Tell Bruce I taught you to drive standard. He’ll be so impressed.”
“Technically I still can’t drive standard. I stalled it, like, a million times.”
“Right,” he said awkwardly, not making eye contact. “Don’t tell him that part.”
“I won’t. See ya.”
“Bye.”
Upstairs in my room, I tried to start my homework, but I felt deflated. I thought for sure he was going to ask me out. It had been weeks since Emma called. What was he waiting for?
Sara yelled, “Tegan, pick up the phone!”
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Spencer.”
“Sara, hang up.”
We waited until we heard the click.
“Miss me already?” He chuckled but then didn’t say anything for what felt like too long. Come on, I thought. “So, what’s up?” I finally said.
“Yeah, so, um . . . I was wondering if you wanted to like, go out?”
“Go out?”
“Yeah, like . . . be my girlfriend?”
I squeezed my eyes closed and took a sharp intake of breath. “Obviously, Spencer. Duh.”
“So, that’s a yes?”
“Yes, it’s a yes. Finally.”
“Finally? I mean, you could have asked me out if you liked me all this time.”
“No way,” I said. “I wanted you to do the work.”
“Right. Well, okay, cool. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow? I can pick you and Sara up.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“Cool, see you at five to eight.”
“Cool. Okay, bye.”
“Bye.”
Sara was already at my door. “Did he ask you?”
“Yes.”
I blushed when she yelled, “Spencer asked Tegan out!” down the stairwell toward wherever Mom and Bruce were.
“Get out.”
“You get out,” she said, slamming my door.
I opened my books, smiled, snapped my pencil against the page, and sighed with relief. It was done.
The next morning, I sat in the passenger seat up front by Spencer like usual. Sara climbed in the back. During the drive, he didn’t go for my hand, and I felt glad. It would have been weird since it was just the three of us in the car. At school as he locked his driver’s-side door, Sara beelined for a group of our friends standing by the smoke doors. “Thanks for the ride,” she called out, not looking back.
“Yup,” he said. Then he reached out and took my hand, lacing his thick fingers through mine and smiled down at me. I felt self-conscious when he did; my fingers almost immediately fell asleep, they were so small compared to his. His hands felt rough, and as we walked toward our friends, the relief I had felt about finally being together escaped slowly, like air from a balloon. Standing around with our friends, my hand still dangling in the grip of his, something about the act of public intimacy felt false, performative. As our friends teased us, saying things like “Finally” and “I knew it,” I didn’t feel the obviousness of our connection the way they seemed to and as I once had. As our friends asked us questions about our new relationship, I was filled with ones I couldn’t answer. The loudest was most familiar: Why doesn’t this feel right?
18. SARA THE HAIRCUT
Zoe cut her hair, and my feelings escalated from a harmless crush to obsession. Sitting behind her in English class, I wanted to run my hand along the soft buzz cut from her neck to the crown of her head. The urge became impossible to ignore.
“I like your haircut,” I said after class. Zoe’s eyes, so bare and scrutinizing, reflected and absorbed my gaze.
“Thanks.” Her right hand drifted up to her neck. “My mom said I look like a dyke.”
A wrenching feeling twisted in my stomach. “You don’t look like a dyke,” I said.
She shrugged. “I’ll see you at lunch,” she said, then sped off in the direction of the stairwell. I stood briefly at the big glass windows that looked down into the student center, hoping to catch a glimpse of her.
At lunchtime, I joined our friends in the school’s main hallway. Diego, who’d started hanging out with us so he could flirt with Stephanie, brought a stereo from home, and we crowded around it like it was a fire, talking loudly over the music. Diego and his friends wore tracksuits, clean white tank tops, and sneakers buffed like new. He collapsed to the floor and began rotating himself expertly in circles, his legs and hips moving impossibly under his arms. I’d never seen anyone break-dance in real life; a crowd of students curiously watched him from a distance. We forced a bottleneck in the hallway, and students attempting to get by had to pass in single file.
Zoe arrived and sat down next to me, dropping a folded note into my lap.
“I drew you something,” she said. “It’s stupid.”
I unfolded the page and saw an inky sketch of abstract swirls and ornate letters. My skin hummed. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll do one for you this afternoon.”
“Are you going to the rave on Saturday?”
“We’re still trying to convince our mom to let us.” That wasn’t true. She’d actually forbidden us from going. She didn’t understand that raves were the safest place for people like us. There were drugs, yes, but that fact produced none of the violence or risks she always warned we’d find there. Without gangs, or girls looking to start fights, or adults chasing us out into the cold, we could be ourselves. I loved those woozy nights of laughter and dancing, strange music that thrummed in my brain for days afterward. She couldn’t keep us away.
The bolder our lies, the more attuned to them she became. It didn’t help that she began speaking to our friends’ parents behind our backs. Our intentions spread like gossip, and she set a trap for us.
She agreed to let us sleep over at Naomi’s that next Saturday, asking us, “Just Naomi’s? Not the rave downtown?”
We shook our heads no, assuring her that we were just going to a sleepover. Maybe to Denny’s for coffee beforehand, or to listen to music at Stephanie’s.
“If I find out you went to the rave, I will ground you for the rest of your life,” she said one final time. Tegan and I pulled our backpacks over our shoulders and waved goodbye to her from the front door.
At curfew, Tegan called Mom to check in. She told Mom casually that we’d just finished a movie and might start a second. After she hung up the receiver, we waited for the return call, something Mom did from time to time, to check that we were where we said we were. Downstairs, Naomi promised her parents that our mom was well aware of our plan, and confirmed we’d be home at sunrise.
Spencer picked us up and drove us through the deserted streets downtown to an old hockey arena. Inside, a makeshift floor covered the ice rink. Drum and bass ricocheted off the domed ceiling. We’d spent time there as kids, watching Bruce playing goalie on Sunday mornings. When we were in junior high, he’d paid Tegan and me to run the scoreboard during weeknight games. We stuffed our bags and coats behind the penalty box and did a lap of the arena floor. Tegan and Spencer planted themselves in front of the subwoofer and smoked a joint, letting the vibration from the bass bounce their skulls violently against the boards. Naomi and I went looking for our friends.
“You made it!” Zoe said into my ear. She and Stephanie were dancing in a crowded locker room.
“Aren’t you hot?” Stephanie asked, tugging at my sleeve.
I tried to imagine removing the thick hoodie I was wearing but knew that in a T-shirt I’d feel too self-conscious to dance. I pushed up the arms of my sweater to my elbows and hoped that would suffice. Warm house music oozed from the speaker, a respite from the battery of sound in the arena. Dancing in that small space, a feeling I’d lost in adolescence returned to my b
ody. I was exactly where I wanted to be; I was happy. It occurred to me then that other people in that room might have lied to their parents in order to be there, might have stolen from their wallets or pockets to pay the admission. These thoughts comforted me.
Later, I watched Naomi swallow down a speed pill in the dark, hoping the drug wouldn’t cause her to freak out the way she had after we’d shared a joint in her brother’s bed. But, after I was high, it was me who was stricken with paranoia. My crush on Zoe felt magnified. The compartments in which I kept my feelings became distressingly overlapped. I withdrew to the edges of the room and danced alone.
At 6:00 a.m., when the lights came on without warning, the floor was revealed to be black with footprints and debris. Naomi’s and Tegan’s skin appeared green under the fluorescent bulbs. Outside in the parking lot, headlights blinded us as we searched for Spencer’s car.
“I hope the battery’s not dead,” Spencer said as he sucked hard on a cigarette. We jogged to keep up. The cold air felt like glass in my lungs. In the back seat Naomi and I wrapped ourselves together, shivering.
“So cold, so cold, so cold, so cold,” Tegan said, her teeth chattering.
When the car was warm, I nodded off against the window.
In Naomi’s bedroom, I was too tired to even take off my coat. Tegan lay right on the white carpet at the foot of the bed, pulling the hood of her jacket over her head and face. Naomi’s habits were too hard to break, and she took a shower and brushed her teeth. I was already asleep when she crawled under the covers next to me.
We were woken up by knocking at the door. Naomi’s mom popped her head in. “Girls, your mom is on her way here to get you.”
I looked at the clock. Had we slept hours already? It was only 8:00 a.m.
Tegan rose from the carpet.
“Shit.” I pulled the covers over my head.
In the Jeep on the way home, my head felt swollen and my ears rang. In the daylight I still felt stoned, the drug jerking at my limbs and playing tricks with my eyes. Mom’s silence unnerved me. I expected yelling, or an interrogation. She hadn’t yet said a word to either of us.
