High School

by Sara Quin

  As we turned onto our street, I saw the reason for her silence, the true symbol of our punishment. Dad’s truck was parked in front of the house. His own father had died when Dad was only a child; he’d been driving while intoxicated. Dad had once made us sign a contract promising we’d never use drugs or drink. He kept it in an envelope on his coffee table. I couldn’t bear to look at Tegan, too afraid to see my fear reflected.

  Inside the house, Dad was sitting in the living room, his winter jacket unzipped. No one said a word, but once our shoes were off, we knew to sit across from him on the couch. Raves were a big part of the reason we’d stopped going to Dad’s on Saturday nights. It was clear to me then that our deceit had hurt him, too.

  “Do you want to tell your dad what you did?”

  “We went to a rave last night,” Tegan said. It looked like she was trying not to smile.

  “Weren’t you told that you were absolutely not allowed to go to raves? So, you lied to me and went anyhow?” she said.

  “Yes, but—”

  “There is no ‘but.’ You lied. You stayed out all night, you made Naomi lie—her mom is furious, by the way.”

  “Everyone we know is allowed to go to them!” I said.

  “You’re not everyone!”

  “But they’re safe. There isn’t even alcohol!”

  “Do you think we’re stupid?”

  We both stared back at her blankly.

  “Do. You. Think. We’re. Stupid.”

  “No, we don’t think you’re stupid,” Tegan said.

  “We know they don’t sell alcohol there, but there are plenty of drugs to shove in your face.”

  “Nice,” Dad said sharply. My blood ran cold.

  Before Mom could respond I said, “It’s not about drugs; we like the music. Dancing with our friends.”

  “I don’t care what you like about it. Your father and I are not comfortable with you two lying and staying out all night.”

  “I’m very disappointed in both of you,” Dad said, pulling the zipper on his coat up to his throat.

  I felt ashamed, but defiant. Like we’d been tricked into doing the very thing they knew we would do.

  “You’re both grounded. For a month, at least,” Mom paused. “And no phone, no allowance, no guitar, no stereo, no TV. And you’re not going to bed. I’m not having you sleep all day.”

  “What are we supposed to do, just stare at a wall?” I asked.

  She lifted her hand and pointed behind us. “Do your job.”

  Our “job” was a flier route that earned us each eleven dollars a month. We usually dumped the bundles in bins or hid stacks in our closets or in Tegan’s bench seat in her bedroom. But on that hellish morning, we completed the route for the very first time, delivering a rolled bundle to every mailbox in the neighborhood. The rhythm and sound of our shoes cutting fresh prints through the snow in our neighbors’ yards put me back into a trance. When the load lightened, I found myself slowing down, prolonging the punishment I deserved.

  19. TEGAN YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED

  We arrived at my aunt Vivienne and my uncle Marty’s house in Marietta, an affluent neighborhood a short distance from Atlanta, just before midnight a few days shy of Christmas. Along with Mom’s parents, and her brother and his family, we descended on the house with a mountain of suitcases stuffed full of Christmas presents. I had mostly dreaded the holiday, preferring the comforts of home and proximity to friends to two weeks in one house with our entire family. But as I pressed into the grand entryway of their house, I felt like we’d entered a movie. Taking in the sweeping staircase and its banister lit with a million white lights, I watched as Mom embraced her sister and their mom, their eyes filling with tears. I felt some of my bad attitude dissipate. Maybe the holiday would be magical after all?

  “You two are in the playroom,” my aunt said cheerily to Sara and me. She was decked out in a black designer tracksuit with shoulder pads and elf ears on her head. She guided us through the kitchen and pointed us up the back stairs.

  “We won’t have any privacy,” I whined to Mom when she came to deliver towels.

  “Or our own bathroom,” Sara added from atop her air mattress.

  “Too bad,” Mom said. “Would you prefer the basement with your four cousins? They’re all sharing one room, but they have a bathroom down there. I can tell Vivienne to put you there instead if you like.”

  I rolled my eyes. “No.”

  “Then stop complaining and get in the Christmas spirit.”

  Putting her finger to her temple, Sara let off an imaginary round of ammo as Mom spun and walked off to find Bruce. As we unpacked, our cousins swarmed the room like locusts. Their incessant chatter and giddiness only grew louder when I pulled out the video camera I’d brought along.

  “Oooh,” my cousin Ashley, who’d also flown from Calgary, squealed. She pressed her face against the lens. “Can you see me?”

  “Stop,” I said, and pushed her back with a palm to the face. “Back up, you’re making it fog up.”

  Seconds later, Caroline, who had thick glasses and nut-brown, shoulder-length hair tied up in a messy ponytail, appeared in front of the lens. The middle child of Vivienne’s girls, she lifted their family cat into the frame and said, “This is Muffin,” with great seriousness. “She hates to be picked up.”

  “Hi, Muffin,” I said, zooming in on the black cat, who looked nonplussed.

  Caroline’s sister Madison, the baby of the family, bumped into the frame with a gray and white gerbil and placed it on Muffin’s back. “This is George,” she said, her glasses slipping off her nose, her short hair framing her pixie face.

  “GET IT OFF HER, MADISON!” Caroline screamed, alarming both Muffin and George. “SHE STINKS! GET IT OFF HER NOW!”

  The gerbil squirmed between Madison’s tiny fingers, its sharp, protracted claws grazing the black fur of a now squirming Muffin, whom Caroline was trying to hang on to.

  “MADISON!” she screamed a second time. Madison lifted George, and Caroline fled with Muffin still in her arms up the hall. Madison and George followed, with Ashley close on their heels. Sara and I were finally alone in the playroom and could finish unpacking.

  “It’s like Home Alone, but instead of the McCallisters it’s the Albertsons,” I said to Sara, pressing my hands around my neck and pretending to squeeze.

  “I wish we’d been left behind.”

  * * *

  The next morning at breakfast our aunt announced a family trip to Target to shop for last-minute gifts. Christmas Eve was the following day, and we all excitedly donned Christmas hats and piled into the vans parked on the garage pad.

  The second Sara and I were over the threshold of the store’s automatic doors, we sprinted away from the rest of our family, tucking our festive hats in the ample, deep pockets of our baggy pants.

  “Come back!” Madison and Ashley yelled.

  “Oh my god, they have it,” Sara cheered, holding up the self-titled record from the Murmurs, one of our favorite bands, in the music section.

  “And it’s only eighteen ninety-nine!”

  “What did you find?” Bruce asked from a few aisles over.

  “You suck,” I said to Bruce, straight-faced as I ducked into the aisle with the CD.

  “What did you say?”

  “Relax, it’s the Murmurs’ big song,” Sara said, motioning to the CD.

  He threw his meaty forearm around my neck and pretended to suffocate me in the aisle.

  “Do it,” I said. “Save me from the rest of the holiday.”

  “No way, we’re in this together,” he said, releasing me.

  On the van ride home from the mall, we played “You Suck” on repeat. By the time we pulled up to my aunt and uncle’s house, we had our littlest cousins singing,

  Right now, there’s dust on my guitar you fuck.

  And it’s all your fault.

  You paralyze my mind, and for that, you suck.

  In the fading afte
rnoon light on Christmas Eve, Bruce admitted to me, on camera, that the men had gone to Hooters for lunch while out running errands. Around us, Mom and our aunts immediately jumped into attack mode.

  “Grampa,” I said, zooming in on him amid the chaos of voices. “Whose idea was it to go to Hooters for lunch?”

  Eventually, from behind a soap opera magazine he’d suddenly taken an interest in, Grampa grumbled, “Marty. He suggested it.”

  “Oh sure, blame the one guy not here to defend himself,” my uncle Henry, Ashley’s father, snorted.

  “Oh, I’m sure it was him that suggested it.” Vivienne laughed about her husband from her spot on the couch next to Mom.

  “The Georgian Pig was closed,” Bruce said, exasperated. He looked at me pleadingly, as if I could somehow undo this. I laughed from behind the camera.

  Vivienne rolled her eyes. “Did you see the closed sign, Bruce, or did Marty just tell you that?”

  “They have good wings,” Grampa said.

  “Would you like it if Madison or Ashley were using their tits to sell Hooters wings?” Mom asked.

  At the mention of their anatomy, the cousins, who’d been uninterested in the conversation up to that point, started giggling.

  “I’ve been to Hooters,” Gramma answered, defensively. “The food’s nothing to write home about. I don’t see what the fuss is about.”

  “The fuss is that the women have to dress in a certain way to sell the food.” I zoomed in as I said it.

  “And men go there to watch them do it,” Sara added. “It’s gross.”

  “I didn’t even want to go,” Bruce said, almost shouting now.

  “Were you kidnapped?” Mom asked, not looking up from her book, refusing to meet his eye. Beside me, Henry snickered.

  I looked over and saw Grampa was asleep. His superpower was napping through conflict.

  “Look at that Roseanne on TV,” Gramma said. “In her bra, she’s so gross.” My Gramma’s superpower was deflection.

  “Gramma,” I scoffed. “Hello? Double standard?”

  With us distracted, my uncle and Bruce jumped up and left.

  “Can’t stand the heat?” Vivienne asked as they fled.

  Most arguments in our family ended this way, with the men fleeing, claiming the women were too emotional to have a rational conversation. But the older I got, the more I saw the men leaving as irrational, and the women’s emotions as the only sensible reactions. From the women, I learned to speak up about the things that were important to me. To brandish my emotions with pride. My voice mattered.

  * * *

  Sensing Sara and I were restless, missing our friends back home and going slowly crazy, Mom and Vivienne suggested a shopping trip downtown to spend our Christmas cash. Only Sloane, our twelve-year-old cousin, Vivienne’s oldest, was invited along. The three younger ones cried when the trip was announced and they were told they’d have to stay back with Ashley’s parents, our uncle Henry and aunt Lynn.

  “Oh, come off it. You hate shopping,” Vivienne said to Caroline and Madison.

  “Let them go,” Aunt Lynn said to Ashley. “We’ll make cookies here instead, girls,” she said, gathering up the kids.

  I waved with delight as my aunt Vivienne backed the van down the driveway, and I saw the kids in the front window. Their sad tableau made us all laugh.

  “Downtown, here we come,” my aunt shouted as she aimed the van toward the Atlanta skyline.

  As Sara and I scoured store after store in Little Five Points, a hip neighborhood my aunt had found for us to shop in, we looked for things we would never find in Calgary: Bugle Boy sweaters, JNCO jeans, indie records of bands we’d only heard of but never actually heard.

  “I remember when you two hated shopping,” my aunt said after a few hours, all of us weighed down with plastic bags full of our purchases. “Do you remember how we used to have to pay you to dress up for family photos?”

  “Yes, and you’d still have to pay me to wear a dress,” I told her.

  “I don’t think either of us imagined you two would be the kinds of girls who’d like shopping,” my aunt said to Mom. “Hey, Sonia?”

  “God, no. They were just like their dad. Impossible to shop with. It was a nightmare taking them to get school clothes every year.”

  “Think of all the money we saved you,” Sara said. “Can you buy me an extra shirt today to make up for it?”

  “No,” Mom answered.

  * * *

  Before dinner Sara and I walked the runway, a small stretch of space between the TV and the coffee table, modeling our new clothes for Gramma, Aunt Lynn, and the cousins who’d stayed back.

  “How was the big adventure downtown?” Uncle Marty asked Sloane after dinner.

  “It was fine.”

  “Did you buy anything?”

  “No way. The stores Sara and Tegan like are weird.”

  “You’re weird,” I teased her as I passed, taking my plate to the dishwasher.

  “I saw a girl with pink hair,” Sloane added.

  “Interesting.” My uncle chuckled.

  “Yeah, and she was kissing another girl.”

  My heart stopped. Everyone in the kitchen froze in place. Next to me at the sink, my aunt Vivienne was totally still, a plate in her hand stopped under the stream of water from the tap.

  The first to speak was my uncle Marty. “Where was this?”

  “Junkman’s Daughter,” Sloane answered.

  “What is Junkman’s Daughter?” my uncle asked, twisting his blond mustache, his face already turning a bright shade of red.

  “A store Mommy and Aunty Sonia took us where they play loud music, and Sara and Tegan bought striped sweaters.”

  As Sloane prattled on to Aunt Lynn and Gramma, Uncle Marty turned to my aunt and narrowed the space between himself and her. “Vivienne, where were you when this was going on?”

  She kept rinsing dishes and stayed silent, choosing to ignore him. I slunk away nervously.

  “Vivienne?” When he spoke her name, it sounded like he was spitting out a sunflower seed.

  “Oh Marty, stop being such a prude,” Aunt Lynn said, dropping a dish in the sink as she passed.

  I gathered placemats from the dining table and noticed every man who wasn’t Marty eyeing the door, plotting his escape.

  “Vivienne, what kind of place did you take our twelve-year-old to today?”

  “It was just a clothing store, Marty,” Mom said, annoyed now.

  “Stay out of this, Sonia. I want to know where my wife was and why she wasn’t protecting our daughter.”

  “Protecting her from what? Gay people?” I came alive. “Seriously?”

  “Calm down,” Mom mouthed at me. Behind her, Bruce looked on with interest.

  I felt hot. As if the screws holding the hinges of me together were about to come loose. “Why?” I mouthed back at my mom.

  “Vivienne,” Marty hissed for the tenth time.

  “Marty,” Mom hissed back at him. “You’re starting to show your true colors.”

  As they argued back and forth, Gramma asked Sloane if she knew what it meant for two girls to kiss. Sloane answered, “Of course, Gramma. It’s no big deal.”

  “Exactly,” I shouted. “Apparently a twelve-year-old is the only open-minded person in this family. Why is everyone acting so messed up about this? We’ve been watching violent movies for ten days. Marty, you take your kids to Hooters. How is Sloane seeing two girls kissing such a big deal?”

  In the corner, Grampa joked to Uncle Henry, “Well, the women don’t kiss at Hooters. Wouldn’t mind, though.” They chuckled. I felt sick.

  “The girls are not a big deal,” Marty answered, annoyed. “It’s that Vivienne wasn’t there, that my daughter was seeing . . .” He was almost purple in the face by this point. My aunt was still silent.

  “Seeing what?” I was yelling now.

  “ENOUGH!” Gramma yelled, stunning us all back into silence. “That’s enough now. We’re playing cards an
d you men are going downstairs; the conversation is done. No more talk about this. Right, Sloane?” She said it cheerily, but I knew Gramma was upset.

  “We’ve been banished, men,” Uncle Marty announced, grabbing his beer and darting for the basement stairs, Uncle Henry and Grampa close behind. Bruce was the last one out; he threw a sheepish, resigned look at me over his shoulder as he did. I shook my head, disappointed. Why hadn’t he spoken up? Why hadn’t Vivienne? Why had it felt like the entire family was tossing around a hot potato? For once the women had banished the men. But I felt angry they had. I wanted Uncle Marty to answer for his discomfort around homosexuality. Discomfort I could see in him because I had felt my own earlier at the store when I had seen the girls. They’d been holding hands when we walked in, and I’d felt personally exposed by the act. Though I suspected plenty of girls in my own life to be carrying on with each other behind closed doors, seeing it in the open had made me want to hide. Seeing my uncle’s fear, my own returned. What were we all so afraid of?

  * * *

  Our last afternoon in Atlanta, Marty came to the playroom where Sara and I were reading on our air mattresses. “You girls want to call your friends, wish them a happy New Year before the party?”

  It felt like an olive branch, and I took it.

  “Yes!”

  “Got a pretty good long-distance plan—your mom and Vivienne sure can talk.”

  “Thanks,” I said, hopping up and racing toward his office. With the door closed behind me, I called Alex. “Oh my god. I miss you so much. You won’t believe what happened. Sloane saw two girls kissing.”

  20. HOMOSEXUAL

  For their French 11 health class, Naomi and Alex created a project called “Les Homosexuels.” In a series of interviews, they asked family, friends, and other students about homosexuality. Sara and Tegan agreed to be interviewed for the project. This is a full transcript of the interview.

  NAOMI: Okay, the camera’s on!

  (Sara and Tegan both look to the camera, smiling.)