by Sara Quin
Tess kept calling for a while after the sleepover, but things felt different between us when I would take her calls, which wasn’t often. We never addressed the awkwardness that transpired that night at my house or in my bed, just like we never discussed the violence the night of her birthday at Rick’s. As the pile of unsaid things between Tess and me grew, her grip on me loosened and I slipped from her hold. Then she stopped calling.
* * *
The next time I saw her was in late winter when she and Leah surprised us after school at Sunridge train station and offered us each a tab of acid.
I’d sworn off acid, and so had Sara, after I’d taken a nasty fall down two flights of concrete stairs at Sunridge train station a couple months earlier.
Sara had told my parents about the fall that night when they got home. Though I’d been livid that she had told them, she left out the fact that I was on acid when it happened, which I felt grateful about. She watched guiltily from my doorway as Mom and Bruce examined me, asking if I had a headache or any pain when they poked and pressed my back and neck.
“I thought you might be bleeding internally,” Sara said later. “If you died, it would have been my fault. If you were me, you would have told, too.”
In the mirror later that night I gasped when I saw the plum-colored bruising covering the backs of my arms, legs, and shoulders from the places where I’d hit the concrete stairs as I fell. Alex sounded alarmed when I told her about it, and looked even more distressed the following weekend when she saw the yellowing bruises on my body in person.
“I wish you’d stop” was all she said.
And we had. Like Rick’s house, acid didn’t seem to fit Sara and me anymore, so we had tried to leave it behind.
That was until Leah and Tess surprised us with the acid. Then we decided we’d do it—one last time.
Sara and I were picky about who we did drugs with, and the second I placed the paper on my tongue I regretted our quick decision to take it with Tess. She didn’t have the right energy for acid. In the fading daylight on the bus she seemed cagey and kept saying she wasn’t feeling it.
“It takes a bit of time to work,” Sara said, rolling her eyes at me and Leah as Tess paced in the aisle on the bus. “When we get to their friend’s house, let’s make an excuse and leave,” Sara whispered to me.
I nodded in agreement.
Inside the guy’s house we were told to sit by his roommates; the guy wasn’t there yet. They were watching a hockey game and drinking La Fin du Monde, which was fitting, since our world felt like it was ending. Tess was toddling around with a giraffe Beanie Baby she’d found upstairs clutched in her hand, claiming she still wasn’t feeling it. I was peaking, and definitely feeling it. Sara called Christina, and, mercifully, an hour later Sara announced we had somewhere to be, and we escaped while Tess was upstairs. As we fled down the front walk toward where Christina was waiting for us, Tess gave chase with the giraffe still in her hand. “Fuck you for leaving me here.”
“Sorry,” we shouted.
She left me a message the following day letting me know how hurt she was. I was too scared to call her back. We haven’t spoken since.
* * *
As I waited at the top of the stairs at Rick’s, I accepted that things between me and Tess were never going to be okay. An hour of small talk and warm beer later, the reconciliation I was hoping to have with Tess by agreeing to attend Rick’s year-end party never happened.
“Sorry,” I said to Leah when I heard Christina’s booming “hello” through the screen door, exactly sixty minutes after we arrived. She and Grace had refused to come to the party with us, but agreed to come get us after an hour.
“If you try and get us to stay, I will leave you there,” Christina warned.
“See ya, Tess,” Sara called into the dark room where Tess was still sitting silently with her back to us. Tess didn’t respond.
“Nice to see you, Tess,” I added weakly, then I turned and walked down the stairs. I felt sorry then that we’d never get the chance to say all those things left unexpressed between us.
As we walked down the front pathway with Christina and Grace, I heard the screen door behind us slam. In the glass of the car parked out front I saw Tess had come outside.
“Go, go, go,” I said quietly to the girls, my stomach churning in fear.
“Fucking ditch pigs!” Tess yelled.
Taking my arm, Christina hissed, “Don’t look back.”
I didn’t.
25. SARA LIGHT PUNK
From the other side of the bedroom wall, Tegan’s voice climbed notes of a melody, her guitar cutting strokes through each word. I resurfaced from a dream. I could see the song forming behind my eyes—black lines of music as unique as fingerprints. When she returned to the chorus, there was a rush of the familiar and the pleasure of hearing her repeat a hook I had memorized after listening to it only once.
My eyes fluttered open. I stared at the Smashing Pumpkins poster on my ceiling. It wasn’t quite life-size, but big enough that I could look straight into each band member’s eyes. I leaned off the mattress and grabbed my electric guitar. I bent my fingers back toward my wrist, recirculating blood into the joints before I twisted the volume knob on the guitar halfway. There was a steady hiss of static from the amp. I took my first big gulps of breath and let out a cry between the changing chords. When I finished, my body tingled like it did in the first seconds after a drag of a cigarette.
I heard Tegan outside my door. “Wanna play something?”
“Sure.”
She sat down on the couch with the acoustic guitar and said, “I’ve been thinking. What about calling our band Plunk?” Immediately, I knew it was right.
“Yes,” I said. “But what is it?”
We laughed.
“Well, we’re punk, but we don’t have a drummer, so we’re kind of—light punk.”
“Plunk.”
“It’s cool, right?” She smiled.
“Yeah, I like it.”
We plucked the fattest string on our guitars slowly, twisting the pegs to tune. I bit down hard between turns, anticipating the snap of the oily bronze E string winding tighter.
“Don’t break it,” said Tegan. There was no way we could afford a new package of strings. If one snapped, we had to play with a gap tooth or replace it with a less important string, which worked but sounded weird. Tegan called out names of songs we both knew. I wanted to ask her about the new song that woke me from my dream, but she bent her fingers into the shape of a power chord and began to crash through the intro to “Smurf Revolution.” I slid my thumb along the back of the guitar neck and dug my ring finger into the skinny high E string. As I plucked out short notes with my pinky, my other fingers started to burn. I dropped out as Tegan started the first verse.
“I stand alone and she knows tomorrow I will go on without her. I know the world we created is fading . . .” She held a long, raspy “Ohhh” before I joined her in unison, shifting to the chorus.
“If I hold my breath until I die, I’ll be alright.” I kept my voice slightly quieter than hers because I sometimes lost track of which part came next.
Tegan shouted through the outro, and I tried filling her pauses with the last half of the chorus melody and lyric:
“She hurts my head!”
“I’ll be alright!”
“She hurts my head!”
“I’ll be alright!”
When the front door of the house slammed closed, we stopped singing.
“I can hear you two screaming all the way down the street!” Mom shouted up the stairs into the hallway.
“We’re practicing!” we yelled back.
* * *
We were preparing to record our first album.
The radio broadcasting classroom at school was cluttered with pieces of audio and video equipment; hulking VHS camcorders, drawers jammed with tangled cords and adapters, and shelves of dusty VCRs. It seemed our teacher, Mr. Kim, was uncomfortable
letting us girls handle the machines unchaperoned; we weren’t afforded the same freedom for our projects as the boys. In the editing bay and at the sound console, he’d often push our hands off the controls and make the desired adjustments himself. If he was too busy to copilot, he’d assign a trusted male student to ensure we didn’t “fudge anything up.”
Before his class, it had never occurred to me to learn how to operate objects more than superficially. I was impatient with technology, anxious for the result and the pleasure of what they produced more than the accomplishment of understanding how they worked. He inspired me to prove him wrong.
“This isn’t just you goofing around, right?” he asked us when we pitched the idea to record our songs for our final project.
“It’s very legit, Mr. Kim,” Tegan said.
“We’re going to use all the skills and knowledge you’ve bestowed upon us this year,” I chimed in.
He squinted at us, tapping the ends of the pen laced between his knuckles on his desk.
“Mr. Kim, you could be the one responsible for helping us make a Grammy Award–winning album,” Tegan said.
Finally, his face broke into a smile. “I knew them when . . . ,” he said. “Alright, but you have to record after school. Last time you had your guitars in here, I got a noise complaint.”
* * *
On the day of the recording, Mr. Kim had Tegan and me run a dozen black cables from the back of the mixing console through the door of the sound booth and out to the main room. We pressed microphones that looked like miniature flashlights into clips and pointed them to the front of our guitar amp. Mr. Kim showed Spencer and Christina how to set the faders on the recording console so that the squares of digital color stayed green, and not orange or red.
“Maybe we should sit? Like we do at home?” I asked Tegan, who was pulling the couches and chairs littered around the room into a semicircle around our setup.
“Just do what feels comfortable. We can always move the mics around if you want to sit,” Tegan said.
Standing with my black electric guitar on my shoulder in front of our friends and Mr. Kim, I felt a spike of jitters. The sunlight from the large second-floor window was like a too bright spotlight, and every gesture felt magnified.
“Rolling!” Christina shouted.
“Okay, we’re starting!” Tegan said into the microphone, launching into the power chords of “Liar’s Club”: “I don’t know what I want anymore. I don’t know who I want anymore. I don’t know who I am anymore.”
When she hit the chorus, I watched Mr. Kim’s face sink.
“Fuck you, fuck me / it’ll never be! FUCK YOU!” Her voice cracked into distortion and Mr. Kim walked quickly into his office and closed the door.
I saw a flurry of activity behind the glass and Christina stuck her head through the door, waving her hand at us. Spencer stepped across the room and whispered, “It’s way into the red! You’re blowing it up!” His eyes darted to the corner where Mr. Kim was hunched over his desk.
“Pull the faders down, it’s fine,” Tegan said off microphone. Spencer and Christina returned to the booth and we started the recording again.
“Instamatic” was a new song of mine, so Tegan put her guitar down and sat on the couch between our friends while I played. As soon as I began, my hand started sliding around on the frets. Hesitating about where the next chord should go, I kept glancing down, and then forgetting the lyrics. I dug my fingers into the strings during the chorus, pushing harder than I usually did at home. Leaning into the microphone, the weight of the guitar shifted from my shoulder to my left hand and I closed my eyes. “You go away, go away! And I don’t mind. You go away, go away! But I’m still fine. You lie, lie, lie, but I still miss you! You, lie, lie, lie but I still need you! It’s your mind that matters most. It’s your mind that makes you mine!”
“Woooo!” Tegan shouted at the end. “Rock star!”
“Rock star,” I said into the mic.
Afterward, we listened back to a few of the songs on the big speakers. It sounded so much better than the songs we’d recorded at home on our stereo. Mr. Kim even seemed excited that we’d pulled it off.
When we climbed into Mom’s Jeep later, Tegan and I talked over each other, recounting every minute of the recording.
“Can you take us to the mall?” Tegan asked. “We want to buy blank cassettes and make copies for everyone at school.”
“And we need a photocopier!” I said.
“For what?” Mom asked.
“For the album cover and track listing! It’ll make it more legit,” Tegan said, putting “legit” in air quotes. “We promised Mr. Kim we’d take this very seriously.”
“We’ll pay you back once we start selling them,” I added.
“Selling them to who?” Mom laughed, turning in the direction of the shopping mall.
26. TEGAN WHO’S IN YOUR BAND?
After we recorded the Plunk demo, we submitted it as our final project for Broadcasting and Communications class before the end of the year. Mr. Kim gave us a perfect grade, and Mr. Russel asked if we’d make a duplicate for him, which we agreed to do.
“Stephanie told me Mr. Russel is getting one, can I get one?” Zoe asked at lunch.
“Me, too,” Christina said. “I was the one who recorded it.”
“Um, I should get one if Christina is,” Spencer said.
Though our group of friends had increasingly become divided about what music we all preferred to listen to at parties—throwing on Mariah Carey and Usher more often than Rancid or Hole as the year came to a close—they’d started asking Sara and me to play more and more. Even the least alternative among us would cheer after we performed. Our friends began requesting our songs by name, and it seemed like they were becoming actual fans of the music we were writing.
“Yeah,” Sara agreed in the hall. “We can make copies for you guys.”
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
“We’ll pay,” Zoe offered.
“Cool.”
Word spread that we were going to make copies for people and by the end of the day, nearly all our friends promised they’d buy one if we made them one, too. Sara and I went to work on fulfilling our first order of cassettes.
“Does it have to be so loud?” I yelled over the stereo at Sara, who sat among piles of tapes. I was pacing by her window, walking off the pins and needles sensation in my legs from sitting in one spot for four hours. I watched the wheels of the tapes spin as our voices were transferred onto the cheap cassettes Mom had bought us.
“Yes,” Sara shouted back.
“Why is there no ‘i’ in ‘Johnny My Frend’?” I asked, annoyed. Sara had written out the track listing, since her handwriting was better than mine. We argued over the names of the songs as we dubbed. Some still didn’t have proper titles, and some we just couldn’t agree on, not even their spelling.
“Because it’s cool.”
“What does ‘Condamnnation’ mean?”
“It’s condemnation, but with ‘damn’ in it instead.”
“Right.”
On the cover, Sara wrote out our band name, Plunk. “We need to call this album something.”
“Who’s in Your Band?” I said without thinking. It was the first thing everyone asked when I told them Sara and I had a band.
“Fuck, yes,” Sara said, laughing. “Who’s . . . in . . . your . . . band?” She wrote it down, and spun the paper to show me.
“Awesome.”
Mom agreed to make copies of the track listing and cover art at work the next day. They were barely in our hands that night before we were racing up the stairs to put them into the cassette cases. When Mom and Bruce poked their heads in later, they laughed at the mess of paper and tapes taking over Sara’s bedroom floor.
“Imagine if they applied this much effort to homework or school,” Mom said. “They’d be on the honor roll.”
I grabbed a red-and-white tape from the pile between us. Dropping it in
the case, I delicately slipped the artwork inside and handed it to them. “Five dollars, please.”
“Ha,” Bruce said, snapping it from my fingers. “I paid for those tapes.”
“Uh, I paid for them,” Mom said, grabbing the tape from him. “Get your own.”
That night when I turned out the light in my bedroom, I put on Who’s in Your Band? and turned it up as loud as it would go in my headphones. Like almost every other night I could remember, while everyone else slept, I listened to music. I had spent hundreds of hours mouthing silently along to the songs of other bands, working myself into a frenzied state flat on my back, in the dark of my room. I’d spent a lifetime projecting myself onto other singers’ bodies, in front of their audiences, on the lip of their stages while locked behind my bedroom door. But that night it was my voice, my songs, my music I heard; my stage, my audience, my body I saw.
At school the next day I swung my backpack around at lunch and unzipped it in the hallway. “Who wants a Plunk tape?”
Our friends crowded around Sara and me, jumping up and reaching to take the tapes from our hands.
“Oh my god, this is so cool,” Grace squealed.
“I can’t believe we can finally listen to all your songs anytime we want,” Zoe said.
“Is ‘Missing You’ on here?” Emma asked. “That’s my favorite.”
“Who’s in your band?” Diego asked.
“Yeah.” I smiled.
“No, who is in your band?”
“It’s just them,” Stephanie said. “They don’t need a band.”
“Well, that’s not really a band, if it’s just them.”
“Yes, it is.”
“You guys wanna buy it or not?” I interrupted.
Diego handed back the tape and dug around in his front pocket. Then he passed me a crumpled-up bill. “Of course I do. I’m going to tell everyone I knew you guys before you were famous.”
