by Sara Quin
“Sure,” I said.
“Cool.”
The first time we showed up to jam, Kevin suggested we play Justin, the bass player, and Corey, the guitar player, a few of our songs. They all nodded along, smirking and smiling to one another.
“I told you,” Kevin said from behind the kit.
But Corey suggested we start with learning the ones they already had written and rehearsed. I felt off balance, in part due to the beer I’d drank before while we waited for them to get off work, but also because it was weird to sing lyrics I hadn’t written, and even harder to strum along to chords I didn’t know the names of.
“Just sing,” Corey suggested to me after I hit the wrong chords enough times. He wasn’t cruel about it, but it stung. I could feel him growing impatient when I’d squint to watch his hand, trying to see where to move my own fingers. I had no technical knowledge of the guitar, not the way I did with the piano. I had no way of knowing what a C chord was when he called it out. Sara gave in before me. Opting to wrap the mic cord around her hand, she flopped on the couch, and I felt jealous of the casualness of the move. Eventually, I put away my guitar and joined her.
I wasn’t sure I liked playing with them. On the phone the next night I told Alex they seemed a bit old.
But when Sara told me Kevin had invited us to come jam with them again and that Corey thought we were really talented, we caved to the shine of their attention.
A half dozen rehearsals later, Kevin announced our first real gig. “It’s on Halloween at Travis’s friend’s house.” Travis was the part-time trumpet player. He was twenty-five.
“Maybe we could play one of our songs there, too,” I suggested.
Kevin perked up behind the drums. “Yeah, for sure,” he said. “That’s a good idea. Corey, let’s let them play one of theirs.”
Corey didn’t say much, just lit a cigarette and mumbled, “Go for it.”
“Ready.” Sara nodded toward me. “This one’s called ‘Christ Comes Quickly.’ ”
Sara started to pick out the intro on her electric guitar. Kevin found the tempo and started to follow along with his kick drum. Then Sara started to sing. “Late at night, when the stars are eating you alive. Does it make you sad, does it make you cry deep down inside?”
I nodded to Kevin, trying to give him cues to show him we were moving to a new section.
“In your dreams when the blood falls in your arms. If I fall, will you catch me?”
I jumped in, yelling, “Will you catch me in your arms?”
We sang the chorus together, both frantically strumming power chords in unison as we built to the second verse. Kevin pounded away behind us.
“Does it bother you, does it bother you, does it bother you? Yes, it does,” we yelled. “She opens her eyes, there is no fire, she’s a liar.”
When we finished, Kevin slammed down his drumsticks on the snare. “That was awesome.”
Corey let a long plume of smoke out and smiled. “It was awesome.”
We had to bargain with Mom to get permission and a ride to the party. “It’s our first real gig,” we begged.
“Are there going to be parents there?”
“Mom. No.”
“It’s Kevin’s friend’s house, Mom. They’re all like, in their early twenties.”
“You’re not going to do any drinking? Right?”
“No, Mom. Please.”
She dropped us out front. Even from the street, you could see the house was packed. As she waved through the front window, she looked nervous. I tried to look confident as I waved back, but I was nervous, too.
Kevin came bounding toward us. He was dressed as a surfer. He darted around other adults in costumes who were smoking and drinking in the living room.
“Where do we go?” Sara asked awkwardly. “I didn’t realize we needed costumes.”
“No, no, no. You guys look great. Here,” he said, grabbing the handle of my guitar case. “We’re set up downstairs. Corey’s there tuning the guitars. Come on. You guys want a beer?”
“No!” we answered together.
When we were ready, Kevin got on the mic and shouted for everyone to come downstairs. The rumpus room filled quickly—it seemed like there were about thirty people. They looked so tall and drunk, but the costumes made it seem less serious somehow, and I told myself to relax. I felt my knees wobble a little as I stepped toward the microphone. When the crowd quieted down, I leaned in and cleared my throat. “We’re . . . the Dragonflies.”
Kevin counted off the top, “ONE, TWO, ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR.”
As we exploded into the song, I felt the adrenaline of the packed room of people who didn’t know us propel me forward, eviscerating the nervousness I felt before we started. The sound system they’d rented was so loud my ears rang between the first two songs, but I was having fun. It was the first time I felt like I was in a real band. People were moving to the songs and smoking in the small space. If I squinted I could imagine we were in a bar or a club, playing a real gig, rather than Travis’s friend’s basement.
In junior high, Sara and I had gone to gigs at nearby community centers to watch local bands play, and I’d dreamed of standing on the stage where they were, singing into a mic over music that filled the space and people in front of me. We’d performed plenty of times now for our friends, but this reminded me how those gigs had made me feel all those years earlier: happy. We were doing it. We were in a band—a real one.
When we finished the last Dragonflies song, the crowd cheered and the five of us pretended to be done until they called us back for an encore.
Kevin leaned in and said, “You guys play one of your songs.”
“So, we have one more song,” Sara said. “Tegan and I wrote it. It’s called ‘Don’t Believe the Things They Tell You, They Lie.’ ”
Everyone cheered.
As soon as we started, I felt a different energy fill the room; somehow there was still space for more. Goosebumps popped up, and I memorized their faces as we reached the pre-chorus where Sara sweetly sang the lyrics, “I don’t want to be a liar, but I do it every day. I don’t want to be so tired, but I can’t sleep anyway.” As she sang the last line she started to growl, “Don’t believe the things they tell you, they lie.” I spun the volume up the rest of the way on my electric guitar and slammed into the final word frantically. Behind me, Kevin was doing the same on the drums. When we stopped, the entire room lit up.
“They loved you guys,” Corey said afterward.
“I think they were just being nice,” I answered sheepishly as I locked my guitar case. It was obvious which song had gotten the largest cheer, and I felt guilty it had been ours.
“No, they weren’t. You guys have something. It’s special. Your songs are powerful.”
My chest expanded as I absorbed the compliments. I trailed Sara up the stairs, and at the door, a friend of Kevin’s stopped us. “What are you doing playing with these burnouts?”
“One day we’ll say the famous Quin sisters played a gig with us,” Kevin said, grinning with all his teeth showing. “Stay for a beer.”
“We should go.”
“Yeah, I guess it’s no fun partying with a bunch of old guys, huh?” He chuckled.
“Nah, you guys are cool. But we promised our mom.”
“Their mom,” the friend said to Kevin, laughing. “How old are you guys?”
We shuffled outside into the cold without answering to wait for Mom.
“I don’t think I want to play with them again,” Sara said, eyeing me.
“Do you think Naomi will be upset if we quit?” I was glad Sara felt the same as me. And glad she said it first.
“No, she doesn’t care what I do.”
“Are you sure?”
“I think we should just do our own thing. The band’s cool, but the way the audience reacted to our song—I don’t know, it’s something else. We just need to keep doing our songs.”
“I think so, too.”
W
e didn’t formally quit the band, but after we turned down a few invites from Kevin to come jam again with the Dragonflies, he stopped calling. Naomi never seemed to care, or at least she never said she did. And when Kevin would appear when we were over at their house, he always stopped and asked how we were doing, what was happening with music, if we’d written any new songs. We returned easily to being his little sister’s friends, and I put the Dragonflies out of my mind. Besides, Sara was right, what we had was different, unique, and there was only room in it for us.
35. SARA NEW YEAR’S EVE
“Don’t have the party,” we told Wendy, over and over. Only the naive or insane would offer their home to feral teenagers for an unchaperoned New Year’s Eve blowout. Wendy’s invitation to host seemed particularly suicidal given that her parents kept their home meticulously decorated. The impeccable ivory carpet and white baby grand piano seemed especially vulnerable. But how the party might advance her reputation must have proved too intoxicating; she ignored our pleas. And before the holiday break, word spread that Wendy’s house was the place to ring in 1998.
“Do her parents know about the party?” Mom asked us when we told her.
“Of course!” Tegan answered, truthfully.
Wendy’s parents had even organized to take her younger sister to a hotel for the night. What she hadn’t told them was just how many people she’d invited.
“We don’t have to go. There are other parties,” Tegan said to me later.
“Maybe it won’t be as bad as we think it will be,” I said, knowing full well that it would be worse.
The first sign that things had gone sideways was that no one had removed their shoes. When Tegan and I arrived, the house felt damp with intruders; the muddy footprints at the top of the basement stairs seemed especially ominous. Already there was a large dent in one of the walls, the result of someone being pushed violently from behind. A crowd of students perched atop the baby grand with cigars hanging out of their mouths. They were rapping along with the hip-hop blasting from massive wooden speakers while their boots dripped ice and gravel on the floor below their feet. A trail of blood snaked its way through the upstairs, evidence of a knife fight that had started in the formal living room between the leather sofas. I floated through these scenes, recognizing almost no one. Tegan begged me to leave with her and Spencer, but I was conflicted about abandoning our friends.
“We should do something,” I said.
“Like?” Her eyes opened wide, and her chin jutted toward me.
“Call the police?”
Tegan closed her eyes, shaking her head.
Upstairs, huddled in a bedroom, I dialed 911 and pleaded with the operator to break up the party. The dispatcher took the address, but she was far from empathetic.
Back downstairs we found that Christina and Grace had crawled under the massive dining room table with the cordless phone; Christina was hitting redial to 911 over and over, pretending each time to be a different neighbor calling in, oblivious that the phone number betrayed her. Kids spilled into Wendy’s parents’ bedroom and onto a pullout couch, clawing at one another and disrobing, oblivious to any audience. Sloppy threats between exes quickly turned violent. It seemed sobbing girls had locked themselves in bathrooms on every floor. Scattered between the basement and the upper level, we drank with abandon, and occasionally refereed or offered moral support to heavily made-up girls with hoop earrings and blunted bangs who were crying or trying to fight one another. Cars loaded with teenagers circled the cul-de-sac menacingly and flashed their headlights through the windows into the crowded, darkened rooms. The house felt infested, every corner and hallway corrupted. A group of us finally abandoned the chaos, no longer convinced we were safe or able to help control what was full-on mayhem.
“I feel bad,” I said as we closed the front door and carefully maneuvered over the icy sidewalks to Spencer’s car.
“We warned her,” Tegan said.
“But—” I looked back at the house.
“We’ll come back, Sara. I’m not spending New Year’s Eve with strangers.”
In the back seat I awkwardly squeezed in next to Naomi and her new boyfriend. We’d met him at a party at Naomi’s a few weeks earlier. I’d watched him drunkenly mime having sex with a male friend, while an audience of Aberhart kids I didn’t know well laughed. He’d left his malt liquor sheathed in a brown paper bag, and I couldn’t decide what offended me more—mocking gay sex, or a rich kid hiding his cheap beer like he was poor. Later I’d told Naomi that he seemed gay.
“You think everybody’s gay,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
* * *
Tegan directed Spencer to an affluent neighborhood in the northwest part of the city for the countdown. I sulked. I knew that invading the next party would feel as jarring as entering the previous one. Tegan had grown closer with Alex and Naomi’s friends from Aberhart, and their excitement had an alienating effect. When we pulled up to the house, it was brightly lit. Inside, a dozen people were smoking pot, sitting cross-legged on the carpet, jamming on acoustic instruments. Alex ran over to greet us, and for the first time that night, Tegan looked happy. Our intoxication made us clumsy and loud, and we filled the air with shrill accounts from Wendy’s party. At first, I reveled in their looks of genuine shock. Then I began to wish that the details of our night didn’t line up so closely with the assumptions held by this group of people about what happened on our side of the city.
“I can’t believe you had to call the police!” someone said.
We nodded our heads solemnly.
“Aren’t you worried?”
“There was nothing we could do,” I said.
Guilt about the crisis unfolding elsewhere weighed heavily on my mind, and after midnight I felt relieved to be back in Spencer’s car, on our way to the northeast and back to Wendy’s.
“I hope they’re not pissed at us for taking off,” I said from the back seat.
“They probably didn’t even notice we were gone,” Spencer said.
When we pulled up to the house, we could see through the windows that the rooms were emptied of people.
“Maybe the police finally came?” I said.
“Holy fuck,” Tegan said, pointing at the garage door. A dent the size of a car had crumpled it like paper.
Inside, the destruction was immediately and frighteningly visible. There was dried blood on the carpet and sofa, and chunks of drywall and dust collected at the bottom of the stairs. I ran my hand along the hole in the wall; the shape was the size of a wrecking ball. In the laundry room, someone had defecated in the washing machine atop a pile of towels. A kid was attempting to remove it with garbage bags wrapped around his hands. The remaining guests were crowded onto a basement couch. Wendy sat drunk and bewildered in the center of them. Zoe was long gone, but Stephanie remained at Wendy’s feet.
“It’s not that bad,” Stephanie reassured her.
Tegan and I piled back into Spencer’s car, dragging Naomi and Christina with us. A car parked down the street flashed its lights at us. As we pulled a U-turn away from the house, the car followed. As we approached the entrance to the highway, the car was still following us—too closely.
“They’re definitely following us,” Christina said. The air in the car felt colder than outside; our breathing fogged the windows, adding to the confusion. Spencer stayed frighteningly quiet. At a stop sign, three men suddenly piled out of the vehicle, bats and pipes raised stiffly over their heads, clumsily lunging on black ice toward the back of our car.
“Go, go, go!” we screamed at Spencer. He stomped on the gas pedal, and we fishtailed, then shot across the intersection, the back tires letting off a screech.
“Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god!” Naomi gasped beside me. The scenario unfolded again at the next traffic light, and we had no choice but to run the red.
“The police station, at Franklin mall!” Christina called out.
“We should do that,” Tegan said, clutching at Spe
ncer’s shoulder. In the dark, the angles of his jaw protruded as he clenched his teeth together.
“Spencer!” I yelled.
“I’m thinking!” he called out.
As each light turned from amber to red, a collective moan of fear would gurgle up from our chests, and Spencer would twist his head left and right without lifting his foot off the gas. We’d cleared half a dozen intersections when he suddenly jerked the steering wheel of the car to the right, making a harrowing entrance onto the highway. But the car followed, and the speed with which they pursued us became an additional threat.
“Please don’t crash,” I said, gripping my jacket collar.
“Hold on,” Spencer said. “I’m going to take the exit to your house.”
We skidded across the solid yellow line and onto the off-ramp. The car behind us couldn’t follow, and we all let out a scream of relief. Spencer parked on a dark street and extinguished the headlights. We collapsed to the floor, the breath from our bodies labored and fogging up the interior windows. We stayed like this for what felt like an eternity. When it seemed the coast was clear, Spencer turned the key in the ignition and drove cautiously to our darkened house.
Tegan ran upstairs to our parents’ bedroom and the rest of us remained downstairs on the couch, afraid to even turn on a light.
“She said it’s okay,” Tegan told us a few minutes later. On any other night, Spencer wouldn’t have been allowed to stay over, but Mom and Bruce were concerned, and we were given permission to head down to the basement together. We stretched out two to a couch, feet to feet, and recounted the night’s horrors. We were relieved to be finally safe.
In the morning, Stephanie and Wendy called the house to request empty bottles and cans for a fundraiser to help pay for the damage done the night before. The totality of the wreckage had provoked empathy from Wendy’s parents, not rage, and the resulting punishment seemed illogically minor. There was little humility from any of us on these calls, but no one dared to say, “I told you so.” Later with Christina, we bonded over how different our punishment would be if it had been one of our moms’ houses that had been destroyed. Boarding school? Forced to live with our dads? Jail?
