High School Read online

  Advance Praise for

  by Tegan and Sara

  “One of the most interesting and brave coming-of-age stories I have read in many years. Tegan and Sara reveal the confusion, the unraveling of personal truths, the fear, the excitement, the shame, and the seclusion that many of us endure as we make our way through the world. This is also a book about how music saves people, how music gives us a voice and a reason to keep going.”

  JANN ARDEN, singer-songwriter and author of Feeding My Mother

  “To navigate the experiential landscape of high school is always an emotional minefield. To have Tegan and Sara unabashedly share the perspective of young lesbians is a rare and invaluable gift, the kind of empathetic education our society is starved for.”

  K. D. LANG, singer-songwriter

  “What a gift to read the coming-of-age story of the brilliant Tegan and Sara. High School gives us a glimpse into the struggles and triumphs of both sisters as individuals and an evolving band. Their vulnerability, honesty, and compassion burst through, and I know [it] will make countless people feel less alone. It is so important for the LGBTQ+ community to have memoirs like this to be able to recognize themselves and be inspired to follow their truth. Oh what I would have done to have this book in high school. I am endlessly grateful to Tegan and Sara for giving so much to this world.”

  ELLEN PAGE, actor and producer

  “It should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever listened to a song by Tegan and Sara that while not only are they able to convey the raw and complex emotions of the high school experience, the aimlessness of suburban life, and the exhilaration of finding your way out, they also speak universal truths about intimacy between families and sisters, friends and lovers. They’ve captured a time and a place so perfectly, I can’t exactly be sure that I wasn’t there.”

  BUSY PHILIPPS, actor and author of New York Times bestselling This Will Only Hurt a Little

  “A genius memoir. Tegan and Sara are massively gifted songwriters, so it shouldn’t have shocked me like it did. There’s simply nothing like it. It’s a completely original, utterly gripping, gorgeously written and captivating memoir that must be read. Tegan and Sara are bold, brilliant storytellers. High School is the freshest, most beautiful, and fearlessly powerful coming-of-age memoir.”

  AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS, New York Times bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Toil & Trouble

  “Tegan and Sara have pulled back the curtain on a formative chapter in their lives and offer a gloriously dizzying, richly observed account of how they became who they are today and what inspired the music we’ve come to know and love. Funny, frank, and so very cool, High School is basically the teenage best friend I always wanted growing up.”

  DAN LEVY, actor, writer, and producer

  “Intense, vulnerable, and life-affirming—everything I’m looking for! Tegan and Sara take us back through their whirlwind journey, densely packed with the intricate complications and the envious, unspoken connection of growing up [with] an identical twin.”

  ABBI JACOBSON, comedian and author of I Might Regret This

  “Candid, tender, courageously honest, and heartbreakingly familiar; I could see myself and my own experience reflected in these stories, more so than in anything else I’ve ever read. Reading this book moved me deeply.”

  JULIEN BAKER, singer and songwriter

  “Deeply moving, relatable. . . . High School never holds back from the absolute authenticity Tegan and Sara have become known for. I never wanted the book to end.”

  CLEA DUVALL, actor and writer

  “High School highlights the indisputable fact that Tegan and Sara were never just musicians—they are master storytellers. In reflecting on that torturous span of time spent agonizing over one’s body, friendships, parents, and desires, this book highlights how high school is less of a place or memory but a metaphor for uncertainty, and underlines the salvation that can only be found in music. High School foreshadows the beginning of a rich and riveting literary career.”

  VIVEK SHRAYA, musician and author of I’m Afraid of Men

  “This account of the pains and pleasures of dirtbag queer-girl adolescence is everything you could want from a memoir: honest and hilarious, dishy and sweet, smart and self-aware, and utterly charming. What a gift to get this view of Tegan and Sara as sisters, as friends, and as artistic collaborators, as they were becoming musical icons, and—more important—themselves.”

  CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of Her Body and Other Parties

  “An engrossing, sharply crafted, deeply authentic look at the misery of (queer) adolescence and the gorgeous glory of becoming yourself. So much angst and revelation, depression, inebriation, inspiration, vulnerability, and power. A wild, teenage ride I could not put down.”

  MICHELLE TEA, author of Against Memoir

  “High School embodies the singular gift of words leaping off of the page and becoming feelings, rattling around in the hearts and minds of a reader. The truth of nostalgia is that it must have multiple lenses to operate in its most flourishing form. Much like in their music, in this book the voices of Tegan and Sara are two distinct bodies of water flowing into the same harmonious river, spilling through the echoing hallways of old high schools, through the bedrooms of first heartbreaks, through the old haunts that remind you of your own. This book is a triumph of memory, affection, and engaging writing.”

  HANIF ABDURRAQIB, author of Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest

  “This book is the LSD-fueled, wallet-chained, Kurt Cobain–inspired handbook of how to become young, queer rock stars, written by chapter-swapping twins whom I wish I had read when I was in high school. This book would have changed everything. I recommend reading it under the covers with a flashlight, and hiding it from your mother.”

  IVAN COYOTE, author of Tomboy Survival Guide and Rebent Sinner

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE (SARA)

  PROLOGUE (TEGAN)

  INTRODUCTION: WILD ROSE COUNTRY (SARA)

  GRADE TEN

   1. WELCOME TO HIGH SCHOOL (TEGAN)

   2. GRADE-TEN DIRTBAGS (SARA)

   3. EVERY BUS RIDE’S A GAMBLE (TEGAN)

   4. ACID (SARA)

   5. WE’RE HOLDING IT FOR A GUY (TEGAN)

   6. NAOMI (SARA)

   7. YOU CAN’T SAY “FAG” (TEGAN)

   8. SUICIDAL TENDENCIES (SARA)

   9. BASKET CASE (TEGAN)

  10. LET’S RAVE (SARA)

  11. TEGAN DIDN’T GO TO SCHOOL TODAY (TEGAN)

  12. HULA HOOPS AND CHAINSAWS (SARA)

  SUMMER 1996

  13. A SUMMER ABROAD (TEGAN)

  14. MONTREAL (SARA)

  GRADE ELEVEN

  15. LATCHKEY KIDS (TEGAN)

  16. SEX NOTE (SARA)

  17. WHY DOESN’T THIS FEEL RIGHT? (TEGAN)

  18. THE HAIRCUT (SARA)

  19. YOU WON’T BELIEVE WHAT HAPPENED (TEGAN)

  20. HOMOSEXUAL

  21. MY GIRLFRIEND HAS A BOYFRIEND (SARA)

  22. LOOKING FOR A HERO IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES (TEGAN)

  23. SWITCHBLADE (SARA)

  24. DITCH PIGS (TEGAN)

  25. LIGHT PUNK (SARA)

  26. WHO’S IN YOUR BAND? (TEGAN)

  27. I’M MAKING YOU SICK (SARA)

  SUMMER 1997

  28. SOMETHING’S MISSING (TEGAN)

  29. BOYFRIEND (SARA)

  GRADE TWELVE

  30. THE HICKEY (TEGAN)

  31. PSYCHO (SARA)

  32. WE’RE NOTHING LIKE THEM (TEGAN)

  33. CAREER AND LIFE MANAGEMENT (SARA)

  34. DON’T BELIEVE THE THINGS THEY TELL YOU, THEY LIE (TEGAN)

  35. NEW YEAR’S EVE (SARA)

  36. BACK
TO REALITY (TEGAN)

  37. GARAGE WARZ (SARA)

  38. THE FIRST CUT IS THE DEEPEST (TEGAN)

  39. QUITTER (SARA)

  40. SARA AND TEGAN (TEGAN)

  41. WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT LOVE? (SARA)

  42. THE PRESS CLUB (TEGAN)

  43. I NEED SPACE (SARA)

  44. COGNITIVE DISSONANCE (TEGAN)

  45. CONFESSION (SARA)

  46. I WAS ALREADY GONE (TEGAN)

  EPILOGUE

  EXPELLED (SARA)

  UNDER FEET LIKE OURS (TEGAN)

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ILLUSTRATIONS

  FOR OUR FRIENDS IN THE HALLWAY, MOM, DAD, AND BRUCE. WE CAN ALWAYS GO BACK.

  —SARA AND TEGAN

  SARA PROLOGUE

  I have no visual memory of Tegan before we were four years old. There is proof of her existence: scores of photographs of us posed together on couches, sitting on laps, or standing side by side in our cribs. But, the snapshots in my mind contain no trace of her. What I can summon is the feeling of her. As if she existed everywhere, and in everything.

  In preschool, a lump was found in her left arm that required surgery. We were separated for the first time since birth. On the first day of her hospital stay, I was left in the care of another woman with a set of twins, the same age as Tegan and me. While her children played together, I sat on the floor of their bedroom, stunned by my sister’s absence. On the second day, I lay on our grandmother’s living room couch with a fever. Opposite me, I registered the empty space.

  Without Tegan I had become me. And it was awful.

  TEGAN PROLOGUE

  When we were three years old, Sara suffered from a bout of night terrors. I have a vivid memory during that time of her flat out on her back, in the hallway outside her bedroom, her pajamaed limbs flailing, and my parents on either side of her trying to calm her down. In the memory, I am reassured by my mom and dad that Sara is okay, that everything is fine. But I am left uneasy, unsettled.

  When I shared this memory years later, my mom and dad were quick to correct me: it was me who suffered from the terrible dreams all those years ago, and Sara who watched from her bedroom at the end of the hall. I have it backward, they insist.

  I wonder frequently how many of the memories I carry of Sara are actually my own. How much of my early life have I confused with hers? Our tangled nature makes even me feel interchangeable with Sara—indistinguishable, bound, and suffocated. There is often a violent urge in me to tear those early memories of us apart, even if just in my own head. But I admit, there is also great comfort that comes from traveling through life with a witness, an identical twin to corroborate your version of things.

  SARA WILD ROSE COUNTRY

  Imagine the map of Canada. If you placed your finger on the Pacific Ocean just north of the U.S. border and dragged it east across the Rocky Mountains until the topography flattened out and the states of Idaho and Montana were stacked below, you’d find the city of Calgary sprouting between the foothills and prairie of Alberta. In the 1970s an oil boom doubled the city’s population and sent skyscrapers shooting up along the bank of the Bow River. The cold mountain water sliced the wealthy western quadrants into north and south before it converged with the Elbow River, vertically splitting the city’s southeast side in two. Beyond the suburban sprawl was a sea of mustard yellow farmland thick with barley, and in every direction a sky blue as the ocean. From September to early June, temperatures dipped as low as minus thirty degrees Celsius and snowstorms buried entire streets of cars under snowbanks frozen like waves in midcurl. When the chinook winds from the west raised normally frigid temperatures above freezing, people swarmed the streets in short sleeves. The summers came and went quickly, and the long, desert-dry days were broken up by storms that rolled in from the south and the east in cinematic scope. Hailstorms of golf ball–size ice exploded windshields, split foreheads, and dented cars. The sun didn’t set until 10:00 p.m.

  My twin sister, Tegan, and I were born at Calgary General Hospital on September 19, 1980. Our parents had met six years earlier at Saint Mary’s High School. Both arrived in Calgary under duress as teenagers: my father an orphan from Vancouver, and my mother fresh from Catholic boarding school in Saskatchewan. Our mother briefly dated our father’s brother, and our father dated our mother’s best friend. After graduation, our father took a job working at a lumberyard, and our mother attended community college, where she earned a diploma in youth and child development. They began dating in the autumn of 1977 and married in June of 1978. With money for the down payment from our grandfather, they bought a house, and our mother became pregnant with twins. Thirty-two weeks later, we were prematurely born into the world eight minutes apart. Baby number one, born at 5:56 a.m., was my sister, Tegan Rain Quin. Baby number two was me, born at 6:04 a.m. and given—according to my mother’s retelling—her second-favorite name, Sara Keirsten Quin. When Tegan and I finally left the hospital a month later, we were still so tiny that our mother dressed us in doll’s clothing.

  By all accounts we were extremely easy babies, soothed by the sight of each other, delighting in hand-to-hand combat for hours on a blanket spread out on the living room floor. Our parents’ marriage, however, was difficult. Our father often seemed depressed and prone to long silences that stretched for weeks; our mother was explosive and at her wit’s end. They separated in 1984, and our dad took off for Mexico. When he returned a few months later, he slept in one of a set of wooden bunk beds in the unfinished basement of our house, his alarm clock casting a hellish red glow. The summer before Tegan and I started grade one, he moved out for good and the divorce was finalized. In 1987 our mom started dating Bruce, a handsome man who worked at a steel mill and drove a Camaro. He moved in with us in 1990, and though he and our mother were not married, we referred to him as our stepdad.

  In the early 1990s, after Calgary’s economy bounced back from a recession, Bruce and our father worked for competing construction companies that built large houses in the subdivisions multiplying at the edges of the sprawling city limits. Tegan and I spent Saturdays with our father, who moved annually between sparsely furnished apartments and newly built homes. We lived with our mother and Bruce in half a dozen neighborhoods before we finished junior high. Mom hated the suburbs and the identical houses that duplicated and tessellated like cells, so she and Bruce bought a plot of land in the inner-city neighborhood of Renfrew and began to draft a blueprint for a new home.

  Our relationship with our mother had grown difficult during our adolescence, but on this one fact the three of us could agree: the move would bring us near to the heart of the city. For our mother, it was a signal that we were moving up in the world. For Tegan and me, Renfrew’s proximity to the record stores, skate shops, and fast-food restaurants downtown meant freedom. In the spring of 1995, a land title for the house was submitted to the school board, proving our intention to relocate to Renfrew the following year. Though we would continue to live in the suburbs while the new house was being built, an exception was made and Tegan and I were officially enrolled at Crescent Heights High School. After Labor Day we started our first day of grade ten. This is where our story begins.

  1. TEGAN WELCOME TO HIGH SCHOOL

  “Tell her to get out. Tell her to leave us the fuck alone,” Sara screamed as we brawled and Mom tried to separate us. “Naomi’s my best friend. Tell her to get one of her own.”

  It took all the air from inside me when Sara said it, like a bad fall.

  The summer before we started high school, Sara and I were virtually estranged. During the day you could find me moping in the basement of our baby blue two-story house, deep in the suburbs of northeast Calgary, watching TV alone. If I wasn’t there, I was in my room with the door locked, playing music so loud my ears rang. While my mom and stepdad, Bruce, were at work, Sara and I either aggressively ignored each other or were at each other’s throats. We fought, mercilessly, for time alone, but I still felt a pr
imal fear of being apart from her, especially as high school loomed. I was plagued with anxiety dreams all summer, in which I wandered the halls of our school searching for her. The dreams stoked the dread I already felt, adding layers of questions I avoided in the light of day like I avoided Sara. We hadn’t always been like this.

  Naomi had complicated things. We met her in grade nine, our final year of junior high, when the French immersion program she was enrolled in moved to our school. Naomi was small, blond, with lively, sparkling green eyes. You couldn’t miss her in the halls. She dressed in brightly colored clothes and said hi to everyone. She oozed friendliness and kindness. Around her, a tight-knit pack of equally cool-looking girls we’d nicknamed the Frenchies was always with her. Sara and I became fast friends with all of them, but Naomi drew Sara and me in closest. For a time, we were both Naomi’s best friends. This was nothing new; Sara and I had always shared a best friend growing up. Our shared best friends acted as a conduit between us: we confessed to them what we couldn’t tell each other, and knew they’d pass along the message. We seemed to prefer it this way. But at the end of grade nine, Naomi and Sara forced an abrupt unraveling of this friendship after Naomi told us she and some of the other Frenchies planned to attend Aberhart High School, instead of Crescent Heights, like us, that fall. After that, Naomi and Sara acted as if Naomi were being shipped overseas, rather than across town. They isolated themselves as summer started, hid behind the locked door of Sara’s room, and left me out of their plans for sleepovers. I felt confused, injured, abandoned. I instigated violent clashes with Sara in front of Naomi when they left me out, further damaging whatever bond remained between the three of us. It was war.

  * * *

  After the fight, Mom followed me back to my room, where she watched as I sobbed on top of my bed, gulping back lungfuls of air, trying to calm down. Mom was an intake worker on a mental health line, working long shifts that meant Sara and I were free to kick the shit out of each other without a referee in earshot all summer. Throughout most of our lives, she balanced school and work, getting first a bachelor’s and then a master’s in social work while holding down a job. She was also a cool mom, someone our friends could confide in when they had problems at home or school. “Your mom’s so easy to talk to,” my friends constantly told me. But as she watched me cry, I felt her analyzing the situation, and me, and I felt resentful; I just wanted to be left alone.