Naomi and I spent the summer before grade eleven sleeping at each other’s houses five or six nights in a row. My body pulsed with an urgency to touch her. If I woke in the night and found she wasn’t near me, I’d slip across the mattress and curl around her in the dark. When we were apart, I felt heartsick, preoccupied with all the ways she might die before I saw her again. There were no more discussions about if she was or wasn’t into me, no more panic attacks that we had to be “just friends.” The more time we spent together, the less time she had to think about what we were doing.
At sleepovers, comments from our friends about who was going to sleep where sent bolts of strange electricity down my arms. “Sara and Naomi will obviously take the bed,” someone would say, smirking. If Naomi suffered from their gossip, she didn’t show it. She even started to hold my hand when we were out with our friends, swinging it for everyone to see. We were in love.
In the final week of August, the new house in Renfrew was nearly finished being built. It was a long, skinny house with hardly any back or front yard. “Modern” was what Mom called it. Tegan and I spent weeks covered in dust, sanding baseboards and painting shelves in the closets. We didn’t mind pitching in, especially when the painters were there. We sucked in the fumes to get tipsy while we worked, laughing and singing so that our voices echoed through the house. After work Bruce took us down the street to Peters’ Drive-In for burgers and slipped us each a twenty-dollar bill. Sitting at a picnic table in the parking lot, throwing French fries at the seagulls, I felt happy. This was our new life.
The night before the move, the workshop benches in the garage were stacked with boxes, half labeled in Bruce’s capital letters, and the other half in my mom’s bubbly cursive. Tegan’s bedroom had been packed up for months. Mom had requested she make the walls “less crazy,” but Tegan had gone overboard, removing so much of herself that it turned the space into something institutional.
“I said to clean it up and make it look normal,” Mom said when she saw what Tegan had done.
Naomi and I finished packing up my bedroom. All that remained was the guitar and my mattress. We spread out on it, soaking up a few more hours until she had to go to work. I played her my new songs, and then some silly lyrics, trying to make her laugh. I adored the way she pursed her lips and focused intensely on my face while I was performing. She was my favorite audience. She pulled the guitar out of my hands and we lay on the bed, facing each other. I had a bad habit of staring over her shoulder at the red numbers on my alarm clock, calculating the time that remained.
“Stop looking,” she said, covering my eyes with her hands.
“Maybe you can call in sick?”
“I can’t.”
“But I’ll die if you leave.”
Her face scrunched up. “I have to tell you something.” She sat up, resting on her elbow. “I got accepted into an exchange program. I’m going to live in Montreal for three months next year.”
I’d become so accustomed to her surprise attacks of guilt about our sexual relationship that when I realized that she wasn’t breaking up with me, I felt light-headed with relief. I pulled her back down onto the bed with me.
“You’re not upset?”
“No.”
“I didn’t want to say anything until I knew for sure,” she said. “I didn’t think I’d actually be accepted.”
“What about your parents?”
“They’re fine about it.”
“What about Christina?”
“I’ve only told you so far.”
I was struck by how afraid I would be if it were me transplanting to a city where everyone spoke a different language, where I didn’t know a single soul. I thought about Tegan and the way she’d suffered at leadership camp in elementary school, the daily phone calls home during which she couldn’t stop crying. After each telephone call, I’d curl into the fetal position on the couch, immobile, devastated that I couldn’t do anything to help her.
“Aren’t you afraid to go alone?” I asked.
“No, I’m excited! Plus, I’ll be with the exchange student, Isabelle.”
I’d failed to consider the stranger that would complete the exchange. Isabelle was set to arrive in Calgary at the start of the school year and would live at Naomi’s house. I imagined the hours they’d spend together on the bus, traveling to and from school, speaking together in a language I didn’t understand. A hollow feeling opened up in my chest.
“We’re never going to see each other.”
“Of course we will.” She curled up against me.
“I just don’t get why you would do this.” My eyes watered with tears and I pushed my palms against my face.
Naomi sat up, pulling my hands off my face. “Please, don’t cry.”
“You said that Aberhart was a great school!”
“It is.” She stopped. “It’s not about school. I want to experience something new.”
I twisted away, turning my back to her.
“Nothing’s going to change between us!” she said, moving closer to me on the bed. “We’ll write each other letters and talk on the phone!”
“That’s not enough.”
She pressed her face onto my shoulder. “It has to be,” she whispered.
The next day, after the moving truck was empty and had pulled away, Mom, Bruce, Tegan, and I took to our corners of the new house, tearing open boxes and scurrying with our belongings from shelf to shelf. Tall stacks of flattened cardboard were bound in the garage next to dozens of black garbage bags stuffed with bubble wrap. I loved the newness of the house. It smelled like paint and plastic, and a chemical scent wafted from the carpets. A clean slate.
The walls of my bedroom were painted lilac, and the carpets were a deeper plum, colors that Tegan and I had been allowed to pick for ourselves. I flopped down onto the bare mattress and stared up at the ceiling fan I’d helped Bruce install the week before. There were three huge windows, and a walk-in closet with another window in it, that looked out onto the street. The room was big enough for a couch, a TV, a stereo, and the electric guitar and amp that Mom had bought us as an early sixteenth birthday gift. It was the best bedroom I’d ever had.
In Tegan’s room, I stood in the doorway as she dragged her mattress from one wall to the next, searching for the perfect spot. She always picked the smaller, darker room. Examining the wooden bench seat near the window, we agreed it would be a terrific place for us to hide drugs. She’d already marked up her ceiling with glow-in-the-dark stars.
“Is Naomi sleeping over?” Tegan asked, flopping down onto her bed.
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“Alex told me Naomi’s going to Montreal next year.”
That Tegan and Alex were talking about Naomi gave me an off-balance feeling in my legs.
“Are you sad?”
I shrugged. How could I explain how afraid I was that Naomi might meet someone else without acknowledging the fact that we were dating?
“Alex told me there’s a French girl coming to live with her.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I hope she likes the same music as us.”
“And the same drugs.”
I laughed.
When I’d told Naomi my worries that Isabelle was going to be a stuck-up preppy girl who’d figure Naomi and me out and tell on us, I’d hoped she would dispel my fears. Instead, I’d watched her face stiffen as she considered for the first time the risks this living arrangement might pose. In junior high when rumors about girls kissing other girls at sleepovers spread through the school, I immediately felt implicated. It wasn’t me at the center of the drama, but it could have been. There could be nothing worse than being called a lesbian.
Especially if you were one.