“I don’t want you to go,” I said.
“I’m going to write you a letter on the airplane and I’ll send it as soon as I land in Montreal,” Naomi said, wrapping her arms around my neck. She left me one of her favorite hoodies and a few of her T-shirts. I thought of my mom at boarding school when she was a teenager, burying her face in a sweater her mom knit for her, desperate for the faintest trace of her mother’s scent. I spread Naomi’s hoodie across my pillow at bedtime, closing my eyes and imagining that we were together.
Naomi promised we’d speak on the phone after she’d settled in, and a few days later she called my house, describing in exuberant detail the Montreal suburb that she now lived in and all the new friends she’d made. She told me that Isabelle was being an amazing host, and then Isabelle took the phone and told me in her broken English how much her friends loved Naomi. Listening as they flipped the phone between them, I felt my first pang of jealousy.
When her next letter arrived, scattered through the pages of her swirling cursive was a name: Frederic. “Isabelle’s boyfriend brought his friend Frederic to the party! . . . Frederic and I went downtown and got tattoos! . . . I slept at Frederic’s house last night.” The letter burned in my hands, a betrayal. Even more distressing was the short stack of photographs that she’d tucked inside the envelope. In one, Naomi’s arms were draped across the chest of a thin boy with ratty blond hair, her lips planted in a kiss on his chalky skin. Frederic.
Christina confirmed what I feared: “Naomi’s got a boyfriend already.”
“I know. She sent some photos of him,” I said calmly. I wanted to burn them all.
When I next talked with Naomi over the telephone, she admitted that she and Frederic were having sex and that she was on birth control. She told me these details unashamed, as if I were her best friend, which I was. But she said it like I was only her best friend. If she felt bad about cheating on me, her voice betrayed nothing. Everything I’d feared had come true. Naomi was having sex with a boy. She was irreversibly different from me.
“You there?” She paused. “I miss you.”
I was determined to hide how deeply I was hurt. Silence swallowed me whole.
“My phone card is going to die, it just beeped.”
“But we just got on the phone!” I said.
“I know, I’m sorry. We can talk longer next time.”
As I pulled the speaker from my ear, I heard her say, “I love you!” Another twist of the knife in my heart.
I drank myself blackout drunk at Grace’s house the following Friday. On Saturday morning a lightning bolt of pain woke me up.
“You fell,” Tegan told me when I asked what happened to my wrist.
She and our friends filled the gaps in my memory with embarrassing details. I’d broken a wine cooler; I’d run away. They’d found me in the park down the street, hands bleeding, smoking a joint with a group of boys none of us knew.
I walked across the hall to the bathroom and tried to pull my clothes off without moving my left arm. I climbed into the shower, finally letting myself cry as the water poured down over my skinned knees. Pulling my shirt back on, I noticed in the mirror that there was puke caught in the tangles of my hair. I removed as much of it as I could using toilet paper and my one good hand.
“I tripped,” I told Mom over the phone. “We were running to 7-Eleven.”
This was the story I rehearsed with Tegan before dialing our home phone number.
“Don’t give her too many details,” she told me. “Just act like it was no big deal.”
“I think it’s broken,” I said, using Tegan’s script carefully.
“Really?” She sighed.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, I’ll come grab you.”
Tegan stood in the front window like a worried dog watching for Mom’s Jeep.
“You sure you don’t want me to come?” she asked when Mom arrived.
“No, it’ll be fine.”
I stepped out into the cold air without saying goodbye to the rest of our friends.
“See you later,” I said, closing the door.
“Good luck,” she called after me.
I climbed carefully into the car, wincing when the seat belt brushed my injury. I started crying as soon as the door was closed. Warm tears spilled off my chin and onto my winter coat.
“So, tell me again what happened?” she asked, pulling away from the curb.
“We were going to the store to get chips and we were just racing each other, and I tripped on the sidewalk.”
“Why didn’t you call me last night?”
“I just thought maybe it would feel better in the morning.”
When we stopped at the first red light, she turned and faced me.
“You sure you weren’t drinking?”
“No, we were just running. It was stupid,” I said.
“You look white as a ghost.”
There was something so specific about the comfort that swallowed me whole when Mom took care of me. She pressed her foot to the gas, ran through yellows like an ambulance, and pulled into the parking lot of the hospital like I was bleeding to death.
Only when the doctor rolled the final piece of fiberglass over my wrist a few hours later did I realize how impossible it was going to be to play guitar.
“Let me wash your hair,” Mom offered when we got home from the hospital.
“Okay.” I carried the green apple shampoo from our bathroom down to the kitchen sink.
She leaned my head over the porcelain, twisting my hair in her hands under the stream of warm water.
“I used to do this when you were a baby,” she said.
“Smells like spaghetti sauce down here.” I inhaled deeply, trying not to cry.
Upstairs, I crawled into bed with my clothes on. I hugged the cast to my chest. I wished I could have my entire body encased in one. I felt hurt, inside and out. The lingering feeling humming at the center of my hangover was fear. The black holes in my memory from last night unnerved me. What would have happened if Tegan hadn’t come looking for me? What the fuck was I thinking?
After a few weeks I could wedge my cast around the neck of the guitar without difficulty. Melodies poured out of me in a terrific wave. I wrote lyrics that sometimes felt too close to the bone. I found it liberating to sing as if directly to Naomi: You did this to me. “You go away, but I’m still here. You lie, but I still miss you. You lie, but I still need you.” To date, my songs had mostly been written about other people, characters, or abstractions. I moved the words I couldn’t say to Naomi in my letters or over the telephone straight into my songs.
“Can I hear what you’re working on?” Tegan asked one afternoon.
I was embarrassed to play it for her. I realized that, for the first time since we’d starting writing songs, I hadn’t designated anything for her to sing. It was important for these words to remain mine, and mine alone.
She sat down on the carpet, and I nervously slid my notebook with the lyrics across to her. She scanned what I’d written, her brow furrowed.
“So which part is mine?”
“The verses will just be me, and maybe you can sing the chorus with me?”
“Okay,” she said, underlining the words as I sang them.
“I don’t owe you. No, I don’t owe you anything.”
She quietly mumbled along, getting comfortable with the melody and the timing. When it felt locked in, I stopped playing. “Okay?”
“Cool,” Tegan said, smiling. “Then what?”
“I do this next section alone,” I said, jumping back into the song.
“That’s not right, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be! That’s not right, that’s not my destiny!”
I built up the strumming like I was going back into the chorus, but instead I dropped out suddenly, picking single notes quietly on the electric strings.
“I gave up love tonight. I waited up all night, I can’t be wrong this time. I waited up and I don’t owe you. No, I don’t owe you anything.”
When I returned to the words in the chorus, I banged out big, distorted chords on the guitar, letting my voice go hoarse. “I don’t owe you! No, I don’t owe you anything!” Tegan joined in, her voice matching my ferocity. We repeated the lines again and again. When we finished, I felt lighter.
When I wasn’t working on music, I dialed the phone numbers of my crushes, one by one. When I hung up with Veronica, I called Grace and then Zoe. I felt buoyant and flirty. I loved their voices in my ear, the sugary high of making them laugh, and the quiet, awkward moments when I sensed a secret on their lips. I read my lyrics and poetry into the telephone until I felt high on their attention. At parties I let myself linger too long and too near them in hopes that someone would be as brave as Naomi. And, finally, someone was.
It was a Friday night, and Stephanie was throwing a party in the basement where she and Penny shared a large double room. Tegan and I liked to bring our guitars with us everywhere we went. Even if we were competing with a stereo and the drone of conversation, we’d tuck away in a corner and play our new songs for whoever wanted to listen. That night Zoe and Diego both leaned up against the wall where we were sitting on the carpet. The heat on my face grew warmer each time we finished, and Zoe was still there listening. It never mattered to me how many of our friends stayed, as long as she did.
“What was that last one about?” she asked me when our guitars were back in the cases.
I shrugged.
“Never mind, it’s none of my business. I just liked it.”
It was one of the new songs I’d written about Naomi. I wondered if Zoe knew, or suspected something was going on between Naomi and me. Or did the words make her think of a relationship in her own life? I was too shy to ask.
We returned to drinking, dancing together to Björk in the near dark.
With one eye closing, and the room spinning, I headed for the bathroom. Turning the knob, I popped my head into the harsh light. Stephanie and Zoe were sitting on the floor, facing each other. Stephanie’s hands were flat on either side of Zoe’s face, her thumbs were hooked around each of her ears. They were kissing. I stepped inside the room and closed the door, sliding down hard onto the floor next to them. Zoe leaned awkwardly toward me, slipped a hand around my neck, and replaced Stephanie’s lips with mine. Stephanie sprang up and squeezed past me out the door.
I briefly worried that Stephanie might be angry with me for interrupting, when Zoe snapped the fluorescent light off and found my face again in the dark. Twisting my hips, she pushed me down onto the floor and spread my knees, pressing her full weight into me. My head hit the porcelain toilet.
There was a knock at the door, and once again the light overhead was on. Zoe backed off me and pulled us both up in one swoop. We stepped into the dark hallway and I turned toward Stephanie and Penny’s bedroom, unsure if Zoe would follow. The bodies of my friends were a blur in the soft blue light. They were dancing near the stereo and I went to join them. My heart was hammering as I swung my arms around their shoulders. I tried to move with the music but knocked the whole group off-balance. Crawling into Stephanie and Penny’s room, I passed out on one of their beds.
When I woke up sometime later, there was no movement in the room, and the music was off. Zoe was lying beside me, her eyes wide open, staring at my face. Everything was in focus. Our faces met. She pressed her thigh between my legs, and I felt her hand pull on my zipper. I had wanted this for months. Zoe’s tongue was in my mouth, her hand in my jeans. There was no talking, no flirting, no hesitation. But when I woke up in the morning, she was gone.