“Tess said we should bring a guitar over and play at Rick’s house this weekend,” Tegan said on our walk to school.
“Really?”
I tried to imagine us carrying our acoustic guitar into the bedlam of that house, singing campfire-style on the couch pocked with cigarette burns or the rotten carpet stained with beer. The only music I ever heard coming out of the speakers was thrash punk and occasionally No Doubt, if Tess threw punches and blocked the guys from changing it. I was afraid we might cross paths with the girls who’d beaten me up a few weeks earlier. Tegan didn’t seem nervous at all. For once I let her confidence fill me up.
The night we took our guitar to Rick’s it was frigid. The kind of cold where every car and bus on the road exhales great plumes of smoke. The hems of our pants dragged under our heels and became soaked and muddied, our feet completely numb. Leah carried the acoustic guitar from the bus stop with her hand wrapped in her sleeve, telling us, “Save your precious fingers,” in a monotone.
She was dressed even less appropriately than us in only a hoodie, which she’d tightened around her head and face. When we crossed through the entryway at Rick’s, I saw a dozen eyes turn and stare at the guitar case in her hand. We were often razzed by the older boys who hung out there, but the guitar seemed to provoke something crueler.
“Oh-ho!” a guy named Phillip bellowed. “Since when is this a coffee-house?” He reached his hand down to the stereo next to the couch and turned up the volume.
“You sure you know how to play that?”
“ ‘Free Bird’!”
“Play Nirvana!”
“Look at those groupies!”
When Tess came down the stairs, she flipped her middle finger up at them like a switchblade.
“Fuck you. And you!” She leaned in, sneering close to their faces. “AND FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, YOU!” She finished with her finger dug into Phillip’s chest.
They went pale and turned their eyes back to their video game.
Upstairs, Rick sat in the corner of his bedroom, stoned, his skin washed with blue light, his eyes cut like slits across his face. Tess closed and bolted the door. Tegan opened the case, and our friends found spots to sit on the mattress. Rick lit a joint, and generously passed it around. Leah pulled frozen bottles of beer from her bag. Tegan started noodling on the guitar, twisting the pegs, trying to bring the guitar’s tuning into focus. Then she started to sing. The jeers and hollering from the boys in the living room rose, but we shifted our bodies closer to hear Tegan’s voice. Tess, in particular, seemed transported. The energy that vibrated through her like a seizure all but stopped. She could have been asleep.