I mean, my god, you used to cry the first day of school, every single year, because you weren’t allowed to be in the same class together.” “I don’t know why you two aren’t getting along anymore. 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. “Your mom’s so easy to talk to,” my friends constantly told me. She was also a cool mom, someone our friends could confide in when they had problems at home or school.
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.
#TEGAN QUIN FREE#
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. It was war.Īfter 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. 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. They isolated themselves as summer started, hid behind the locked door of Sara’s room, and left me out of their plans for sleepovers. After that, Naomi and Sara acted as if Naomi were being shipped overseas, rather than across town. 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. 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. This was nothing new Sara and I had always shared a best friend growing up. For a time, we were both Naomi’s best friends. Sara and I became fast friends with all of them, but Naomi drew Sara and me in closest. Around her, a tight-knit pack of equally cool-looking girls we’d nicknamed the Frenchies was always with her. She dressed in brightly colored clothes and said hi to everyone.
Naomi was small, blond, with lively, sparkling green eyes. 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. The dreams stoked the dread I already felt, adding layers of questions I avoided in the light of day like I avoided Sara. I was plagued with anxiety dreams all summer, in which I wandered the halls of our school searching for her. We fought, mercilessly, for time alone, but I still felt a primal fear of being apart from her, especially as high school loomed. While my mom and stepdad, Bruce, were at work, Sara and I either aggressively ignored each other or were at each other’s throats. If I wasn’t there, I was in my room with the door locked, playing music so loud my ears rang.
#TEGAN QUIN TV#
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. The summer before we started high school, Sara and I were virtually estranged. It took all the air from inside me when Sara said it, like a bad fall. Tell her to leave us the fuck alone,” Sara screamed as we brawled and Mom tried to separate us. This is the origin story of Tegan and Sara. A transcendent story of first loves and first songs, it captures the tangle of discordant and parallel memories of two sisters who grew up in distinct ways even as they lived just down the hall from one another. Written in alternating chapters from both Tegan’s point of view and Sara’s, the book is a raw account of the drugs, alcohol, love, music, and friendships they explored in their formative years. While grappling with their identity and sexuality, often alone, they also faced academic meltdown, their parents’ divorce, and the looming pressure of what might come after high school. High School is the revelatory and unique coming-of-age story of Sara and Tegan Quin, identical twins from Calgary, Alberta, growing up in the height of grunge and rave culture in the ’90s, well before they became the celebrated musicians and global LGBTQ icons we know today. First loves, first songs, and the drugs and reckless high school exploits that fueled them-meet music icons Tegan and Sara as you’ve never known them before in this intimate and raw account of their formative years.
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