![]() When I’d exhausted myself, I stood looking out the window at the moon. I crept to the bathroom and once again sat sobbing into a towel. That night I woke up anguished, replaying the conversation with Zoe again in my head until This is your last song.” Singing those words, I felt tears roll off my chin. This is the last song that I’ll sing for you. “This is the last song that I’ll write for you. It was the only thing I knew how to do to make myself feel better. ![]() In my bedroom I sat cross-legged on the carpet with my guitar and began to work on a new song. Words that screamed back at me from the page. I went home that day with pages of new lyrics furiously etched with thick pencil in my notebook. Should Straight Actors Play LGBTQ Characters?.It was as if I were sucked into a void alone, the finality of her words as permanent as death. “I don’t feel that way about you,” she said softly. I waited for her to respond, a hundred steps ahead, imagining with her a future that I’d never quite allowed myself to see before with a girl. I shifted the phone from one ear to the other. I pressed my face to the metallic screen of the open window. “I told him that we were just talking, and that you told me. “Dustin asked if there was something going on between us.” Why had I waited so long to talk about it with her? Years of drunken hookups and flashes of undefined moments between us clouded my vision. “I thought we should talk about last night.” I buried my face in my shirt. When she moved to the bedroom and the line grew quiet, I gritted my teeth and said what I’d spent all day rehearsing. I could hear her mother’s voice and the television in the background. When I couldn’t stand to be at home or I was feeling guilty about something I’d done, the sterility of our bedroom at his house-the bunk beds we’d had since we were five years old, the comforters from before that-was a place to reset, to disappear. I called Dad and asked if it would be okay for me to stay with him that night. On Sunday morning I woke with a fireball in my guts worse than any hangover. When Spencer finally cleared us out of his parents’ house after midnight, I watched Zoe climb into Dustin’s yellow sports car, her face streaked with tears. It had a gay story line, and during the scenes where the two leads were having sex, Dustin kept his head bowed, refusing to watch. Over the summer we’d gone to see All Over Me in the theater. When he and Zoe started dating, I took solace in the fact that his religious beliefs prevented him from having sex with her. He’d started showing up at raves with Diego the previous summer. He was a born-again Christian and didn’t swear or drink alcohol. In his tracksuit, he looked like the coach of a sports team, or a youth minister. They found a spot near the wall and sat down together. Her boyfriend, Dustin, was doing the same, their hands interlocked. A few minutes later I watched Zoe taking wobbly steps over everyone’s legs and the backpacks littering the carpet. I rejoined my friends in the living room, pulling my toque a little lower over my eyes. I sat on the floor with my head in my hands after she’d shut the door behind her. She turned to the door as if her boyfriend might be waiting right outside. “I’d trade all of it for you,” I blurted out. How I’d imagined myself a thousand times living with her in the shabby apartment from the photograph she’d taped to her bedroom wall-surrounded by the pyramid of beautiful girls she’d lived and danced with the previous summer. made me think of her-vast, permanent things, like the sun. I wanted to tell her how everything I knew about L.A. “I’m going to go to Los Angeles and be a backup dancer for Janet Jackson.” You’ll probably get out of Calgary before I do,” she said. “Our mom says we can’t sign the record contract until September. I smiled, letting my knee rest against hers. She rested her bare feet in her hands as she spoke. “There’s so many crazy things happening to you guys, huh?” Zoe was drunk, one of her eyes half closed. It was one of the last Fridays of the school year, and Spencer offered to throw a party at his house. The recipient of this admission was a friend, Zoe, an aspiring dancer, whose name looped in Sara's mind "like a song." ![]() ![]() In this exclusive excerpt from the book, Sara recalls the first time she explicitly confessed to someone els-and, more importantly, herself-that she was gay. One way in which the stories of Tegan and Sara, who both identify as queer, differ is in their coming out processes. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play ![]()
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