This Song Will Save Your Life (7 page)

But the Thursday after that, Dad had to stay at work late to staff an in-store concert, so I was back at Mom’s house, where everything was the same except for the couch. So much for the power of civil disobedience. After Dinnertime Conversation (topic of the day: fossil fuels. Fossil fuels is always Mom and Steve’s default topic), and after finishing my homework, I walked over to Start.

And it was back. The street was as deserted and dark as always, but Start was happening behind those windowless concrete walls. I could sense it.

Sure enough, when I turned down the alleyway between the warehouses, there was Mel, looming in front of the door. He was talking to some girl in a fur shrug.

“Honey,” I heard him saying to her, “did you kill that thing yourself?”

She muttered a reply.

“Listen. Here’s when it’s okay to wear a dead animal: When you killed it yourself. Or when you are a drag queen and it’s wintertime. Neither of those situations apply here.”

The girl sighed and removed her shrug. Mel stepped aside to let her into the club. “Meat is murder!” he called after her.

I stepped forward. “You’re a Smiths fan?” I asked him.
Meat Is Murder
is one of my favorite Smiths albums.

“That’s my generation,” he said. “I was going out to parties like this one back when the Smiths were still releasing new material. Yes, I am
that
old.”

“So, wait,” I said, “do you actually not allow fur coats?”

Mel leaned down to be on eye level with me. “To be honest, we don’t have a dress code here. That doesn’t stop me from enforcing the standards I want to see, but it’s not an official rule. The flyer just says ‘fix up, look sharp.’”

I looked down at my tennis shoes, jeans, and long-sleeved shirt, already a little sweaty from my brisk walk. “I didn’t do that,” I said.

“No,” Mel agreed. “You could stand to fix up and look a little sharper. But I’ll let it go this time. ID, please.”

Shit. This thing again.

“I … don’t have my ID on me.”

Mel shrugged. “No ID, no entry, honey.”

I stared at him. He stared back at me. This had been so easy when I was with Pippa and Vicky that I hadn’t thought about how hard it could actually be. Of course you need an ID. Of course, as always, there is an arbitrary, invisible fence in place. You can’t see it, but it will always keep you out. It will always encircle happiness and keep you out.

“Are you crying?” Mel asked, his eyebrows knitting together.

“No.” My voice came out higher and more nasal than it was supposed to. “I’m just … Do you remember me, Mel? I was here a couple weeks ago?”

He looked at me for another long moment before his eyes lit up with recognition. “You’re friends with Pippa and Vicks.”

“Yes.” My knees felt weak with relief, and I didn’t tell him that “friends” wasn’t quite accurate.

“Why didn’t you just say that? They’re already inside. You can go on in to meet them.” He went to open the door, then turned back to me. “How well do you know those girls?” he asked.

“Not well,” I admitted.

He nodded. “Then I’ll tell you this: Vicky’s got talent, and Pippa’s got issues.”

“Okay.” I didn’t know what he meant, and I made a move for the door.

“Which do you have?” Mel asked, blocking the entry with his body. “Talent or issues?”

I paused for a moment, thought about this. “Both,” I said at last.

Mel laughed and opened the door for me. “Good answer.”

Inside, “Blue Monday” was blasting from the speakers, and the dance floor was even more crowded than last time. I tried to figure out how many people were packed in there. A hundred, maybe? Two hundred? It was impossible to tell through the flashing lights and everyone constantly moving around and around.

I scanned the crowd and eventually spotted Vicky and Pippa—my friends! Mel called them my friends, so it’s just like they’re my friends!—next to the DJ booth. Vicky was wearing a colorful, flowery dress that looked like a really stylish muumuu, and pink boots that made me briefly long for my unicorn boots. My horribly, horribly uncool unicorn boots.

Pippa was dressed all in black, and her legs went on for miles between her improbably high heels and her improbably short dress. She was clutching a tumbler filled with ice and a brownish liquid. The two of them were posing with their hands in the air for the photographer guy with the big camera.

I pushed my way through the dancing crowd until I reached them. “Hi!” I said, then wondered if maybe they had forgotten me, just as Mel did. Isn’t that funny, to think that the people who have lived in your daydreams for the past two weeks, the people whom you’ve drawn in your chemistry notebook, to think that those people might not even know who you are?

But I needn’t have worried. Vicky recognized me immediately. “Elise!” she shrieked. She even gave me a hug, like she was my mother or Alex.

Basically what I’m saying here is, the only people who ever hug me are the people who share 50 percent of my genetic code.

“Where did you
go
last time?” Vicky demanded, holding me by the shoulders. “We turned around and you were just gone!”

I brushed my fingers across the inside of my left arm and tried to think of a way to answer Vicky, other than just saying,
Sometimes I get overwhelmed
.

“You totally pulled an Irish goodbye,” Vicky went on.

“What’s an Irish goodbye?” I asked.

“It’s when you just take off suddenly and don’t tell anyone you’re leaving,” Pippa spoke up. “And it’s a racist thing to say.”

Vicky rolled her eyes. “One, no it’s not. Two, you’re not even Irish, Pippa. You’re English.”

Pippa shrugged. “They’re still part of the empire.”

“The
empire
?” Vicky screeched. “Now
that
is racist!”

“Hey,” I interrupted, “who is that guy who was taking your photo a minute ago? With the camera that looks like it’s worth more than my life?”

Vicky laughed. “That’s Flash Tommy.”

“Not his real name,” Pippa contributed.

“I think
Tommy
is his real name,” Vicky said.

“Tommy isn’t a real name,” Pippa said. “It’s a
nickname
.”

Vicky turned back to me. “Flash Tommy is a nightlife photographer. He goes out and takes photos of parties and then posts them to his Web site.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because that’s his job,” Pippa said, like this was a real thing, like, “Oh, yeah, any functioning society has got to have its doctors, its teachers, and its nightlife photographers.”

“It’s because somebody has to document our glory days,” Vicky said.

The DJ transitioned into a Strokes song.

“I told him to play this,” Pippa said. “I did this. That’s the best part about being friends with the DJ. You always have somewhere to stash your coat, and sometimes he’ll play songs for you.”

The DJ hopped down from the booth to join the three of us. “Hey,” he addressed me. “You were here a couple weeks ago, right? You look familiar. What’s your name?”

“Elise,” Pippa answered for me. “Like the Cure song.”

I totally saw what Vicky meant when she told me that Pippa
loooved
the DJ. The way she had jumped in to reply to his question, even though it wasn’t directed at her. The way she fluffed her hair. The way she smiled at him. Maybe Pippa read the same study that I did, about how people like you more if you smile at them.

“Hi, Elise-like-the-Cure-song.” The DJ grinned and stuck out his hand. “I’m Char-like-the-Smiths-song.”

I stared at him blankly.

“You don’t know the Smiths?” he asked.

“I know the Smiths,” I snapped, because lord knows you can launch any kind of criticism at me, lord knows I’ve heard it all before, but don’t you
dare
doubt my musical knowledge. There’s not much I can do right, just this one thing, but you cannot take this one thing from me. “I love the Smiths,” I went on. “I just don’t know a Smiths song called ‘Char.’”

“It’s his DJ name,” Vicky explained, rolling her eyes. “DJ This Charming Man.”

“But that’s such a long name,” Pippa continued. “We just call him Char. Short for Charming.” She batted her eyelashes at him.

“Huh.” I narrowed my eyes at him. He was wearing a fitted, unbuttoned sport coat and a skinny blue-and-white-striped tie with dark washed jeans and spiffy white sneakers.

He nodded. “I know what you’re thinking, and I agree.
Charming
is a bit of an overstatement. But at least it gives me something to aim for.”

Pippa giggled. “Who wants to go up for a drink?” she asked, but she wasn’t asking me or Vicky.

Char shook his head. “I have to change the song. Sorry.”

He climbed back into his booth and put his enormous headphones back on. Pippa stayed where she was, like she had changed her mind about the drink. A second later, Char transitioned out of the Strokes and into Whitney Houston, “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me).”

Pippa and Vicky squealed at the same time and started madly dancing. It was obvious to me that Pippa was putting on a show for Char, but when he climbed down from the DJ booth, he made eye contact with me, not Pippa.

“Do you want to dance?” he asked, holding out his hand to me.

“I wanna dance with somebody,”
Whitney sang,
“with somebody who loves me.”

I shook my head, feeling myself blush. “I don’t really dance.”

Char furrowed his brow. “Why not?”

“I … I don’t really know how.”

Char started dancing then, making weird jerking motions with his arms and stomping his feel at awkward intervals, like a spasmodic soldier. “Can you do better than this?” he shouted over the music.

I nodded, smiling despite myself.

“Great! Then you know how to dance.” He stopped doing the soldier moves and grabbed my hand in his. “Just follow my lead.”

“But I don’t know—”

He just shook his head and sang along in a loud falsetto: “So when the night falls, my lonely heart calls.”

He bent his elbow to pull me in toward him, then pushed me back with his arm. It was so fast that I didn’t have time to say anything before, suddenly, we were dancing. He twirled me in toward him, then switched hands and spun me back out the other way. He passed our arms over my head and then around my side. And the whole time he was doing some crazy, complicated footwork. His legs looked like spider legs.

“Watch my face!” he shouted over the music. “Not the floor!”

“I can’t help it!” I shrieked. “I don’t want to fall.”

“You’re not going to fall!” he shouted.

“I feel like I’m on a roller coaster!”

Char stopped spinning me around and pulled me in to him. “I need to change the song,” he said into my ear. “Playtime is over. Come with me into the booth for a sec.”

He led me into the DJ booth. It was only a few feet off the ground, but I felt suddenly like a god, looking down at the party from on high. The wall behind the booth was covered with Post-its on which people had written song requests or notes.
Play some Sabbath! Something with a beat. Do you have anything by the Bluetones? DJ This Charming Man ROCKS!
I watched Pippa and Vicky, just below us, still dancing like maniacs. Vicky was jumping up and down and punching the air, while Pippa swayed on her heels, rolling her shoulders and head around. Pippa stared at me for a moment, narrowing her eyes as if sizing me up for something—though for what, I could not have said. Then she tossed her hair and returned to ignoring me.

“I can dance!” I exclaimed as Char bent over his laptop.

“I told you,” Char said. “Everyone can dance.”

“Well, really it’s that
you
can dance. I just followed. Where did you learn to dance like that, by the way?”

“Church youth group,” Char replied without looking up.

“I don’t believe you.”

“That’s good. That’s a good policy. Try never to believe me unless you absolutely have to.”

“So, where did you learn to dance?”

“My wedding,” Char replied. He transitioned into a Primal Scream song. “I had to take a lot of dance classes before my wedding. You know, for our first dance to Elton John.”

For some reason this gave me a weird pang, which lingered even after I glanced at his ring finger and reassured myself that he was just kidding again. It was like the
I don’t belong here
feeling, sort of. It hit that same place in my stomach.

“Char,” I said, and asked for a third time: “Where did you learn to dance?”

He looked up at me then, though his hand was still fiddling with dials. “I taught myself,” he said finally. “I go out a lot.”

I nodded like I was very wise and knew all about going out a lot.

“How old are you?” he asked me suddenly.

“Sixteen.”

Char hung his headphones around his neck. “I like that.”

“What?” I felt self-conscious all of a sudden, and I crossed my arms across my chest. “That I’m only sixteen?”

He laughed. “That sounds creepy. No, I like that you’re honest. Some girls might claim to be older, you know, so they seem more mature or whatever. You’re not pretending to be anything you’re not.”

“I suck at pretending to be anything I’m not,” I told him, leaning against the booth’s railing. “It’s not for lack of trying.”

He laughed again.

“Your turn,” I said. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen. Twenty in June.”

“How long have you been doing this?” I gestured out at the room.

“I’ve been DJing at Start for a year and a half now. I’m precocious,” he confided.

“Oh, me, too.”

“Really?” He raised an eyebrow. “At what?”

“Pretty much everything. I started speaking in sentences when I was a year old. I could read chapter books by the time I was six. During fourth grade math class, I just sat in the back of the room with my own middle school pre-algebra textbook. My favorite band in kindergarten was the Cure, because I liked their lyrics.”

Why are you telling him this? Do you think this will make him like you more? In all your life, telling people these things about you has never once made them like you more. Don’t you know this by now?