Текст книги "This Song Will Save Your Life"

Автор книги: Leila Sales

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Текущая страница: 10 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

13

When I got to our lunch table on Tuesday, Sally and Chava were already seated. With some guy. Seriously. Sally and Chava knew a guy, apparently. His hair was dyed slime green, he had a fake septum piercing, and his face was riddled with acne scars.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not blaming anyone for having pimples. At this particular lunchtime, I myself had one massive pimple on my chin and one that looked kind of like a mini unicorn horn right in the center of my forehead. These things can’t be helped. But here’s what can be helped: removing your fake nose ring and using it to more effectively pick at your pimples while sitting at a lunch table with Sally and Chava. Which is what this guy was doing.

Nonetheless, he was a guy.

I sat down. “Hello, friends.”

“Elise!” Sally cried in delighted surprise. “You’re just the person I wanted to see.”

“Sure,” I said.

“This is Russell,” Sally went on. She reached out her arm as if to put it around him, but then she seemed to think better of it and just pointed instead.

“Hi,” Russell wheezed out around a mouthful of his burger.

Chava started to laugh cheerily. I stared at her. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that Russell is so clever!”

I unwrapped my peanut butter sandwich.

“Why don’t you tell Elise that funny story you were telling us earlier?” Sally prompted him.

As Russell launched into a description of this one time when his online role-playing game turned particularly violent and he had to resort to inhumane tactics to save the day, I let my attention wander. As I gazed into the distance, who did I see walking toward my table but Emily Wallace. She led a group of five beautiful people. Her hair swished with every step she took, and she carried her books in a gleaming leather shoulder bag.

This was one of the other rules that started at some point, maybe around eighth grade. It turned out that it wasn’t cool to carry your school supplies in a backpack. I didn’t know that it wasn’t cool to have a backpack. It used to be cool, I think. Even after Lizzie Reardon told me not to, I still kept using my backpack. Because textbooks are heavy. Do girls like Emily Wallace never ache from the weight of all those books?

I could hear Emily’s high-pitched voice float above the din of the cafeteria. “Yeah, we had so much fun,” she was telling her minions. “It was way overpriced, though. Like, six dollars for a hard lemonade? But these college guys fully offered to buy us drinks. We left kinda early, though. Petra’s mom would have lost it if we’d stayed out any later. I mean, it was a Thursday.”

“Hey!” I heard Petra object.

“The bouncer was kinda weird, though. I mean, he…”

And at that moment, Emily’s eyes met mine. I resisted the urge to look away, to play ostrich. Instead I stared right back at her, and I tried to send her this message through my eyes: Don’t you dare talk about Mel like you know him.

Emily’s voice faltered. She blinked and looked away. Then she made an abrupt turn and led her posse down an aisle toward their table in the center of the room, away from me.

I had never seen anything like it.

“So do you want to?” Russell was asking, and it took me a moment to come back to earth and realize he was speaking to me.

“Do I want to what?” I asked.

He coughed a number of times, his hacking getting louder and louder until I half expected him to expel an owl pellet. Sally flinched away, like he might be contagious. At last, Russell coughed out, “Do you want to go to the summer formal with me?”

Chava clapped her hands delightedly. She is a sucker for romance.

“Me?” I asked.

Russell nodded a bunch and slurped down his Coke, which seemed to help with the coughing.

“Do you even know my name?”

He nodded again, less vigorously.

The Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal is a relatively new addition to the Glendale High social calendar. It used to be that there was only one formal dance at the end of the year, and that was prom. Obviously. Only juniors, seniors, and their dates are allowed to go to prom, so this led to some seriously immoral and occasionally illicit maneuvering on the part of lower classmen trying to score tickets. Two years before I started at Glendale High, some sophomore girl apparently offered to tell everyone that she had given a senior guy a blow job in exchange for him agreeing to take her to prom as his date.

At this point, the school administration must have realized that they desperately needed an occasion for freshmen and sophomores to spend their money on; thus, the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal was born. It’s now a very big deal among the community of people who care about school dances, and almost no one bothers to bribe or blackmail her way into actual prom anymore.

I breathed out, slowly. “Thank you for asking me, Russell,” I said, “but I’m afraid I already have plans that night, so I won’t be able to make it.”

“You don’t even know what night the formal is,” Sally pointed out.

This was true.

“It’s in two weeks,” Chava piped up.

“Two weeks from Saturday,” Sally said.

I nodded. “I have plans.”

Russell didn’t seem terribly devastated. He didn’t say anything like, “Don’t leave me, my love!” He said, to Sally, “Can I go now?”

She shrugged. He took off, leaving his burger wrapper and soda cup behind.

“Wow, Elise.” Sally turned on me. “You really are a snob, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?” I blinked.

“All your journal entries about how nobody at this school is good enough for you. I was always like, ‘Oh, she can’t really mean that.’ But you do mean that.”

“Sally, what are you talking about? Who do I think I am better than?”

“Russell!”

“I don’t know Russell. Where did you even find him?”

“He’s a freshman,” Chava said.

“So what was he doing here?” I asked.

“He wanted to ask you to the formal,” Chava explained.

Suddenly it all became clear to me. “You wanted him to ask me to the formal.”

Silence from my friends.

“You made this poor freshman come over here and ask me out. Why? Just so you’ll have company at the dance, Sally, so you won’t have to stand there alone like always?”

“No!” Chava sounded shocked.

“For your information,” Sally snapped, “I won’t be alone. Larry Kapur asked me to be his date.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know how to respond to this. “Um, that’s great, Sally.”

“I just thought it might be fun for us to double-date,” she said. “Share a limo or something. You know, like friends do.”

“Plus,” Chava said, “you’re always talking about how no boys ever like you and how lonely you are.”

“I’m not,” I said, flashing back to last Thursday night, Char’s mouth on mine, our bodies pressed together—

“You know, in your journal,” Chava said. “We didn’t want you to be sad anymore. That’s all. So that’s why we encouraged Russell to ask you to the dance.”

“Encouraged,” Sally repeated.

“We didn’t say he had to. We just wanted you to know that boys do like you. Like Russell.”

I thought of Char’s breath in my ear, his tongue on my neck, his hands on my stomach.

“Thank you,” I said. I shook my head, like I was trying to shake Char right out of my mind. “That’s really sweet of you guys.”

And it was, actually. That was the surprising thing of it. I’d assumed Sally and Chava had some malicious or at least self-serving reason for “encouraging” Russell to ask me out, because in my experience, when my classmates acted like they were trying to help me, they were usually just trying to help themselves. But all my DJing had taught me something about reading a crowd. And when I read Sally and Chava right now, all I saw in them was exactly what they claimed: they wanted me to be happy.

It was weird. But being friends with Vicky had made me realize that some people were just like that. Some people were nice to you, simply because they liked you.

“So will you go to the dance, then?” Sally asked.

I smiled and took a bite of my sandwich. No matter how pure my friends’ motives were, they were not getting me into any non-mandatory school event. “I really do appreciate it, guys,” I said. “But no way.”

*   *   *

During my DJ set on Thursday, Pete came over to the booth. He scribbled a note on a Post-it, stuck it to the hem of my dress, and walked away.

I picked it up. When you’re done playing, come talk to me, it said.

Pete didn’t have to wait long. I was done about twenty seconds later, when Char ran over. “What did Pete want?” he asked me.

I shrugged and showed Char the note.

Char’s forehead wrinkled. “I’ll take over. You should go talk to him, I guess. I’m right over here if you need backup.”

That didn’t sound good. I smiled weakly and climbed down from the booth.

I found Pete sitting alone on a stool at the bar. “Elise!” he exclaimed, adjusting the brim on his fedora. “DJ Elise. Wait, you don’t have a DJ name, do you?”

“DJ Elise is fine,” I said.

“Do you have a last name?” he asked.

No one at Start knew my full name: not Char, not Vicky, not Harry. But Pete was a real grownup. He clearly expected me to have a real name. “It’s Dembowski.”

“It’s great to talk to you again, Elise Dembowski,” Pete told me. I hadn’t seen him since the first time I met him, when Vicky was trying to get his attention. He booked Start, but he didn’t come every week. Tonight he was wearing loose jeans, a plaid button-down shirt, and a dad-like haircut. The only giveaway that he wasn’t an elementary school teacher was his hat.

“Do you know what I want to talk to you about, Elise?” Pete asked.

I could think of a lot of options, none of them good. He wanted to talk to me because he’d found out I was only sixteen, for example. Or he wanted to talk to me because Char was supposed to have gotten permission to let me DJ Start with him, after all. Or maybe Pete wanted to talk to me because it was against the rules for two DJs to hook up with each other.

Some people will tell you that honesty is the best policy, but I disagree. In instances like this, I fully believe that feigned ignorance is the best policy.

“No,” I said. “What do you want to talk to me about, Pete?”

He smiled. “May I buy you a drink?”

I narrowed my eyes. If this was some trick to catch an underage drinker, I wasn’t falling for it. “That’s okay, thanks.”

Pete nodded. “I hear you. I don’t drink, myself.”

My gaze flickered to the glass on the bar in front of him.

“Ginger ale,” he explained. “I’ve been on the wagon for five years. I used to party way too hard. I gave up all the substances back then, but I’ve never been able to give up the scene.”

“What made you stop drinking?” I asked, interested despite my concern that this was all some elaborate setup to get me banned from Start forever.

“Well, I was at the Mansion one night—do you know the Mansion? Downtown? No, never mind, you’re too young. Anyway, I was at the Mansion and accidentally sober. We’d all taken ecstasy, but I’d gotten mine from some shady dealer—shadier than normal drug dealers, if you can picture that—and I guess he gave me a placebo pill, hoping I wouldn’t notice. But I definitely noticed. We were all on the floor, dancing and talking and hitting on girls, and I had this moment where I looked at my friends and realized they were all acting like idiots.”

I laughed a little. I couldn’t help it.

“I know,” Pete said. “Obviously people on drugs act like idiots. Didn’t we all learn that in junior high? But I didn’t get it until I saw it. It was chilling, I tell you. Anyway, that was my moment.

“Three months earlier my girlfriend at the time had overdosed on painkillers and spent a week in the ICU, all hooked up to IVs and shit. But that was not my wake-up call. My wake-up call was at the Mansion. The next day I enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and every other Anonymous club I could find. I even remember the song that was on the speakers the moment it happened, when I decided I wanted to quit, start a better life.”

“What song?” I asked.

“LCD Soundsystem. ‘All My Friends.’ I still go back to it sometimes, even now. When I’m tempted by something I shouldn’t do, I’ll listen to that song, and it reminds me of the life I don’t want anymore.”

I pursed my lips. “That’s a pretty powerful song.”

Pete stared into my eyes, like he was searching for something inside me. “A great DJ can do pretty powerful things.”

I stared back at him, willing myself not to look away.

“Elise,” he said, “do you want your own night here?”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“Your own night. Here, in this space. Char DJs Start on Thursdays, and he does a great job, but I want to expand. I want a Friday night party. The big time. It’d be all you. Whatever kind of music you want, however you want to set it up. Costumes, bands, decorations, your call. And you’d get paid, obviously. Ten percent of the bar ring, if that’s okay with you. We can negotiate it later. You can charge a cover at the door, if you’d rather make the money that way.”

“Wait.” I held up a hand. “That’s what you wanted to talk to me about?”

Pete nodded. “It’s a weekend night, so it’ll be more crowded than this. People will stay out later, too. I need to know if you can handle it.”

“But I’m just—” I began, then stopped myself before I finished with “a kid.” “I haven’t been doing this for very long,” I said instead. “I’m sure you could find someone with more experience…”

Pete took a swig of ginger ale. “If you’re saying that you’re sure I could find some thirty-six-year-old guy who’s spun ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ so many times that he’s able to play Tetris on his phone while he’s DJing, while chugging Red Bull so he can stay awake until four a.m., then yeah. I’m sure I could find that guy, too. But I don’t want that guy. I want someone with something to prove.

“Char probably told you that I first booked him to play Start when he was barely eighteen years old. This was back when Start was at the Harts Lofts, you know, before the police busted that place and we moved down here. Char was just a kid with a big mouth who really wanted to be cool. I remember thinking, I should kick this guy out, but I could tell that he genuinely loved the music. And he had talent. But, Elise, believe me when I tell you this: your talent, your natural talent, puts Char’s to shame.”

I shifted on my bar stool. “Char’s an amazing DJ.”

“I’m not denying that,” Pete said. “He wouldn’t be here if he weren’t. And it’s not a competition. But you have got the goods to be big. Really, really big. If you want this, then I know you can do it. So just tell me: do you want this?”

My body felt as if it were filled with electricity, and I started to smile. “Yes,” I said quietly, like I was signing a legal contract. “Yes! I want this. When can I start? Tomorrow?”

Pete chuckled. “Why don’t you give me a little time to promote it, get your name out there, so we can make sure people actually show up. We’re going to make a star of you. Let’s say two weeks from tomorrow. Ten p.m. Yes?”

“Yes,” I said to him. “Thank you so much. I can’t even tell you how much this means to me.”

Pete tipped his fedora to me. “Just make sure you do something powerful,” he said, “and that will be thanks enough.”

I almost floated away from the bar. I needed to share this with someone. I needed to tell Vicky right now. I needed to tell Char. Fortunately, I saw that Vicky was standing right next to the DJ booth. I ran across the dance floor toward them, kicking up my legs behind me … then slowed to a walk when I saw who was with them.

Pippa.

“You’re back!” I exclaimed. “How was Manchester?”

“What the bloody hell is your problem?” Pippa spat at me.

I took a step backward. I tried to catch Vicky’s or Char’s eyes, but they were both staring at the floor.

“I don’t…” I began, the electricity seeping straight out of my body.

“My mum makes me leave the country for all of a month and a half, and you think this is an opportunity to just jump right in there and start banging Char?”

Shit.

“Pippa, it wasn’t like that,” I tried.

“Oh, really? What was it like? Did you wait a whole week after I was gone? Come on, do you think I’m an idiot? If you were trying to keep your little romance a secret, maybe you shouldn’t have let Flash Tommy photograph it. We do have the Internet in England, you know.”

I saw Char wince.

“Pippa, honey,” Vicky said gently, “it wasn’t Elise’s fault.”

“Oh, so she just accidentally pulled Char one night? And what about you?” Pippa turned to Vicky. “You never mentioned this to me because you thought I wouldn’t care, or because you weren’t brave enough to tell me?” Her voice rose and her tiny hands clenched into fists as she stared down Vicky and Char. “I was gone for six weeks. You can’t both just replace me!”

“That’s not fair,” Vicky said in a low voice. “You’re my best friend, Pippa. I missed you every day.”

“Just tell me why you did it,” Pippa demanded of me, and I could see her long lashes fluttering as she blinked back tears. “Why did you have to steal him?”

Why did I do it? I didn’t know. I didn’t have a reason, really. Char kissed me, so I kissed him back. I hadn’t thought of it as stealing him from Pippa. He had told me he wasn’t interested in her. He didn’t want to be her boyfriend. How could I have stolen him if he was never hers?

“Do you love him?” Pippa asked, her voice pained.

I glanced over at Char. He was still studying the floor.

It was a ridiculous question. Did I love Char? Did I feel about Char the same way I felt about the Beatles, string instruments in pop songs, the way Little Anthony sang high notes, the way Jerry Lee Lewis played piano?

“No,” I said.

Pippa frowned. “So why, then?”

Because you were swept away by someone liking you.

I took a deep breath and tried to explain. “I didn’t know. I feel sometimes like … there are all these rules. Just to be a person. You know? You’re supposed to carry a shoulder bag, not a backpack. You’re supposed to wear headbands, or you’re not supposed to wear headbands. It’s okay to describe yourself as likable, but it’s not okay to describe yourself as eloquent. You can sit in the front of the school bus, but you can’t sit in the middle. You’re not supposed to be with a boy, even when he wants you to. I didn’t know that. There are so many rules, and they don’t make any sense, and I just can’t learn them all.”

“Well, here’s a simple rule for you, Elise,” Pippa snapped. “Don’t steal your friend’s man.”

And she turned on her heel and marched toward the bar.

Vicky ran to catch her. Char started after them.

“Char,” I said, catching his sleeve. “I have something to tell you.”

He pulled himself free and said, his voice clipped, “It’s not really a good time, Elise.”

“Oh.” Of course, he was right. Pete’s giving me a Friday night party seemed silly and irrelevant now. No one was interested.

I had a sudden flash of wondering just how Char was going to take that news. He would be proud of me. Wouldn’t he? Proud that he had taught me so well that Pete would trust me with this?

Yes, of course, Char would be proud.

But maybe I wasn’t so sure of that, because I let the subject drop.

“Can you take over the decks so I can deal with Pippa?” Char asked me.

I nodded mutely. He turned away again. “Char,” I blurted out. “Am I going over to your place later tonight?”

I sensed instantly, staring at Char’s half-turned shoulder, that I had broken yet another unspoken rule. To ask for what I wanted.

My question seemed to hover in the air between us, while I wondered what it would be like to have a real boyfriend. Someone who you could make plans with. Someone who called you when he thought of you. Someone who would say that he wanted you to come over. I wondered what it would be like to be Sally, and to have Larry Kapur tell you that he wanted to take you to a formal dance. Someone where you didn’t have to guess.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” Char said. “Not tonight. It would just upset Pippa even more if we went home together.”

“You’re right.”

Char reached out and squeezed my shoulder briefly. “Thanks for covering for me, Elise. I owe you.”

Then he went to the bar to handle Pippa, and I went to the booth to handle the music, and that was the last we spoke all night.

I liked being up there in the booth, separate from everybody. Pete was right: I was good at it, and it was safe. But on a night like tonight, it was lonely, too.

*   *   *

When I was done, I walked home for the first time in weeks. When I reached my mother’s house, I eased open the front door into darkness and then closed it behind me as quietly as I could. I leaned back for a moment, resting my head against the door. Home safe.

Then someone screamed.

I bolted upright.

“Alex?” I whispered.

A pause. Then my little sister emerged from the shadows, brandishing an empty paper towel roll like a sword.

“Are you okay?” I asked softly.

“What are you doing here?” she hissed. “You scared me!” She didn’t quite lower the paper towel roll, like she still wasn’t sure whether she would have to physically fight me or not.

“I’m sorry, honey,” I said. “I just went for a walk.”

Alex stepped forward so I could see her better. “Now?” she asked. “It’s the middle of the night.”

It was much later than the middle of the night. “I couldn’t sleep,” I explained.

Alex blinked a few times, then asked, “You’re not sick again, are you?”

And I knew we were both thinking about September, when I was rushed to the hospital and then had to miss weeks of school, because I was “sick.” I felt a sudden surge of love for my baby sister. Even if no one told her what was going on, she was no fool.

“No,” I said. “I’m not sick.”

“So why—” Alex began, at which point I decided that the best defense was a good offense.

“What are you doing up?” I asked.

Alex twirled the paper towel roll around in her hands. “Working on my poetry castle,” she said. “Come see.”

She led me into the sunroom. The cardboard castle sat proudly in the middle of the room, flags flying from its two turrets. Paper and markers were spread out all over the rest of the floor.

“It looks great,” I told her.

Alex looked at it critically. “I still need to paint the front,” she said. “And I need to finish writing the poems. I’m going to sell poetry, and I don’t know how many people will want to buy them. I need to be sure I have enough. Everyone in the whole school is coming, even the fifth graders. And all the parents. You’re coming, right?”

“Of course,” I said. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“How many poems do you think people will want to buy?” Alex asked.

“Well, I’ll want to buy at least ten,” I told her.

Alex nodded like she had expected as much. “I need to write more poems,” she concluded.

“But, Alex,” I said, “you don’t have to write them now. You have two whole weeks. It doesn’t have to get done at three o’clock in the morning.”

“I know that,” Alex said, picking up a piece of paper and carefully setting it on top of the stack inside her castle. “I wanted to do it now.”

I looked into her gray-blue eyes and saw myself in them, as clearly as looking in a mirror. Building a miniature record player for my dollhouse long past bedtime. Teaching myself to code a Web site under the covers, so my dad wouldn’t come in and tell me to go to sleep. DJing alone in my bedroom in the dark. These things could always wait until daylight, but I wanted to do them in the night.

“I’m going to bed, Poet Girl,” I said. “Want me to tuck you in?”

Alex tapped the end of a marker to her teeth, considering. “Okay,” she said at last. She put down the marker and followed me upstairs.

“Alex?” I whispered in the darkness of her bedroom. “Can you not tell Mom and Steve that I went for a walk tonight?”

“Okay,” Alex said, snuggling into her covers. “Don’t tell them that I was working on my castle either.”

I wrapped my arms around her and she kissed my cheek. It wasn’t the person who I’d thought would be kissing me at the end of tonight. But it was better than ending the night alone.