Текст книги "This Song Will Save Your Life"

Автор книги: Leila Sales

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

7

My hands were shaking when I arrived at Char’s home on Sunday afternoon. I had texted him earlier in the day to ask if he was free to teach me about DJing, and he wrote back, SURE! COME OVER @ 3 AND WE’LL MAKE MUSIC :) So he had invited me here, I reminded myself.

But still. That didn’t mean he actually wanted me here. As I rang the buzzer to his apartment building, I imagined him, maybe with a bunch of his friends, hiding behind a parked car, watching me, laughing, and saying, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she actually showed up. Like she believed I was serious!”

That wasn’t what happened. What happened was that Char answered the door, looking like he had just woken up, but nonetheless happy to see me. “Hello!” he said. “If it isn’t Elise, the precocious DJ.”

I gave him a silent glare. I don’t need to take a bus all the way across town on a weekend for someone to make fun of me. I can do that just by going to school.

I had told my mom that I was spending the afternoon at Sally’s house. I briefly considered telling her that I’d made a new friend and I was going to hang out with him, figuring she would be delighted to hear that my social life was blossoming. Then I decided that, because my new friend was a nearly-twenty-year-old male whom I’d never seen in daylight before, maybe my mom didn’t need to know.

“Did you bring your laptop?” Char asked.

I held it up for him to see.

“Excellent. Let’s do this.”

I followed Char as he bounded up four flights of stairs and then down a short hallway. He was wearing cutoff jeans and a plain red tee with a small rip in the back, and he had a Chicago Cubs baseball cap jammed down over his unruly hair. In this outfit, he still looked like the Char I knew, but he also looked like somebody else. Like he could have been any of the guys at my school—a little older, but no more special. I suddenly understood why Mel kept telling me to “fix up, look sharp.” The everyday Char didn’t wear fitted suits or leather jackets. Maybe the everyday Pippa didn’t wear four-inch heels or sequined dresses either. The everyday me didn’t play music at late-night dance parties. I couldn’t tell which was the way Char actually was: Char at Start, or Char at home.

He unlocked the door to his apartment. Actually, apartment would be a compliment. It was a room. A big room, with a bed at one end and a kitchenette at the other, but still just a room. There were a bunch of boxes stacked up in the middle of the floor, and Char’s DJ setup rested on top of them: a turntable, a mixer, a laptop, and speakers on either side.

Char looked around the room, his lips pursed, like he was seeing it through my eyes. “Right,” he said. “I just moved in, is why there are all these boxes still.”

“Oh, when did you move?” I asked politely.

“October.”

I squinted at him. “You know it’s April, right?”

He shrugged.

I looked around at his unswept floor, unmade bed, and white walls—blank except for that Trainspotting poster about “choose life” and an enormous Smiths poster that said GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA on it.

Then I shrugged, too, set down my computer, and said, “Okay, so teach me something I don’t know.”

He laughed and sat down on his bed. “I’ve never taught anyone to DJ before. I don’t want to sound like your bio teacher.”

“I don’t take bio,” I told him. “I’m in chem now. I’m a sophomore.”

He rolled his eyes. “I guess the thing to know about DJing is that it’s not just playing one song after another song, like you were doing on Thursday. That’s good, and it takes practice to do that using the equipment. But that’s not enough, because, at the end of the day, anyone can put together an iPod playlist and press play, but not just anyone can have my job.

“There are two things that make someone a great DJ. One is technical skills. Not leaving gaps between the songs, not accidentally playing two songs at once, starting songs from the point that you want—that kind of thing. One of the most important things to master is beat matching. Do you know what that is?”

“It’s when you fade in one song while you’re still fading out the other,” I answered, while looking around the room for a place to sit down. Nothing. No chairs, no couches, no rug. The only place to sit was on the bed, next to Char. But the idea of that made my hands feel shaky again. Did he have sex with Pippa here, in this bed?

“Right,” Char said, like he was answering my unspoken question. “If there’s a pause between songs, people will use that as an opportunity to go to the bathroom, or get another drink, or for whatever other reason leave the dance floor. Your goal, as DJ, is to make them stay on the dance floor. So when you match the beats from one song to the next, there’s an overlap, but it sounds harmonious, not cacophonous, and no one even notices that they’re dancing to the next song until they’re already in it. Give it a shot.”

So I hooked up my laptop to Char’s mixer, and he talked me through transitioning from “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to “Young Folks.” But it did not sound, as he had suggested, harmonious. It sounded like a headache.

Char leaned back against his pillows and watched me, a smile playing on his lips.

“Okay, what am I doing wrong?” I asked after the third time that I completely failed to align the two songs.

“It’s just hard,” Char said. “For starters, you’ve picked two songs that happen to be really tricky to beat match. Start with something more straightforward. I learned to do this by transitioning from ‘This Must Be the Place’ into ‘This Must Be the Place.’ It’s easier to figure out how songs match up when they’re the same song.”

So I tried doing that for a while, but still I couldn’t get the beats to hit at the same time.

“I think I’ve ruined this song for myself,” I told Char. “Have I ruined it for you, too? I’m sorry. It used to be so enjoyable.”

“It takes more than ten minutes of repeating the same song for me to grow sick of it,” Char said. “But there are definitely songs that I’ve ruined for myself. Like ‘Girls and Boys.’”

“The Blur song?” I said, resting the headphones around my neck for a moment. “But it’s so good!”

“Ah, that just means you don’t go out enough. I’ve been going out three or four nights a week for the past three years. That means I’ve gone out roughly five hundred times. And every single time, I have heard that song. Now, the word girls appears in that song thirty-two times. That means that I have heard Damon Albarn say the word girls more than sixteen thousand times. What percentage of my life do you think I have spent listening to that song?”

I shrugged. “Math.”

“Algebra?” he asked.

“Geometry. Algebra was last year. I’m a sophomore, Char.” I put the headphones back on and tried again for the “This Must Be the Place” into “This Must Be the Place” transition. No luck.

Char hopped off the bed and came over to stand next to me. He reached across me to press pause on my computer. Then he gently removed the headphones from my head and flipped them so that one side was pressed against his ear and the other was pressed to mine. His head was just a few inches away from my own. “Okay,” he said, and he started the song from the beginning again. Then he took my free hand and pressed it to the turntable. He rocked our hands back and forth on the record so that I could hear the same beat of the song repeat over and over in the headphones. “You hear that?” he asked. “That’s the kick. You want it to match the downbeat on the other song.”

He gestured at me to start the other song, and then in my free ear I heard him start to count measures, while in the headphones I heard only the kick of the first song as we kept rocking our hands forward and backward together. “And one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one—”

He pulled my hand off the record, and the two songs took off together, perfectly in sync.

He let go of my hand but didn’t move away. “Now slowly take that slider from one side to the other,” he instructed, and I did. “And that, Elise,” he concluded, turning to face me straight on, “is how to beat match like a DJ.”

Suddenly, “This Must Be the Place” wasn’t ruined for me anymore. Suddenly it was the greatest song I had ever heard.

“You know,” he said, studying me, “you actually have a fantastic smile.”

“Three years of braces,” I explained.

“No, seriously,” he said.

“They also pulled four teeth. Before the braces. That probably helped.”

“Why don’t you smile more often?” he asked.

“I smile about as often as I feel like smiling,” I answered. “Sometimes more, because I read this study that said people like you better when you smile.”

Char laughed. “Does that work? Are people really that easy to trick?”

“In my experience,” I said, “no.”

“Bummer.” He returned to his bed.

“So how’s Pippa?” I asked, switching over to an old Smokey Robinson. The transition sounded messy again, but a little better this time.

Char sighed.

“You know,” I said, “just speaking of people who want people to like them better. It’s a natural transition.”

“No offense, but your transition from ‘This Must Be the Place’ to ‘This Must Be the Place’ worked better.”

“How is Pippa?” I repeated.

“Pippa texted me on Friday with a million apologies and thanks, since Vicky told her that I was the one who carried her home from Start. So that seemed good, because if she could text, then at least we knew that she was alive.”

“And how did you respond?” I asked, scrolling through songs on my computer.

“I didn’t.”

“You just didn’t text her back?”

“Yeah.”

“Seems a little rude, Char.”

He leaned his head against the wall. “I just don’t want to lead her on, you know?”

“So that’s the last that we’ve heard from Pippa?” I asked. “A text acknowledging that she’s alive?”

Char looked shamefaced. “Not exactly.”

I sighed. “What did you do?”

“Well, I ran into Pippa and Vicky at Roosevelt’s last night.” I must have looked blank, because he added, “It’s a bar. They have this amazing monthly soul night. The DJ spins only forty-fives, and his collection is out of this world. Last night he was playing this Lee Dorsey song I’d never even heard before—”

“Pippa,” I reminded him.

“Pippa. Right. I brought her home with me.”

I stopped the song with a screech. “You’re telling me you didn’t want to lead her on, so you brought her home with you?”

He rested the back of his hand against his forehead. “I hear what you’re saying. I don’t know. It made sense at the time.”

“When did she leave here?”

“About an hour ago.”

I looked around Char’s room again, seeing it now with fresh eyes. Pippa was just here.

“Vicky is going to kill you,” I said.

Char gave his pillow a shove. “Vicky is overprotective. It’s not like I’m some pariah, preying on Pippa’s naïveté. She knows how I feel. She wasn’t drunk last night, or at least not as drunk as she usually is. She made her own rational, adult decision to come home with me. She wanted to.”

I thought about Pippa on Thursday, passed out on a bench. “I think Pippa wants a lot of things that aren’t good for her.”

Char shrugged. “Don’t we all?”

I rubbed my thumb across the inside of my left wrist and didn’t reply.

“This is a downer,” Char said abruptly. “I shouldn’t be burdening your young mind with my old-man problems.”

“Once again, if you missed it, I am a sophomore. And furthermore? It’s not like you have to be a legal adult to have problems.”

“Oh, really?” Char laughed. “What are your problems? Chem class is that hard?”

I kept my thumb on my wrist and said nothing.

“Anyway,” Char replied, “you came all the way over here to learn to DJ, not to hear about all the ways that I’ve screwed up with girls.”

“Go on, then.”

“Okay, like I said, there are two things every great DJ needs to be able to do. One is to master the technical skills. Which you’re doing. Good job. Unfortunately, that’s about ten percent of what it takes to DJ right.

“The other part, the part that really matters, is that you need to be able to read a crowd. You can’t just play whatever songs you like. You have to figure out what people are responding to, what they want to dance to, which songs they already know and like and which songs they’re going to like once you have introduced them. Every crowd is different, and even at Start, every week is different. That is why I still play ‘Girls and Boys’ sometimes. It doesn’t matter that I’ve heard Damon Albarn sing the word girls more than sixteen thousand times. As long as people still want to dance to it, it is still worth playing.”

“Okay,” I said. “So how do I do that? How do I figure out what people want?”

“You watch them,” Char said. “You stand in the DJ booth, so you’re near them but not part of them. And whenever you can, you look up from what you’re doing and you see how they’re reacting.”

Char’s words made me think of all the magazines I had read, all the movies I had watched, all the blogs I had studied, trying to figure out what it is that people want me to do. “I don’t think I’m very good at reading the crowd,” I said.

“That’s because it’s an acquired skill,” he said. “It takes practice, sometimes years of practice. And sometimes even the best DJs get it wrong. I think it’s natural to just want to play your favorite songs and force everyone to love them as much as you do. And sometimes, in the right context, they will. Over the past two years, I have turned everyone at Start into a huge fan of this random oldies song called ‘Quarter to Three.’”

“I don’t know it,” I said.

“Exactly. And the kids at Start beg me for it now. But it took a while. Most people don’t immediately like new things. They want to dance to the songs they know. As DJ, you obviously know more songs, and better songs. That’s why it’s your job. But you can’t always be teaching them. Sometimes you have to play along with them. It’s a balance.”

“So you just stand up there and look around the room and figure out what will make people happy?” I asked.

“Pretty much. So, go on. Give it a shot.”

“Okay.” I looked down at my computer, then back up at Char. “Wait, who is my pretend crowd?”

“Me.”

“Oh.” I frowned around his room for a moment, then put on “Born Slippy NUXX.”

“I do like this song,” Char said. “What tipped you off?”

I pointed to the Trainspotting poster taped to his wall.

“Great movie,” he said. “Great sound track. Okay, let me have a turn. Pass me my laptop, will you?”

So I did, and then when “Born Slippy NUXX” was over, he put on an upbeat song. “This is ‘Quarter to Three’ that I was telling you about,” he said. “It’s good, right? I found it on some oldies compilation. It’s only, like, two and a half minutes long. You can play something once it’s through.”

I started searching through my music collection again.

“You know, you can sit down,” Char said.

“Where?” I asked, looking around in case he had hidden a couch somewhere in this twenty-square-foot room.

“Here.” He patted the bed beside him.

I hesitated, then picked up my laptop, carried it over, and sat down next to him. I thought it might feel different because it was a boy’s bed, or because it was Char’s bed, but it just felt like a bed.

“Hey,” Char said abruptly, looking over my shoulder at the thousands and thousands of songs on my computer, “do you want to DJ at Start? I mean for real, not just because I’m dealing with a Pippa crisis. You could have, like, a half-hour guest DJ slot every Thursday, and you could play whatever you wanted. Except for ‘Girls and Boys.’ Okay, fine, you could sometimes play ‘Girls and Boys’ if you really wanted to.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m totally serious,” Char said. “I saw you on Thursday, and you’re a natural. Plus,” he said with a grin, “I’m your teacher.”

“But don’t you need, like, permission? From Pete or someone? Can you just do that?”

“Hell yeah, I can do that.” Char leaned back on his elbows. “I’m the DJ. It’s my night. I can do whatever I want.”

I thought about it for a moment. I thought about how tired I had been, waking up Friday morning after only a couple hours of sleep. I thought about how my back hurt from standing and my ears rang. But I also thought about how exciting it had been. How powerful I had felt, knowing that I alone had the ability to make people dance, the ability to make them happy.

“You’re smiling again,” Char noted. “You can’t make me like you that way, now that I know your tricks.”

“Char,” I said, “I would love to DJ at Start.”

“Then it’s settled,” he said. “You only have four days until your first gig, so you better start practicing.” He nudged me with his shoulder and nodded toward my computer.

I played a Cat Power song, and Char said, “This is good. It’s kind of sad, but I like it.” And then he played a song that I didn’t recognize, and he said, “I can’t believe you’ve never heard Big Audio Dynamite. You’ll love them.” And then I played a song, and he played a song, and we kept going like that for the rest of the afternoon, just playing each other music that we liked. The sun was streaming in through his curtainless windows, and his bed was soft and comfortable, and I would pinpoint this day, afterward, as one of the last times that things were as perfect as they seemed, before everything came tumbling down.

8

When I agreed to DJ at Start, I forgot one important thing: my parents.

It’s not that I was going to ask for their permission to walk alone down abandoned streets to DJ a warehouse dance party at one a.m. on a weeknight. I didn’t feel like that was any of their business. However, I did need permission to stay at my mom’s house on Thursday night. And not just this Thursday night. Every Thursday night.

I asked my mom first, since I figured she would be an easier sell than my dad.

“Why?” she asked.

It was later on Sunday, after my magical afternoon at Char’s. Alex and Neil were in their pajamas, watching half an hour of educational television before bedtime. My mom was in the study she shares with Steve, clicking away on her computer.

“I just want to spend more time with you,” I said.

You know how manipulative you are. You always know. I love my mother fiercely, and some days I even love spending time with her, but in no way did I have so powerful an urge to spend more time with her that I would request to change the custody schedule that we all agreed on when I was a kid.

Plus, time with my mom is never just time with my mom. It invariably means time with Steve, Alex, Neil, Bone, and Chew-Toy, as well. We had exactly seven minutes left in this one-on-one conversation before she would go into the family room, snap off the television, and send my little brother and sister to bed. Otherwise they might accidentally be exposed to more than half an hour of television, which would presumably turn their brains to Silly Putty on the spot.

I knew that getting more quality time with my mom was not my goal. But she did not know that. I saw her cheeks glow as she raised her eyes from her computer to look at me. “But then your father only gets you Wednesdays and Fridays,” she said. “I’m not sure that’s fair.”

My mother is very, very into fairness. Like, to the point where she will kennel Bone while Chew-Toy gets fed dinner and vice versa. She doesn’t think it’s fair for one dog to eat some of the other dog’s kibble. She also lets Alex stay up exactly twenty minutes later than Neil, because Alex is two years older than Neil, and that is fair; however, she will not let Alex watch any more television in her extra twenty minutes because that is not fair. Whenever Steve denies them dessert, and Alex wails, “That’s not fair!” I can practically see Mom’s brain whirring, trying to determine whether Alex is or is not correct.

“I’m sure Dad will understand,” I told my mother, even though 1) I was not at all sure of this, and 2) that completely did not address her question.

But Mom said, “Well, it’s all right with me if it’s all right with him. We’ll be glad to have you around more often, sweetie.”

And that’s the thing about my mother and fairness. She really wants to be fair to everybody. But if she can’t be fair to one person, then she wants that person to be my father.

My parents separated when I was four years old, and Mom blames the dissolution of their marriage entirely on Dad. At her lake house last summer, I guess she felt that I was now old enough to understand what went wrong between them—which is reprehensible, by the way. You are never old enough to hear details about your parents’ marital problems.

Regardless, Mom told me, “We weren’t happy together. We both knew we weren’t happy, but he was the one who brought it to that breaking point. I was so ambitious, and he was so … well, he was content with what he’d already done. He was happy to rest on his laurels. When I wanted to create more, build more, start BOO OIL, have more kids, renovate the house, he wouldn’t get behind it. He wouldn’t get behind me. I would have done anything to make our marriage work. But your dad has never liked anything that requires work. I’m telling you, never fall for a music man. It only ends in heartbreak.”

Her whole story made it sound to me like Dad had done her a favor. Why would she have wanted to stay with him if they were that unhappy? But that is not how my mother sees it.

So even though Mom got Steve, and two adorable new kids, and two adorable new dogs, and a way bigger house, and a lake house, too, even so, she has never felt fully compensated for the way my dad treated her twelve years ago.

And I think that’s why she didn’t protest now, when I told her that I wanted to spend more time with her. Instead she said, “Just check with your father, and then I’ll tell the rest of the family the happy news.”

So later that night, after I knew he would be home from work, I closed myself into my bedroom to call Dad.

“Elise!” he answered. “Good to hear from you, honey. How was your weekend?”

“It was fine,” I said. “Hey, have you heard of a band called Big Audio Dynamite?”

“Sure,” he replied. “That was Mick Jones’s band after the Clash. Good stuff. Why?”

“I heard one of their songs today,” I said. “I liked it.” That was about all I felt like telling my dad about my afternoon at Char’s apartment. Then I took a deep breath. “Daddy,” I began, which is not something I’ve regularly called my father since I was Alex’s age, “would you mind if I started staying at Mom’s house on Thursday nights?”

There was a brief moment of silence on Dad’s end of the line.

“Maybe I could switch it for another night at your house? Like Tuesdays?” But even as I said this, I knew it wouldn’t work. Dad has to work at the store until closing every night of the week except Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. That’s why those are my nights with him. The rest of the time he comes home so late, and sleeps so late, that I could stay with him and never see him at all. And my parents are not okay with that, especially not since I cut myself. After that, I haven’t been allowed to stay at either parent’s house if there aren’t going to be adults home at a reasonable hour. I don’t understand that rule, since the time when I cut myself was the middle of the afternoon, but whatever.

As predicted, Dad said, “No, Tuesdays wouldn’t work, I have to be at the store until late.”

There was another pause.

“It’s just that there’s this new extracurricular activity I want to do,” I tried to explain. I stared out my bedroom window. “But it’s on Mom’s side of town, so—”

“Was this your mother’s suggestion?” Dad broke in.

“That I stay with her on Thursdays?” I asked, surprised. “No. She had nothing to do with it. It was my idea.”

“Oh,” my father said. “Well, if it was your idea, then that’s fine.”

“Really?” I squealed.

“This is what you want?” he asked.

“Yes! Thank you so much, Daddy. I’ll see you Wednesday. Love you!”

And that is how I got a weekly guest DJ slot at Start. It wasn’t pretty. But that’s how I did it.

*   *   *

There are some people who want to win at whatever they do, even if the things they do are not the sort of things one wins at.

I am one of those people.

When we had a gardening section in fifth grade science class, I wanted to be the best gardener. When I learned how to do embroidery at day camp, I wanted to be the best at embroidering. And I realized, during my second time playing music at Start, that I didn’t just want to be a DJ. I wanted to be the best DJ.

I played a half-hour set. Char was very encouraging—he helped me plug in my laptop, and adjusted the monitors for me, and reassured me that he wouldn’t leave the dance floor, not even to use the bathroom, so he would be right there if I needed him. And it went okay. I only tried to beat match twice, and both times the songs overlapped in a jarring, earsplitting way. The second time Char even climbed up to the DJ booth to help me, which was mortifying, so the rest of the time I focused on simply playing one song after another without leaving any moments of silence. I tried to read the crowd, like Char had told me, but all I could read was that the crowd did not like “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” It seemed like half the room filed outside to smoke when I played it. I couldn’t tell why. I had heard Char play that same song two weeks earlier, and everyone had danced.

Char relieved me at one thirty, full of compliments and encouragement. Then I packed up my computer and found Vicky, who was smoking outside, near Mel.

“Hey, lady,” she called when she saw me. “You were awesome up there.”

“I was all right.”

Vicky shook out her long, thick brown hair. “Please. Give up the false modesty and just take a compliment.”

With all the words I would use to describe myself, falsely modest had never been among them. “Thank you,” I said. “But I could do better. Char is better.”

“But you’ve been doing this for, what, a week?”

“Two weeks.”

“Right, and he’s been doing it for years. Cut yourself some slack. Anyway, Char’s a dick. Don’t aspire to be like him.”

I didn’t think Char was a dick, considering that he was not only teaching me how to DJ, but also letting me play at his party. But I could guess why Vicky might think so. “You mean because of Pippa?” I asked.

“Because of lots of things.” She exhaled a ring of smoke, and we both watched it swirl up into the night sky.

“Where is Pippa, by the way?” I asked. I hoped the answer was not “passed out on a bench” again.

“Manchester,” Vicky replied.

“Oh, cool. Will she be back for Start next week? I want her to see me play. I swear I’ll be better at it next time.”

“You were fine at it this time,” Vicky reminded me. “And, no, I don’t think she’ll be back next week.”

The way Vicky said that did not sound good.

“Her parents thought she was partying too hard,” Vicky explained, crushing her cigarette butt under the heel of her gray suede boot. “Her mom freaked out because she had given Pippa, like, two hundred dollars to buy a new winter coat, and then she somehow found out that Pippa spent all the money on alcohol and basically froze all winter long. So they made her take off the rest of the semester and go back home where they can ‘keep an eye on her’ or something.”

I wondered if Pippa felt about this the same way I felt about my parents’ stupid rule that I couldn’t stay in a house at night without an adult. As if that was going to help me. As if they knew exactly what my problem was and they were going to fix it.

“Do you think Pippa parties too much?” I asked Vicky. “I mean, you’re her best friend. You would know. They’re three thousand miles away.”

Vicky shrugged. “We’re eighteen. Everyone parties too much.”

But that wasn’t really an answer.

“What are you going to do without her?” I asked.

Vicky’s hand reached toward her pocket, as if for another cigarette, then she shook her head and clasped her hands instead. “I have no idea,” she said. “Homework?”

“Yeah…” I said doubtfully.

“I could clean my room,” Vicky suggested. “That would take a while.”

“Another great plan, sure.”

“Shopping!” Vicky announced. “I will go shopping. For every day that Pippa is away, I will buy something new to make me happy in her absence.”

“How many days could you keep that up for?” I asked. “Without going broke, I mean.”

“I think … two. Maybe three, if I’m buying, like, socks. It’s fine. This is what credit cards are for. Do you want to go shopping with me?”

“Um,” I said, at the same time that Mel said, “Yes.”

We both turned around to look at him. He stood a few feet away, blocking the doorway with his bulk. “Oh, how rude of me,” Vicky said. “Mel, darling, do you want to go shopping with me?”

Mel snorted. “Thank you, Vicks, but I have all the dangly earrings and studded belts that I need for this season. I was answering on Elise’s behalf. Just in case you weren’t sure, Elise, the correct answer is yes.” I opened my mouth, but he just waggled his finger and admonished, “Remember, honey, fixing up and looking sharp is not optional.”

“I thought you said it was optional,” I reminded him.

Mel sighed. “For the love of God, will you just respect the wisdom of your elders for once?”

“Fine.” I turned back to Vicky. “Yes.”

“Excellent. Let’s do Sunday!” Vicky jumped up and down a little. “You ready to go back in?”

Mel began to edge the door open for us, but I said, “I’m leaving, actually. I’m tired, and I have to wake up so early tomorrow. See you Sunday, Vicky!”

And I walked home.

I hadn’t lied to Vicky—I was tired, and I did have to wake up so early, but that wasn’t why I left early. I left because I wasn’t ready to be done DJing yet. I wanted to keep doing it and doing it and never stop until I had mastered it all. When I got home, I stayed awake in my bedroom, my headphones on, practicing with my DJ equipment for hours, until the sunlight began to seep through the dark, wiping away the stars, and turning the sky from black to navy to gold.