This Song Will Save Your Life

  “You sure you don’t want a beer or anything?”

  I looked up from my computer for a moment, just long enough to raise an eyebrow at Char. “I am still sixteen, you know.”

  “Yeah, I’ve heard that.”

  “I might be wearing a new dress and shoes that aren’t sneakers, but I’m still sixteen.”

  Char blinked a few times, flustered. “Some sixteen-year-olds drink beer,” he said. “And all your beers would be free, since you’re the DJ. That’s one of the best reasons to become a DJ, is for the free booze.”

  “I thought it was for the DJ clothes,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I only have, like, a minute left on this song. Just bring me a cup of water. But make sure it’s free. You know, ’cause I’m the DJ.”

  Char rolled his eyes and left me alone in the booth, and I turned my full attention to DJing.

  I know that humility is a valued trait, but there’s no way to be humble about this: I was on fire. It wasn’t just that I had mastered the technical skills, thanks to my hours and hours of practice over the past week. It was more that something had clicked, and now I understood what Char meant about reading the crowd. They will tell you what they want. They will tell you vocally sometimes, with loud requests shouted into your ear at the least convenient times, right as you are trying to transition between songs, or with Post-its stuck to you. And they will tell you silently, by dancing or not dancing, smiling or not smiling, listening or not listening.

  Tonight I had Start in the palm of my hand. They loved me, and I loved me, too.

  When Char came to relieve me some time later, I said, “I can keep going. I don’t mind.”

  “I can see that,” he said, snaking his arm around me to reach his computer. “But why don’t you let me have a turn, too? Just because Start is technically my night and all.”

  Reluctantly I transitioned over to him, then hopped down from the booth.

  “Oh my God,” Vicky said when I reached her on the dance floor. “Do you believe me now? That you’re Glendale’s hottest DJ?”

  I had to cover my mouth, I was smiling so wide. “I believe you now.”

  Vicky was standing with two guys. One of them had enough facial hair that I could have knit a scarf out of it. He was wearing a white T-shirt on which he had written in Sharpie, I Shop at the Gap. I couldn’t tell if this was supposed to be ironic or the opposite of ironic. The other guy looked a little younger, a little heavier, and a lot less bearded.

  “These are the Dirty Curtains,” Vicky said. “This is Elise. Guys, am I wrong, or is Elise twice the DJ that Char is?”

  “Oh, no,” I quickly said. “Char’s awesome!”

  “I thought you were awesome,” the younger guy said. “When you played that Buzzcocks song? That was insane! Did you see how much everyone was dancing? How did you even think to play that song?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m the DJ, I guess.”

  “You were killing it up there,” he went on. “Right, Dave?”

  The beard guy nodded. “Killing it.”

  The younger guy turned back to me. “I loved it,” he said earnestly.

  “Aw, who’s a little fangirl?” Vicky sang.

  He blushed a little. “Shut up, Vicky.” To me, he said, “I have this terrible habit of saying exactly what’s on my mind at any point in time. Right now, what’s on my mind is—how cool is it that we’re hanging out with the DJ?”

  “Char’s the DJ,” I said. “I’m, like … the guest.”

  “I’m Harry.” He shook my hand. “And you’re great.”

  “Oh, right,” Vicky said. “How could I forget the formal introductions. This is Dave, and he’s on guitar.” She pointed to the guy with the beard.

  “Yo.” He jutted his chin upward.

  “This is Harry.” Here she pointed to the chatty guy. “He’s on drums. His name is Harry because of his eyebrows. You know. They’re hairy.”

  “And her name is Vicks because she smells like Vicks VapoRub all the time,” Harry immediately responded.

  Vicky stuck a hand on her hip. “His name is Harry because when he came out of the womb, he was so terrifyingly ugly that Mom shouted, ‘Scary!’ But she was crying so hard about how ugly her baby was that the doctor thought she said ‘Harry,’ instead.”

  “Her name is Victoria because she’s like Queen Victoria,” Harry began. “You know. A virgin.”

  “First of all,” Vicky said. “Queen Victoria wasn’t the Virgin Queen. That was Queen Elizabeth. Second of all, are you actually talking about my sex life? Ew. Do you want me to throw up that entire sixteen-ounce milkshake all over you?”

  “Let me guess,” I broke in. “You’re brother and sister.”

  Harry and Vicky both blinked at me, like they’d forgotten they had an audience. “It’s that obvious?” Harry asked.

  Dave snorted.

  “Okay, but here’s the real question,” Harry said. “Who’s older?” He and Vicky both posed.

  “Vicky is,” I said without hesitation.

  Harry let his arms fall to his sides. “Drat. You know all our secrets.”

  “Harry’s sixteen months younger,” Vicky added. “He’s still in high school.”

  “Our mom liked to get pregnant a lot,” Harry said.

  “Ew again!” Vicky shouted.

  “Everything that’s on my mind,” Harry said to me. “I’m telling you. It’s a curse.”

  “He usually isn’t allowed to come to Start,” Vicky explained to me. “You know, because it’s a weeknight, and Mom and Dad say he has to go to school in the morning and all that.” She put on a high baby voice and pinched Harry’s cheeks. “Don’t you, my itty-bitty baby bwother?”

  He jabbed her in the stomach, and she let go of his cheeks.

  “So why are you here tonight?” I asked.

  “Teacher training day tomorrow,” Harry replied. “Thank God.”

  I had school the next day, so Harry obviously didn’t go to Glendale High.

  “I’m at Roosevelt,” he said, before I asked.

  “Oh, yeah. They’re our rivals, I hear. In football.”

  “Boo,” Harry said.

  “Yeah. Boo back at you.”

  “Sorry to break up this pep squad interaction,” Vicky said, “but can we please dance? So we’re not listening to Robyn for nothing?”

  So we danced. Sort of. Mostly I hopped from foot to foot, and sang along, and flailed my arms a little.

  “How do you do it?” I shouted at Vicky.

  “Do what?” she asked, shimmying her shoulders a minuscule amount and somehow making every guy in the room look over at her.

  “Dance!” I said.

  “Oh.” She laughed. “First, stand up straight.”

  “I am.”

  “No, babe. You’re not.” She pulled my shoulders back and tipped my chin up, like I was a rag doll. Harry seemed to be trying not to laugh as he looked on. “Now,” Vicky went on, “repeat after me.”

  “I don’t want to repeat after you,” I said.

  “Only people who repeat after me will learn how to dance like me,” Vicky announced, her nose in the air.

  “I’ll repeat after you,” Harry volunteered.

  “Thank you, Harry. Elise, feel free to join in. Repeat after me: I deserve to be here.”

  “I deserve to be here!” Harry and Dave declared, and I mumbled along with them.

  “No one can take my dance space away from me,” Vicky intoned, and the three of us repeated her words.

  “And finally: I don’t care if anyone thinks I look stupid.”

  “But I do look stupid,” I pointed out, as Harry yelled out his affirmations.

  “So do I,” Vicky said. “But I don’t care.”

  Then Vicky walked us through some of her tricks for preserving her dance space. “If someone comes up behind you, you elbow them.” She demonstrated. “It looks just like a dance move, but no one likes an elbow
in their kidney. Or you jump up and land right on their foot.”

  We all practiced jumping up and down.

  “Basically, just throw your arms around a bunch and take big steps, so everyone knows which part of the dance floor belongs to you. People are not going to make room for you. You have to make room for yourself.”

  A random guy approached Vicky, but she didn’t even elbow him or step on him. She just ignored him and kept dancing. After a moment, he moved away.

  “I’ve kissed way too many boys at Start already,” Vicky confided to me, sounding world-weary. “I’m over them. They’re all in bands.”

  “But you’re in a band,” I pointed out.

  “Exactly. So why would I need them?”

  Harry grabbed my hand and twirled me around. I laughed, and he twirled me again, looking very pleased with himself.

  Char was a great dancer, but Harry wasn’t. He seemed at a loss for moves, and after standing still for a moment, he just twirled me around once more. This time, I caught Char’s eye as I spun. He made a come here motion with his fingers.

  Harry opened his mouth, as if to say something to me, but before he had the chance I said, “One second, okay?” I dropped Harry’s hand and made my way to the DJ booth.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked Char when I reached him. “Do you want me to take over for a while?”

  “Everything’s fine. I just thought you could use some rescuing.”

  I looked back across the room. Harry had returned to dancing with Dave and Vicky. “I was doing okay,” I said to Char. “But thanks.”

  “Do you want to stay up here?” Char asked. “We can go one-to-one until the night’s over. It’s quieting down.”

  I slid in next to him. “Sounds great.”

  Char and I alternated songs for the next half hour or so. I played some oldies; the Contours, James Brown, stuff like that. That was my dad’s favorite sort of music to play, and I wondered how he had spent a Thursday night at home without me. Char was playing more eighties: Prince, Edwyn Collins, Transvision Vamp. He put on New Order’s “Temptation,” and we both took off our headphones and relaxed for a moment, leaning against the booth’s railings. “Temptation” is a long song.

  “This one could be about you,” Char said, looking at me.

  I tilted my head. “Why?”

  “Because it’s about a girl whose eyes are green and blue and gray all at the same time. Just like yours.”

  “They’re usually blue,” I said. “Bluish gray.”

  He stared into my eyes deeply, unblinking.

  “They only look green when I wear a green shirt,” I said. “So it’s not really like this song.”

  “This song is about never having seen anyone like you before. And I haven’t ever seen anyone like you,” Char said.

  “I haven’t seen anyone like you either,” I said.

  We both fell silent and looked at each other for a moment.

  And then he kissed me.

  I pulled away almost instantly, as if I’d received an electric shock. “What did you do that for?” I demanded, my hand flying to my mouth.

  Char reached out and gently removed my hand from my face. “Because I wanted to,” he answered quietly, and, still holding my hand in his, he kissed me again. This kiss lasted longer than the first, and I didn’t know what to do with my lips. But Char knew exactly what to do.

  When he leaned away from me, I stared at him for a moment, my heart thundering so fast in my chest that I thought I might throw up, or just collapse to the floor, if he weren’t still holding on to me.

  “You know, I’m not going to have sex with you.” The words flew out of my mouth. I immediately felt myself turn bright red. You never know when to shut up.

  But Char laughed and laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said, kissing the top of my head. “I never thought you would.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him, unable to tell if he meant that as compliment or criticism.

  “What about Pippa?” I asked.

  His face was unreadable, and his eyes kept straying to my lips. “This isn’t about Pippa,” he said. “This is about you.”

  “But—”

  “Come here,” Char said. “It’s okay.” He opened his arms to me. I slowly sank into his embrace, and he rocked me back and forth. Dimly I was aware of the song fading out, the silence that followed, the lights coming on overhead. I slid my arms around him and pressed my face to his chest, trying to hear through his thin T-shirt if his heart was pounding as hard as my own. But his heart seemed fine.

  “Come on, Elise,” he said after a time, softly into my hair. “Let me drive you home.”

  11

  When my alarm went off on Friday morning, I woke up in my mom’s house, not my dad’s, which still felt a little crooked. I could hear Alex downstairs, banging around with her poetry castle construction project. I could hear Chew-Toy scratching at my door. But I stayed still for a moment, just thinking about last night—five hours ago, really. Me playing songs. Strangers dancing. Char kissing me. Me kissing Char. Char and me kissing each other.

  In the dark and in the night, it made some kind of sense. There we were, two DJs, standing close together, sharing an evening where every song we touched felt golden. But in the harsh light of morning, I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. He was nearly twenty, I was in high school. He was cool, I was not.

  So why had he kissed me?

  I got out of bed, threw on a pair of jeans and a plain T-shirt, and braided my hair so it would be out of the way. Before I went downstairs for breakfast, I opened up my laptop. I clicked away from the DJ program I’d been using the night before and opened up my Internet browser. Then I googled “Flash Tommy” and clicked over to his Web site.

  It was filled with party photos. I saw boys smoking in bathrooms, girls pretending to take off their clothes, boys and girls making out in every combination. I saw lots of shots of Pippa: Pippa dancing with Vicky, Pippa downing a glass of wine, Pippa with her arms around Char. I quickly scrolled away from that last one.

  And then I came across what I’d been looking for: a photo of me. It wasn’t one of those that Flash Tommy had taken when I first arrived last night. I hadn’t noticed him shooting this one. In the photo, I am standing alone in the DJ booth. I have my headphones half on, and I’m looking out just past the camera, smiling like I have a secret. The dress that Vicky helped me buy makes me look like a punk-rock ballerina, and my eyes look wider and bluer than I remembered them ever looking before.

  I glanced toward my mirror, but I bore only a passing resemblance to the Elise in that photo on that Web site. My eyes were puffy, and the most punk-rock thing about me was that the cuffs of my jeans were frayed. But I was still smiling like I had a secret. Because I did.

  I decided right then that Flash Tommy’s big fancy camera, no matter how much it had cost him, was worth every single penny.

  I hummed my way through breakfast and the bus ride to school, all the way to my locker. I was working on my combination when my friends showed up. You know, Chava and Sally. Those friends.

  “Just the people I wanted to see!” I said to them, and I wasn’t even being sarcastic for once. I have watched enough popular television to know that when a boy does something inexplicable, like kiss you out of nowhere, you are supposed to discuss it with your girls. Especially if your girls are people like Chava and Sally. There is nothing they love more than trying to explain the behavior of boys they don’t know.

  Yet neither of them responded by saying, “Girlfriend! Spill the gossip!” which is how your girls are supposed to talk to you, according to popular television. Instead, Chava said to me, looking very serious, “Elise, Sally and I just want you to know that we are here for you. We are your friends and we are here for you,” she went on grimly. “Like, in your times of need.”

  “Okay, that’s great.” I raised my eyebrows at her. I assumed she wasn’t talking about Char kissing me, since that wasn’t exactly a “time of need.”


  “And you can tell us anything,” Sally added. “In fact, you should tell us anything. That’s what friends do.”

  “You should tell us anything so that we can be supportive,” Chava said. “You know, of whatever it is that you tell us.”

  “Plus, we tell you everything,” Sally added. “So it seems only fair.”

  “I do tell you everything,” I said, which was not true. But I told them more than I told anyone else at school, so it seemed like a lot.

  Sally said, “You didn’t tell us that you want to kill yourself.”

  I heard a loud whoosh in my ears, and I felt dizzy, like the earth was suddenly rotating around me very, very fast. I pulled my sleeves down over my wrists in an instant, like a reflex.

  “I don’t want to kill myself,” I said in a shaky voice.

  “You see, she doesn’t tell us anything,” Sally complained to Chava.

  “Who said I wanted to kill myself?”

  “You did,” Sally said.

  “You just claimed that I never tell you anything!” I slammed my fist against my locker, and Sally and Chava exchanged a look of concern.

  “We read it in your blog,” Chava said.

  “I don’t keep a blog.”

  “Okay, your ‘online journal,’ then,” Sally said with a sigh.

  “I don’t keep one of those either.”

  “Elise, you can trust us,” Chava said gently.

  “Then can I trust you to tell me who claims that I have a goddamn blog about my suicidal tendencies?”

  Sally wrinkled up her nose. Predictably, Sally’s parents do not allow her to swear. She was probably supposed to put a quarter in a jar just for listening to me.

  “Everyone,” Chava said, blinking hard, like she was trying to hold back tears. “Everyone has read it.”

  I shoved past them and ran down the hall to the computer lab. I sat down and typed in “Elise Dembowski” to Google. The first option that popped up was “Elise Dembowski, MD.” The second was “Elise Dembowski Tampa Florida school superintendent.” But the third line read, “Elise Dembowski suicide.”

  I clicked on the link, then stuck my fist into my mouth and bit down while I waited for the page to load. When it came up, it was a design scheme of orange stars, with the heading “Elise Dembowski’s Super-Secret Diary,” and the sheer juxtaposition of my name and my least-favorite color was shocking to me.