“What did you think was going to happen when she came back from Manchester?” I asked him. “Did you think she wasn’t going to find out about us? Or she wasn’t going to care?”
“I didn’t,” Char said, “think about it. Anyway, I told her I didn’t want to be her boyfriend before she left. You know that. So why did she expect me to celibately wait for her return for a month and a half?”
“Because,” I replied, wondering if Char was secretly an idiot not to already know this, “you had sex with her after you told her you didn’t want to date her.”
“So?” he asked.
“So, what was she supposed to think that meant?” I asked. “What do you think people think it means when you hook up with them?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. What do people think it means?”
I gave a long exhale, then said, “For someone who’s supposed to be so great at reading a crowd, you have some serious blind spots.”
Char flicked a number of dials on his mixer. “If you’re such an expert, Elise, why don’t you just tell me?”
I tried to look him in the eye, but he just kept looking at his equipment. “People think it means that you want to actually be with them. In a serious way. People think it means you care about them. That’s the point of the whole thing, isn’t it?”
Char shrugged. “Guys don’t think that way.”
I didn’t know if he was right about that or not. I didn’t know how guys thought about anything.
“Is Pippa coming tonight?” I asked, even though I already knew the answer from Vicky.
“No idea.” Char put on his headphones.
I waited until he had transitioned into the next song, but when he still didn’t take off his headphones, I tugged at his arm.
“What’s up?” he asked, taking off one earphone. “I’m working.”
“I can see that,” I said. “I wanted to tell you my big news from last week.”
Things were weird between me and Char right now. Things were weird because Pippa was back. But when I told him my news, he would be proud of me. He would remember how much we had in common. Things would be good again.
Right?
I felt like a cat bringing home a dead bird to her master. “You’ll like it, won’t you? I killed it all by myself. You must like it.”
Did bird-murdering house cats get this fluttery feeling in their stomachs, too?
“I’m going to be DJing Friday nights!” I told Char, a smile erupting across my face. I couldn’t not smile whenever I thought about it. “Starting next week. I can do whatever I want with it, Pete said. It’s going to be the best.”
Char took off his other earphone. He stared at me. “You’re DJing Friday nights,” he repeated, and I thought that maybe the loud music had garbled my words. “Here?”
“Right!” I shouted, to make sure he could hear me this time.
But his expression was still confused. “Pete gave you a Friday night party? Just you, no one else?”
“Just me,” I confirmed.
Now Char’s expression was more than just confused. It was mad. He responded with only one word. “Why?”
“Because he thought I’d be good at it.”
“Why?” Char asked again, and I felt the ground slant ever so slightly underneath me.
“He said … I have a lot of natural talent, and—”
“Do you have any idea what a big deal it is to get a weekend party at one of Pete’s venues?” Char interrupted. “Do you have any idea how many times I’ve asked him to move me to Friday, so no one has school or work the next day and can really go out? And then he just gives it to you? You, a sixteen-year-old girl who started DJing all of two months ago?”
I didn’t speak for a moment. Then, quietly, I said, “It’s not my fault that I’m only sixteen. And it’s not my fault that I only started DJing now.”
Char lowered his voice, too. He sounded gentle, helpful. “Why don’t you just tell Pete that you don’t feel ready? Tell him you need more practice. Tell him you’re worried about what will happen if you have technical problems and you don’t know how to fix them. I’m sure he’ll understand.”
“Because,” I said, “I do feel ready.” I cleared my throat. “This is so silly, but I guess I expected that you would be happy for me.”
Char tapped on his computer keyboard and was silent for a minute. If I were someone else, I might have been impressed. But I knew enough about DJing to know that he wasn’t actually doing anything.
“Listen, Elise,” Char said at last. “I hadn’t wanted to get into this tonight. But I think we should … stop.”
“Stop?” I repeated.
“Yeah. Like, break up.”
And the world tilted again, harder. “How can we break up?” I asked. “Were we even together?”
“I think the age gap is too much for us,” Char said. “We’re at different stages in our lives, and we’re looking for different things.”
“Now?” I said. “Now this bothers you?” I felt my breathing coming funny, like I had to gasp to get enough air. “What did I do, Char? What is it? Are you breaking up with me because Pippa’s mad at you? Are you breaking up with me because”—my breath caught in my throat and I almost couldn’t go on—“because I got offered a stupid Friday night party and you didn’t?”
“You said you didn’t love me,” Char said quietly, looking at his computer screen, not me.
“When?”
“Last week. When Pippa asked you. You said no. You almost laughed, and you said no.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. And then I said, “No—I’m not sorry. You don’t love me either. You never said you did. You never once called me, or hung out with me in daylight. How could you love me? Do you?”
My body tensed. Part of me hoped that he might say yes. That he would say, “Yes, I love you, and that’s why I’m breaking up with you—because it kills me that you don’t feel the same.”
Because that would be it, then. The ultimate proof that I was lovable.
But what Char actually said was, “That’s not the point.”
“How the hell is it not the point?” I was almost screaming by now.
“You don’t need me,” Char said. “That is the point.”
He put his headphones back on.
When do you want me to take over? I wrote on a Post-it and stuck it to his computer screen.
The corner of Char’s mouth twitched, and he pulled my note off his monitor. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, crumpling the paper in his fist. “You have a full night of DJing ahead of you next Friday. You deserve to take tonight off.”
It took me a minute more of standing there before I realized that I’d been dismissed. Before I realized that a relationship can end just like that.
Dazed, I left the booth and walked outside. I would have kept walking, too, I would have walked forever, except that Vicky, Harry, and Mel were standing right there.
“Hi, Elise!” Harry said. “Look, I’m here!” He went on to explain, “My parents are on a business trip, so Vicky’s quote-unquote ‘in charge.’”
I pasted a smile on my face and joined their circle. I don’t know why I bothered to act like everything was okay. Start is small, and news travels fast. Soon enough they were all going to find out that Char had dumped me. But I wanted, for as long as I could, to pretend like he hadn’t. I wanted not to be there when they heard the news and said, Well, of course he did. Boyfriends are for pretty girls, normal girls, girls who know what they’re doing. Everybody knows that.
nobody likes me, and i deserve it.
Shut up, Elise.
“The Beatles,” Vicky was saying to Mel.
“All quit,” Mel replied.
“Not John,” Vicky countered.
“Right, because he was murdered before he had the chance.”
“George never quit either,” Vicky said.
“And then he died from lung cancer,” Mel said.
“But when h
e was, like, sixty. I’ll quit before I’m sixty.”
“Sixty comes sooner than you think, honey,” Mel countered.
“We’re taking a poll,” Harry explained to me, “on whether or not Vicky should quit smoking. So far it’s two for quitting, one against. You want to even out the score?”
“No,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Vicky whined. “This isn’t a majority-rule situation. It’s my body.”
Mel cleared his throat. “Well, maybe—”
“Hey,” I interrupted. “Were you guys popular in high school?”
They all stopped talking and stared at me.
“You know,” I said. “Friends. Did you have them? If so, how many?”
“Well, now,” Mel rubbed his bald head. “You’re asking me to remember back pretty far.”
“Oh my God, Mel,” Vicky said. “You are, like, one-eighth as old as you pretend to be.”
Mel scowled at her. Then he said to me, “Honey, I was a gay black teenager in Arkansas. How popular do you think I was?”
I tried to picture a younger Mel getting bullied by his own versions of Chuck Boening and Jordan DiCecca. But it didn’t work. If they had tried to steal his iPod, he would have stood up to them. He was Mel. Standing up to people was his job.
“I’m definitely very popular among the Dungeons & Dragons players at my school,” confided Harry. “Also, I rule at Settlers of Catan, and that has won me a devoted fan base of at least two or three classmates. Oh, and I shred on the drums. The girls go wild for that.”
“You can’t shred on drums, dipshit,” Vicky told him. “Only guitarists shred.”
Harry winked at me, then screwed up his face and mimed a very intense drum set. He stopped after a few seconds, when he noticed that I still wasn’t smiling.
“I don’t believe that anyone who is a legitimately interesting person can be popular as a teenager,” Mel went on. “Or ever, maybe. Popularity rewards the uninteresting.”
“I take offense,” Vicky cried, throwing her cigarette butt to the ground. “I am at least a somewhat interesting person, and I was popular in high school.”
Mel and I both gaped at her. I felt betrayed. “You were?” Mel asked.
“You don’t have to sound so shocked about it.” Vicky shook out her thick, wavy hair.
Mel said, “I just can’t picture you as a blond cheerleading girlfriend of the class president, that’s all.”
Vicky snorted. “Exactly how many teen movies have you watched? You know that’s a huge stereotype, right?”
Mel shrugged. “I’m a John Hughes fan.”
“Well, I was never blond, but I was a cheerleader sophomore year, and I never dated the class president, but I did once make out with the quarterback at a party.”
“And the wide receiver,” Harry added.
“And him,” Vicky conceded.
“And the tight end,” said Harry.
“I did not.”
Harry nodded at me and mouthed, She did.
“Anyway,” Vicky said, “I was popular. Well, for the first half of high school. I was a very popular fifteen-year-old.”
“Then what happened?” I asked.
“Well…” Vicky’s eyebrows knit together. “Don’t laugh or anything, but I used to be skinny.”
She paused, her face red.
“Why would we laugh at that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Vicky said. “Like, maybe you’d think it’s ridiculous that someone like me could have ever possibly been skinny.”
“You’re not fat now,” I said.
“I’m fat enough,” Vicky said. “But when I started high school, I was skinny. I really, really was. I also threw up pretty much everything I ate. Everyone loves a skinny girl. I do, too, frankly.
“At the end of tenth grade, my parents made me start seeing a therapist, and she literally changed my life. After a few months of therapy, I stopped making myself throw up so often, and then I did it less and less, until I never did it at all. So naturally I gained weight. There were actual calories in my body for the first time since I was twelve. And so my friends, who were, by the way, huge bitches, just ditched me.”
“That’s crazy.” I tried to imagine, as I looked at Vicky, not wanting to be friends with her. I couldn’t do it.
“That’s actually why I started smoking,” Vicky said. “Because it’s supposed to be an appetite suppressant. As you can see, it doesn’t work as well as all that.” She lit another cigarette and arched her eyebrows at Mel, as if daring him to tell her not to. He didn’t say a word.
“To be fair to my high school friends,” Vicky went on, “it wasn’t just that I didn’t look like I used to. It was like this spell had been broken, and all sorts of things that used to seem important to me now just seemed stupid. So I quit cheerleading. And student council. My so-called friends could not figure out what was going on.”
Vicky giggled and added, “My parents weren’t that thrilled either. Their plan had been for me to give up vomiting, not for me to give up everything. They even fired my therapist, as if it was all her fault that I had decided that I wanted to be myself.”
“And it meant that I never got a therapist either,” Harry added. He sighed. “Yet more proof that Vicky is their favorite. So unfair.”
“But then,” Vicky said, “I made friends with these other kids at my school—you know, the ‘uncool’ ones. And one of them turned out to be really into music. She and I started writing songs together. Eventually we formed my first-ever band. She played guitar, I played keyboards and sang. We never performed anywhere, but we recorded a bunch on our computers. And that”—Vicky flung her arms out to the sides—“is how I discovered who I am. And that is why I’m here tonight, hanging out with you.”
I tried to picture one of the girls at my school secretly being Vicky, hiding in the skin of a popular clone. What if Lizzie Reardon in three years would look back on the time she spent making my life hell and think to herself, Well, that was really petty, wasn’t it? Would Lizzie Reardon someday be nice to a stranger on the street the way Vicky was to me the first night I met her?
But it was too hard to imagine. I couldn’t see it.
“Enough sad tales of my youth,” Vicky said. “Your turn, Elise. Who are you in the teen movie of our lives?”
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I’m a super-cool underground DJ sensation, I wanted to say. But that wasn’t right. Char had just made it clear that I was nothing of the sort. I’m the super-cool underground DJ’s girlfriend. But I wasn’t that either. Who was I?
I extended my left arm toward them, palm up, my pale white skin illuminated by the stars and a lone streetlight.
“Jesus Christ,” Harry said. “What happened to your arm?”
Vicky smacked him on the side of the head.
“Ow!” Harry exclaimed. “What was that for?”
Vicky shook her head at him, then took my arm in her hands and looked at it. Really looked. “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked in a low voice.
“Tell you what?” I asked, trying to shake her off. “Tell you I’m unpopular? Okay, I’m telling you now: I’m not Glendale’s hottest DJ. My name is Elise Dembowski, I’m sixteen years old, and nobody likes me. One time I pretended to try to commit suicide, but I didn’t really do it, and for a while I pretended to date Char, but I didn’t really do that either. I’ll pretend to be anyone or anything other than myself, but the problem is that no one is ever fooled.”
I wrenched my arm away from Vicky and shoved past a startled Mel, back into Start. I wanted to lock myself in one of the filthy, graffitied bathroom stalls and not come out until daylight.
But once inside, I couldn’t help but find Char with my eyes. So I couldn’t help but find Pippa, too, next to him.
Her body was angled toward him, her button nose and rosebud lips turned up toward his face. From across the room, I could see his mouth moving as he spoke to her, his headphones resting on the table. She threw back her
head and laughed, and Char laughed, too, as he placed his hand on her lower back.
I felt the warmth and weight of his hand as strongly as if I were the one in the booth right now, not Pippa. How many times had Char touched me in exactly that same way? And it always made me relax, because it was the most certain reassurance you will be coming home with me tonight.
Pippa would be going home with Char tonight. I could see it as clearly as either of them up there could. Maybe even more so, because I knew how to read a crowd. And I could read them both perfectly.
I felt my stomach flip, but it wasn’t because of Char. Not really. It was because I could pinpoint exactly how I had lost him. I knew because it was the same way I lost everyone.
Pete had offered me my own Friday night party, and I had accepted. I had been too precocious. Again. Again and again and again.
I had always thought that if I just did something extraordinary enough, then people would like me. But that wasn’t true. You will drive away everyone by being extraordinary. You will drive away your classmates and your friends, and tonight you will drive away Char. But you, you never learn your lesson. The world embraces ordinary. The world will never embrace you.
Of course Char wanted Pippa. It was so clear to me now: why he ended things with me, why he would keep Pippa around and around, no matter how much he didn’t care about her. He wanted a girl he could mold just the way he wanted. And me? No one can mold me. I know because I’ve tried.
So I turned and ran. I left them all behind, and I ran the whole way home.
When I got through the front door of my mom’s house, I saw the poetry castle looming in the sunroom in front of me. I was panting, my heart racing. I bent over, resting my hands on my knees, trying to steady myself. But nothing felt steady.
It was too late for me to turn into the sort of girl who people would like. It was too late for me to be normal and unremarkable. Fake Elise had seen this long before I had. Every word in that journal was true, truer than me fooling myself into thinking that maybe this new world of Start gave me a new lease on life, a new chance to alienate no one.
Silly. Silly Elise. It is too late for you.
But there was one person it wasn’t too late for.