This Song Will Save Your Life (11 page)

“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.