by Katia Rose
The big industrial sink looks too inviting to resist. I only hesitate for a second before heading over and using the spray nozzle to rinse my face. The cool water feels like heaven as a few drops trail down my neck, and I can’t stop smiling, even when my cheeks start to ache.
“This is it,” I murmur as I lift my head out of the sink and lean against the basin. “This is what I’m made for.”
I grab a glass off a nearby shelf and fill it with water. I’ll go collect my gear after they kick everybody out, but in the meantime, I take a moment to stand there with my eyes closed, glass in hand, reliving what it was like to hear them shout my name.
“Paige.”
My spine stiffens at the sound of a man’s voice, and my eyes fly open, landing on the guy at the end of the hall.
I blink.
Then I blink again.
My body recognizes him before my brain does. I’m still blinking and trying to make the sight of him make sense as the glass slips out of my hand and shatters on the floor.
Neither of us flinches at the racket as the shards scatter along the tiles. Neither of us moves at all. His eyes don’t leave mine, and my breaths, which were rapid and fueled with exhilaration just seconds ago, have slowed to a complete stop.
He said my name.
He said my name, and now, out of all the millions of things I could and should be thinking, all I can focus on is how much I want to hear him say it again. It’s instant and visceral: a physical ache drilling into my bones.
I need to hear him say it again.
He takes a step forward. “Paige.”
The shake starts in my feet and travels up my whole body. I fucking tremble as I watch his mouth shape itself to form the sound.
This can’t be happening.
He can’t be here. He can’t be standing there, looking at me like that, making me feel like this.
He can’t be.
So I close my eyes again, just for a second, just long enough to curl my hands around the edge of the sink and grip so tight it hurts. I imagine a wall shooting up out of the floor between us, a wall so thick he’ll never break through.
When I open my eyes, my jaw is tight, and all my muscles have tensed. My voice comes out low and even. “What are you doing here?”
His face twitches, flinches almost, and he stops himself from taking another step.
“I—” He sounds hoarse, and he stops to clear his throat. “I just—I saw your set.”
I force myself to nod. “Okay.”
“You...I...” He reaches up to scratch the back of his neck, and the gesture is so fucking familiar, a piece of him I locked away without even realizing I was holding onto it.
He could be seventeen again. He could be standing next to my locker, scratching his neck and thinking up a reply to whatever smartass comment I just made.
“I don’t know what to say,” he finishes, one side of his mouth turning up like he’s testing the waters for a smile.
He’s still so beautiful.
I don’t smile back, but I don’t stop looking at him either. I could recognize him in a crowd of thousands, but the longer I stare, the more changes I start to see.
His hair is shorter, too short for the waviness of the black strands to really show. There’s a new leanness to his face, the lines of his cheek and jaw a little sharper. His shoulders seem wider, stretching the sleeves of his gray t-shirt, but he still has that lean, loping look I noticed the second I first saw him.
He’s got the start of some stubble. It looks like he could have an actual beard now if he wanted, not that patchy thing he tried to grow for a few months in high school.
I let the facts sink in. I’m twenty-three, so he’d be twenty-five now.
Twenty-five.
There’s so much between eighteen and twenty-five, so many moments and feelings and sunsets and triumphs and hours spent lying in bed, thinking and dreaming, fighting and losing. It’s a whole lifetime, in a way.
A whole lifetime I wasn’t there for.
I want to tell myself I don’t know him anymore, that nothing about him is the same, but even without us exchanging more than a word, I can tell it’s not true.
His eyes haven’t changed: deep, dark brown—almost black unless they’re in the sun. They still watch the world around him with that expression it took me forever to place. They still watch me that way.
I’d still describe it just like I did back then: his eyes always look like he’s in the middle of making music, like he sees it everywhere and in all things.
I fight as hard as I can to keep from trembling again.
“I’m not sure if there’s anything to say.”
I don’t know if I’m being harsh for him or for myself. He flinches again.
“I just...I saw you, and—”
He stops when DeeDee comes charging down the hallway again, this time with a tray full of dirty glasses in her arms.
“Paige, we are going to—” She freezes when she spots Youssef. Her eyes dart from the broken glass to me gripping the sink for dear life before landing back on him. Then they narrow. “Excuse me, mister, but what the hell do you think you’re doing back here?”
I try to clear things up. “DeeDee, he just—”
“Is he messing with you?” She doesn’t wait for an answer before setting the tray down on the counter and getting right up in Youssef’s face. She manages to have him terrified and backed against the wall even with her pink water wings still on. “Écoute, you. I have kicked more assholes out of this bar than I can remember. You will not be the first one or the last one, but I will make sure that you—”
“DeeDee!”
She turns her head to me but keeps her finger in Youssef’s face like she’s holding him at gunpoint. “Yes?”
“It’s okay. I...know him. He just surprised me, and I dropped the glass.”
“You know him?”
“Yeah.”
She looks back at Youssef. “Hmm. Are you sure?”
I almost laugh. “Yes, DeeDee.”
“Okay.” She drops her finger and backs off. Youssef slumps against the wall like he’s been released from a chokehold as she bounces over to me. “Well, in that case, there’s this guy out there who says he wants to hire you to DJ at The Cube Room. The Cube Room, Paige! That place is the best. I told him to come get noodles with us so you guys could talk about it. You should come too.”
She directs the last part at Youssef as she picks up her tray again and carries it over to the dishwasher, side-stepping around the shards at my feet. He stares at her like he’s expecting her to lob one of the glasses at his head.
DeeDee is one of those people you quickly learn not to underestimate.
“Uh...” he begins after the silence stretches on for a second.
It’s the only thought my brain can produce too. This night has taken such an extreme turn for the unexpected I have whiplash.
“I’m gonna go pack up my shit,” I announce before doing what I do best in most social and emotional situations: leaving.
It’s only once I’m back out in the mostly-empty bar that the impact of what just happened truly hits.
Youssef Salah just showed up at Taverne Toulouse. He saw me play. He talked to me. He said words to me, and I said words to him, and then I left him standing in the kitchen.
Holyfuckingshit.
My hands are shaking as I start unplugging things and securing my gear back in its cases. I swear as my Ableton Push—AKA the object I love more dearly than most parents love their children—nearly slips out of my hands. Crouching down behind the booth to shield myself from the servers gathering up glasses and bottles, I ball my hands into fists inside the sleeves of my hoodie and make myself breathe.
He doesn’t get to do this to me. No one gets to do this to me. No one gets to make me feel out of control.
“Uh, hi. Chanly?”
“What do you want?” I snap my head up as a guy leans over the top of the booth to stare down at m
e.
His eyes go wide, and I realize I must look like a creepy little demon right now, crouched in a ball with my hood covering half my face, swathed by the black mass of my sweater.
“Uh, hi,” I try again, raising myself to my feet. “What’s up?”
“My name’s Nabil. I just, um—” He swallows, probably worried I might start speaking in the voice of Satan.
Honestly not a reputation I mind having.
“Well first off, you had an amazing set. Fucking fantastic. I saw you play at Piknic Électronik a few weeks ago, and it was killer, but this was like...lethal. So good.”
“Uh, thanks.”
My guard starts going up, my body tensing like I’m entering a fight. Men never compliment me unless they’re looking for something in return.
“So, I’m the manager of The Cube Room, on St-Catherine. It’s—”
“I know what it is.”
Which means I know who he is. There are outliers, but men in the music industry are pretty much all the same, and if you’re a girl—especially a girl DJ, and especially a girl DJ who isn’t white—it’s a lesson you have to learn quickly.
There’s no time for the benefit of the doubt. They will either treat you like you’re stupid, like you’re a snack, or like you’re a bitch.
So I always establish myself as the latter instead of giving them the choice.
“Cool. So, I’ll just get right to it. I would love to have you play the club—for an initial show, and possibly as a regular feature. Normally I’d be like ‘Let’s have my people talk to your people’ and shit, which I still will, but one of the bartenders said you guys are all going out for food, and that set definitely deserves celebrating, so if you’re interested in talking about The Cube Room...Well, you know they say the best business deals are always made eating noodles at two in the morning.”
He laughs, and I lift one corner of my mouth for half a second.
In my head, I’m already picturing it. A regular set at The Cube Room would be huge for me. I haven’t found a manager I trust enough to hire yet, so for now, it’s just me handling my bookings. The people-pleasing skills needed for that aren’t my strong suit, and I know my career has been suffering from all the times I’ve held back on putting myself out there.
This isn’t an opportunity I can afford to miss.
A movement across the room catches my eye, and I look past Nabil to see Youssef stepping out of the hallway. It shouldn’t feel like getting slammed with a truck to see him again after only five minutes, but it’s still all I can do not to double over from the impact.
Nabil turns too, and the night throws yet another curveball at my face when he calls out to him.
“Youssef, man, where the hell were you?”
Youssef looks from Nabil to me and then glances around the room like he’s looking for someone to trade lives with.
I too would be down to swap existences with the next server to pass by.
Nabil calls out again, and I watch as Youssef reaches to scratch the back of his neck before coming over. There’s something boyish about it, something that makes it harder and harder to see him as a stranger, not the tall senior who didn’t go anywhere without a beat-up black Jansport hanging off his shoulder and a pair of headphones slung around his neck.
It’s like I’m holding up a ‘spot the difference’ game beside him as he comes to stand in front of the DJ booth, circling the similarities amongst all the things that have changed.
“Youssef, this is Chanly. Or is that a stage name? I—”
“It’s Paige.”
Neither of us is looking at Nabil, and it only takes him a second to pick up on whatever force field of convoluted emotions is growing in the space between us.
“Uh, do you two know each other?”
Those dark eyes don’t leave mine. “Yeah. We...we went to high school together, back in Brampton.”
Mierda. That fucking voice. It’s like I can feel his lips on my skin when he speaks.
I grip the sleeves of my hoodie even tighter and bite out the words, “Only for two years.”
It’s as much a reminder for me as it is for him. He was gone so fast—fast enough that those two years shouldn’t be anything more than a blip in my history. We knew each other in a different life, in a different city where we were different people. Just the word Brampton brings up a dozen memories about my family I’d rather forget.
“Wait. Is she—”
The movement of Youssef’s elbow jabbing into Nabil’s ribs pulls my attention away long enough to break our stare-off. Nabil’s eyes have gotten so wide he looks like some kind of nocturnal animal from the dark depths of the rainforest. His mouth is hanging open as his head snaps back and forth between the two of us like he’s following the world’s most engrossing tennis match.
I shift on my feet. I don’t like people knowing more about me than I want them to, and this guy seems to think he knows a whole lot.
“Wow. Okay. Wow.” His jaw drops open again, but he pulls himself together after Youssef’s elbow threatens another assault. I’d laugh if I wasn’t somewhere between pissed off and totally freaking out. “Okay, I’m sure you two would love to catch up, and I really would like to talk about The Cube Room, so how about Youssef and I go wait outside while they finish cleaning up in here, and then we can tag along to get food? If that’s cool with you, of course.”
I let a few moments tick by as I weigh the options. Ingrid texted me just after the show ended to say she was heading out with some girl she met in the crowd—no surprise there; Ingrid can’t even do groceries without five different girls trying to flirt with her—so I don’t have her as an excuse to leave. I’d have to come back to the bar to get my gear tomorrow and then Uber it all to the apartment if I went for noodles, but I know there’s at least a storage closet they could lock my stuff in for me.
I don’t really have a viable reason not to do this, other than Youssef, so if I do bail, he’ll know it was because of him.
The fact that he still makes me feel something, whatever the fuck it is, isn’t something I want broadcasted to the world.
“Okay. I guess we’ll meet you outside.”
Nabil smiles and grabs Youssef’s shoulder to lead him out of the bar. I watch them go, flipping one of the latches on the case I’m holding open and closed a few times. The whack of the metal springing open reaches a frantic tempo before I set the case down, pull my hood up, and march over to the bar.
“Hey hey!” Zach greets me when I fling myself onto the barstool beside him. “That was an amazing show! Seriously, you were on fire. You’re coming for noodles, right?”
I take a deep breath and nod before turning to DeeDee. “Is it too late to get a drink?”
Four
Youssef
COLD: Adjective used to describe a sound quality that is digital and harsh
Nabil is practically jumping up and down on the sidewalk. He grabs my shoulder and shakes me as he lets out a long string of Arabic swear words before I can even answer.
“Can we please not call her ‘high school girl’? It sounds bad. She is clearly not a high schooler.”
“Yeah.” Nabil stops bouncing and smirks at me. “Clearly. I mean, damn. Damn. You don’t really notice it at first because she’s got like, the hoodie and her hair is all hanging in her face, but when I walked up to her at the booth it was like whoa.”
Whoa.
I kind of want to knock him in the ribs again for saying it, but I can’t blame him. There is no other way to react to Paige’s face than ‘whoa.’ Even at fifteen, she was stunning. Literally stunning—like, freeze on the spot and forget how to breathe kind of stunning.
She had the same hair back then too: thick, dark curtains hanging over her shoulders and always shielding her like blinders. I remember the first time I looked down the hall and saw her tuck one side behind her ear as she grabbed some books out of her locker. I’d never noticed her before. She was just a freshman, and it was only S
eptember, but after I got that one short look at the lines of her profile before she slammed the locker closed and turned away, I couldn’t stop noticing her.
I could never stop any part of what I felt when it came to Paige.
“I should go.”
“What?” Nabil blinks like he’s only just noticed I’m not as ecstatic as he is.
“I’m gonna go. You should stay and talk shop, but I’m leaving.”
“No!” He steps in front of me like he’s ready to ignore the three inch difference between our heights and throw me to the ground. “You need to talk to her!”
“I did. She...I don’t think she wants me here.”
“Bullshit. You guys looked like you were ready to fuck on the DJ booth.”
“Don’t—”
He raises both his hands in a gesture of innocence and cuts me off. “Hey, man, I just speak the truth I see, and the truth is that you and that girl have some unfinished business. How many times have you been drunk and going on and on to me about how much you wish you could see ‘that girl from high school’ again? Well, fate has answered, brother.”
I lean against the brick wall behind me, and Nabil comes to stand by my side when it’s clear I’m not going to take off running. It’s past two in the morning now, but the street is still filled with diehard partiers waiting for Ubers or flocking to food trucks and twenty-four hour restaurants. I’m sure I have a string of texts from Mohammad asking me where the hell I went, but I leave my phone in my pocket.
“I just can’t believe she’s in there. I can’t make it feel real. Like, Paige Rivera is right there.” I jab a finger at the door of Taverne Toulouse.
“Riverrrra.” Nabil puts on a bad South American accent and rolls the last r. “Sexy.”
“Fuck off.”
“Ooh!” He pretends like the growled threat hurt him. “Shit, you really like her, don’t you?”
“I don’t know her. Not anymore.”
Maybe I never did. Things wouldn’t have ended the way they did if I knew her.