by Leila Sales
Chava looked hopeful, but Sally shook her head. “I have to get home by curfew.”
I nodded and opened the door. “Thanks again for driving me.”
“Sure,” Sally replied. Then I got out of the car and watched her drive away, at twenty-five miles per hour. My friend Sally was two-timing Larry Kapur. The world is a weird place.
“You’re here pretty early,” Mel commented when I reached the door to Start. “For you, I mean.”
I shrugged.
“Can’t wait for your party tomorrow night,” Mel went on. “It’s gotten fantastic press online. All about Start’s vibrant young DJ sensation, Elise Dembowski, rising from nowhere to nightlife fame. I’m sure you’ve seen it. They got some great shots of you from Flash Tommy.”
“No,” I said, my heart sinking. “I haven’t seen it.”
“Look yourself up, honey!”
“Mel…” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think I’m going to do the party tomorrow.”
“Why?” he asked.
“I don’t think I’m … technically proficient enough. I mean, I’m just not good enough, probably…” I trailed off, waiting for Mel to fill in the blanks.
I wasn’t selling this at all. When I told Char, and Pete, I was going to need to sound a lot more convinced of my inability.
Mel frowned. “Honey, when you came here to me and I asked you whether you had talent or issues, do you remember what you said?”
I nodded and swallowed. “Both.”
“So why are you letting your issues get in the way of your talent?”
“Mel,” I said, “I want to.”
I went inside. Char was alone at the DJ booth. I supposed it was too early in the night for Vicky or Pippa to be here, and I was glad for that. This would be easier if it was just between me and Char.
I stood alone in the back of the room for a moment, watching him. It was early, so almost no one was dancing yet. Char’s eyes were focused on his computer, and he brushed a lock of hair off his forehead. I could see his fingers tapping out a beat on the table next to him.
One last time, I thought about what it could be like, twenty-four hours from now, at my party. If I were the one standing up there, tapping out a beat. If Char were the one in the audience, watching me, swaying to my music.
One last time, I said goodbye to that, and I started toward the booth.
One foot in front of the other, until you reach him. Open your mouth and tell him. Just tell him you give up. It’s easy. Fake Elise did it. You can, too.
I was almost at the DJ booth, reaching out for Char, when I felt a hand clamp down on my shoulder. I turned around, and the disco ball overhead illuminated the man behind me.
It was my father.
17
“What are you doing here?” I asked my dad.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. Then, “We’re going home.”
He propelled me out of Start, past Mel, and into his car. Whether Char noticed that I was there or noticed that I left, I don’t know. I never spoke to him.
“How did you find me?” I asked.
Dad ignored me and pulled out his cell phone. “Danielle,” he said into it. That’s my mom. “I found her.” He paused. “No, she’s fine.” Another pause. “Okay, yes. See you there.”
He hung up and started to drive, his windshield wipers flicking furiously back and forth.
“Daddy, I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I snuck out. I’m sorry I lied to you. I’m sorry I’m so…” I started to cry then. “I’m sorry,” I repeated over and over. “I’m so sorry.”
When we pulled up to Dad’s house, Mom was already waiting in her car outside. She jumped out and ran through the rain to meet us at the front door.
Inside, we dumped our umbrellas and wet shoes by the front door and went into the living room. Mom sat in one arm chair, Dad in the other. I sat alone on the couch. I noticed Mom glancing around the room. I didn’t know if she had ever been to Dad’s house before. They almost never saw each other at all, because they didn’t have any reason to. They had both been at my middle school graduation ceremony two years ago. And at the hospital on the first day of the school year. Big events only.
But here we were, the three of us alone, together. Just like a family.
I was still crying, but I shut up when Dad opened up his laptop and showed me the screen. “Does this look familiar to you?”
It was Elise Dembowski’s Super-Secret Diary.
My stomach clenched. “Yes.”
“Around ten o’clock tonight,” Dad said, “I received a panicked phone call from a nice-sounding girl named Amelia Kindl. She said that she didn’t know you very well, but that she had read something online that concerned her. She directed me to a blog, saying she didn’t know if it was serious or not, but she was worried. I thanked her and went to the Web site address she’d given me. This is what I found.” He read aloud. “‘June seventeen. Tonight is the night. I don’t want to do this anymore. I give up. Goodbye. xoxo Elise Dembowski.’”
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“What do you think I did?” Dad asked me.
“You got worried?” I asked.
“Elise, ‘worried’ does not begin to cover what I got. If anything had happened to you, I literally would not be able to go on. I ran upstairs and opened your bedroom door, no idea what I was going to find. I was terrified. And what I found was … nothing. The room was empty. That was when I called your mother. She wasn’t happy about hearing from me so late at night.”
“Only because I didn’t know why you were calling,” Mom objected.
“We didn’t know where you were,” Dad said. “All we knew was that you had left a suicide note online, and then disappeared.”
“I still don’t understand how you didn’t notice her leaving,” Mom said to him.
“She said she was going to bed,” Dad defended himself.
“Didn’t you hear anything? Do you expect me to believe she snuck out of the house absolutely silently?”
“I wasn’t sitting outside of her bedroom all night, preparing to bust in if I heard a single sound other than a snore. I believe kids need a little privacy.”
“She was grounded. How much privacy did she need?”
“So how did you find me?” I interrupted. There’s nothing interesting in my parents’ bickering. I’ve heard it all before.
“This other Web site,” Dad answered. He said the name like it was in quotation marks: “‘Flash Tommy’? You had it open on your computer, and I saw photos of you at a big party. So I headed to the street address given on the site. I didn’t know if you would be there. I was just hoping.”
Thanks a lot, Flash Tommy.
“So you probably want to know what I was doing at that party,” I said dully.
“What we need to know,” Mom said, “is, what is this diary of yours?”
“I didn’t write it,” I told them.
“That’s what I thought,” Dad murmured.
Mom shot him a look.
“What?” he asked. “The girl on this Flash Tommy Web site is not the same girl writing these diary entries. They directly contradict each other. And she’s been at this party a number of times. I saw photos on that site. Sorry to tell you this, Danielle, but your daughter has snuck out of your house before, too. More than once.”
Mom blinked rapidly, but otherwise acted like Dad hadn’t spoken. “So you didn’t set out to kill yourself tonight,” Mom asked me.
“No!”
“And you don’t … hate us?” Mom asked.
I bit my tongue to keep from swearing. “Does that blog say I hate you?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
They both nodded.
“No,” I said. “You’re my parents. I don’t hate you.”
“Then you shouldn’t have been sneaking out of our houses, Elise,” Mom said. “It’s dangerous. Not to mention incredibly disrespectful. Your father and I set rules, and we expect you to follow them.
When I tell you that you’re grounded, I need you to take me seriously.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“How many times have you left the house in the middle of the night?” Mom demanded.
“I … don’t know. A lot, I guess.”
“And were you always going to this…” Mom gestured at Dad’s laptop, at a loss for a word to describe Start. “This event space?” she finally said.
“No.” I’d never put this into words before, to explain it to someone else. I didn’t quite know how to begin. “Sometimes I just wanted to walk. I wasn’t trying to hurt you or disrespect you or anything … It had nothing to do with you. I just really love Start. That’s all.”
“Here’s what I want to know,” Dad said, tapping his finger against his computer. “If you don’t write this blog, then who does? And why?”
“I have no idea,” I answered.
“Then that,” said Dad, “is what we really need to figure out.”
* * *
When I walked into the kitchen the next morning, my father was not only awake and reading the newspaper, he was dressed in a suit. The last time I saw my dad in a suit was at his own mother’s funeral.
“Let me guess,” I said, grabbing a banana. “You’re pursuing a new career as a real estate broker.”
He raised his eyes over the paper. “I want your school to take me seriously when I go in there and give them hell. Here.” He slid a carefully cut-out newspaper article across the table to me.
It was a brief piece, more of an event listing than an actual story. It just said there was a new indie, new wave, and soul dance party tonight, from the promoters who brought you Start, and it featured up-and-coming DJ wunderkind Elise Dembowski. Above it was a color photograph, small but unmistakably showing me behind the turntables.
This wasn’t the first time I’d appeared in our town paper. Getting into the Glendale Gazette is actually not that competitive. You can accomplish it for far less than DJing a warehouse party. I got mentioned in the paper when I won the eighth grade spelling bee, and before that in fifth grade when I was a youth volunteer on Steve’s friend’s mayoral campaign. I still had those clippings in my desk drawer, cut out for me by my father. This wasn’t the first time.
But it felt the best.
“So that’s why you wanted me to get you DJing equipment, huh?” Dad asked, not looking up from his paper. “Very clever. Now, were you planning to tell me that you’re going out tonight, or were you just going to try your hand at sneaking out again?”
“I…” I rubbed my eyes. “Neither. I was planning not to go.”
“Because your mother would blow a fuse if she knew her underage daughter was at a nightclub?”
“Because … It’s complicated, Dad.”
“Try me,” he said. “I’m a relatively smart guy.”
Yeah, my dad was smart. Smart enough to kill me if I told him I’d been hooking up with a guy who was three and a half years older than me. I said, “Because some people there don’t want me to play. And they have a good point.”
“The thing about being an artist,” Dad said, folding his newspaper and setting it down on the table, “is that there are always going to be people who want to stop you from doing your art. But this usually says more about them and their issues than it does about you and your art. Trust me. I’ve been a musician since I was younger than you. And if I had a penny for every person who has told me the Dukes are dead, we should stop trying to write music, I should do something productive with my life, I’ll never be as good as this other bassist or that other bassist—well, I would be rich enough to buy you something fancy. But those people don’t know me. So I just keep playing my music. That’s what I’ve been doing for forty years, and that’s what’s always worked for me.”
“So you’re saying I should sneak out of the house tonight to DJ a warehouse party?”
Dad gave a little laugh. “You wish. No, Elise, all I’m saying is: don’t let anyone else decide your life for you.” He stood up and straightened his tie. “Let’s go.”
Dad drove me to school. We met Mom in the parking lot, and then we headed to the principal’s office, united.
Of course, the principal wouldn’t see us. The principal never sees anybody; he is way too important for that. We met instead with the vice principal, Mr. Witt, most famous for his masterful handling of the Jordan DiCecca–Chuck Boening iPod Crisis. My parents showed Mr. Witt Elise Dembowski’s Super-Secret Diary and explained what was going on.
“What are you going to do about this?” my dad asked.
Mr. Witt suggested the following things:
1. Most likely, I had actually written this diary, but now that my parents had discovered it, I was just acting like I hadn’t so I wouldn’t get in trouble.
2. Even if somehow I didn’t write this blog, there was no reason to believe that the blogger was a student of Glendale High. It could have been anyone in the world! In fact, the blog might even be referring to a different Elise Dembowski!
3. Glendale High had zero tolerance for bullying, and therefore it was impossible that any one of the school’s 850 angel-faced students was the culprit.
“I hear what you’re saying, Mr. Witt,” Mom said, “but I have to disagree. I would appreciate your conducting a real investigation into this question. This is harassment. This is bullying. We need to know that the school is taking this as seriously as we are.”
“If any of our students is somehow running this blog, we will find out about it,” Mr. Witt promised, in the tone of someone who has only one week left in the school year and after that doesn’t have to give a shit about any adolescent problems until September.
After our meeting, my parents left matters in Mr. Witt’s capable hands and headed to work. “I’ll pick you up at three to bring you to Alex’s school fair,” Mom said before she left.
I blinked. “I’m ungrounded?”
“No way, José. You are definitely still grounded. But you’re going to that fair.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because,” she said, “you told me you wanted to be a good big sister. And that’s what a good big sister does.” She gave me a quick hug. “I’m sure Mr. Witt will sort this out.”
I was sure of nothing of the sort, but I put on a smile and waved goodbye.
* * *
As I headed to lunch a couple hours later, I braced myself for more questions about Start from Chava and Sally. But what I didn’t brace myself for was the dozen other kids who showed up at our table as soon as I sat down.
Emily Wallace slid in right next to me. A few of her friends joined her. And of course wherever Emily goes, boys follow. The guy who had once offhandedly called me a “lesbo” sat down next to Chava, who looked like she was maybe going to faint. A bunch of other guys in T-shirts, sweatshirts, track pants, and other gear that proclaimed GLENDALE LACROSSE gathered around, too.
“What’s going on?” I asked, looking around the table. Looking for escape routes. Looking for a lunch monitor.
“Nothing,” replied one of the girls. “Just eating lunch with you.”
And you might think I would be happy to have the popular kids sitting with me, like: This could be it! The moment when my fortune changes! Next stop is homecoming queen, student council president, and juggling three boyfriends at once!
But that wasn’t what I wanted. It never had been. Leave those dreams to Sally and Chava. I hadn’t wanted popularity; I had only wanted friends.
“Tuna fish,” said another girl, pointing at my sandwich. “Good choice.”
“For real,” agreed another. “I wish I’d brought tuna fish today.”
I looked at Sally and Chava and raised my eyebrows as high as they would go, to say, This is weird, right? But Sally and Chava were too busy beaming at all our lunch guests, like desperate hostesses who hadn’t been quite sure that their party would ever begin.
“I wish I had tuna today, too!” was Chava’s contribution.
“Me, too,” I said, eating a bite of my sandwich, which, if the girls were to be believed, was the most miraculous sandwich ever to grace the Glendale High cafeteria. I tried to ready myself for what these people, these people who did not understand, would have to say about Start.
“Did you really go to that warehouse party?” asked another guy.
“Of course she did,” said the first one. “There was a photo of her there.”
“Chava and I drove her there last night,” Sally answered proudly. “She was grounded, so she snuck out of the house. I was the getaway car.”
“That’s cool,” a girl said to Sally, in a tone like she legitimately meant it. Sally beamed. Then the girl turned to me. “So you actually DJ there?”
I tried to smile as the walls I’d built between Start and school, my real life and my dream life, came crashing down piece by piece, battered away by lacrosse sticks and mascara wands.
“I went to see her once,” Emily butted in. All eyes snapped to her. “Guys, it was so much better than a school dance.”
Everyone murmured their approval and envy of Emily’s lifestyle.
“How did you get to do that, though?” one of the guys asked me. “I mean, why you?”
“I don’t know,” I answered. “Luck of the draw?” But that was a lie, and I couldn’t do it; I just couldn’t leave it at that. “And I’m good at it,” I added.
Oh, you think you’re so great. You think you’re so special. You think you’re so much better than everyone else.
But no one said that. Just my own mind.
“Here’s the bit I don’t understand,” Emily began, and again everyone turned to listen to her. “Why do you write that super-depressing blog about how nobody likes you and you hate your life, wah wah, when you get to be a DJ? I wouldn’t complain that much if I were you.”
“Oh, that’s easy,” I responded. “Because I don’t actually write that blog.”