by Leila Sales
20
“So you decided to show up after all, hmm?” Mel said when I arrived at Start later that night. “Just couldn’t stay away?”
“What can I say? The scene needs me,” I told him.
Mel laughed. “Atta girl.” Then he noticed who was behind me. “Hello,” he said, sticking out his hand for a shake. “I’m Mel.”
“I’m Joe Dembowski. Elise’s dad,” said my dad.
I closed my eyes briefly. Please don’t do anything to embarrass me, Dad. Actually, my dearest hope had been that he wouldn’t identify himself as related to me, period. Let everyone think he was just some lecherous old guy who enjoyed hanging out at warehouse parties on his own.
“You’ve come to see your daughter’s big premiere?” Mel nodded his approval. “You’ve got a good dad,” he said to me. “And don’t worry about it, Joe; I don’t need to see your ID.”
“You’ve been taking care of Elise?” Dad asked, looking Mel up and down.
Mel shrugged modestly. “When she lets me.”
Dad laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “I know what you mean,” he said. Then we entered Start.
“So this is where you’ve been spending all your time?” Dad asked, looking around the room. The party hadn’t started yet, so it was almost entirely empty. The bartender’s iPod was playing faintly on the speakers.
“Some of my time,” I said cautiously.
Dad shrugged, like he wasn’t impressed. Then he laughed. “You know what? You’ve come to enough of my gigs over the years. I’m glad to finally have the chance to return the favor.”
“I’m glad, too,” I said, and I was. Glad that we were back on speaking terms, glad that my dad understood what it meant to fall in love with music, glad that I had my own father and not Sally’s. I hugged him suddenly.
“I’m proud of you, baby,” Dad murmured. “Go out there and knock ’em dead.”
“Thanks, Dad,” I said. “Now would you please sit over by the bar and act like you don’t know me all night?”
He nodded. “You got it.”
I headed over to the DJ booth and started setting up. Char had always taken care of this part before, so I went slowly, checking and double-checking to make sure that everything was plugged in correctly.
Just as I was plugging in my last cords, the Dirty Curtains arrived.
“Helloooo, Glendale!” Harry shouted, raising his drumsticks in the air. “How y’all doing tonight? Glendale in the hoooouse!”
“Harry,” Vicky said, a step behind him. “We’ve been over this. The drummer doesn’t get to banter with the audience.”
“What about the guitarist?” Dave asked, setting his guitar on the stage. “Does the guitarist get to banter?”
“No,” Vicky said.
Dave shrugged. “That’s cool. I didn’t want to banter anyway.”
“I did,” Harry said. He raised his voice again. “Glendale, get your hands in the air if you’re sexy! All sexy hands, in the air! Unsexy hands, you can just hang out.”
“I swear to God,” Vicky said, “I have the bantering under control. I will handle the banter. Just play your goddamn instruments.”
I stepped down from the booth and gave Vicky a hug.
“Okay, I am freaking out.” Vicky let go of me and took a step back. “Now tell me the truth: do these false eyelashes make me look like a My Little Pony?”
“Vicky!” I laughed. “Since when do you get stage fright?”
“Uh, since my whole life?”
“But you’ve performed in a zillion things. You were a cheerleader,” I reminded her.
“Yeah, and shouting, ‘Roosevelt Roosters, go go go!’ in a yellow-and-green unitard really prepared me for singing in front of Start. Anyway, this is the first time I’ve performed my songs. Songs that I wrote. Not to mention the first time the Dirty Curtains have performed anywhere, ever. Like, all of a sudden the Dirty Curtains are a real band, instead of a few dudes who play video games on my TV and shed beard hair all over my rug while I try to make them rehearse.”
I glanced over at the other two Dirty Curtains, who were plugging their instruments into amps and saying, “Testing, one two three,” and, “Is this thing on?” and, “Cocksucker cocksucker cocksucker” into their mics.
“They seem like a real band to me,” I said.
“I just don’t want you to regret asking us to play on your big night,” Vicky said. “We might suck. Are you prepared for people hearing us and, like, vomiting all over your dance floor?”
“Vicky,” I said, resting my hands on her shoulders. “Repeat after me. I deserve to be here.”
“I deserve to be here,” Vicky said, looking into my eyes.
“I don’t care if anyone thinks I look stupid.”
“I don’t care if anyone thinks I look stupid,” Vicky echoed quietly.
“Okay.” I took my hands off her shoulders. “Do your stuff out there. Show no mercy.”
Then Vicky went to help set up, while I went to the booth and put on my headphones. I cued up the Undertones’ “Teenage Kicks.” Then the clock hit ten, Mel opened the door, and the crowd came pouring in. The night had begun.
It felt different, DJing a party that was all my own. The whole success of the night rested on me. If I messed up, I didn’t have Char there to save me. But there was something about it that I liked, too. Because if the night was a success, I didn’t have Char there to take the credit. That was all mine.
And by midnight, I was ready to say it: the night was a success. The dance floor was full, a pulsating mass of bodies moving to every track I played. Char had talked about reading the crowd like you’d read a book, but tonight I had moved beyond even that. It felt like invisible veins and arteries ran between me and every person in that room, communicating information between us instantly and noiselessly. It wasn’t like reading a story. It was like I was writing a story.
And everyone was there. I saw the Dirty Curtains, of course, flitting through the crowd, and Pippa, Pete, Flash Tommy, Emily Wallace and her friends, my dad.
Everyone was there, except for Char. His absence still hurt me. But it hurt less now than I had thought it would.
Shortly after midnight, Vicky showed up next to the DJ booth. “Ready?” she asked me. The Dirty Curtains were up on stage, Dave strapping his guitar over his shoulder and Harry adjusting his mic stand.
“So ready.”
She flashed me a grin, then hopped up on the stage. I faded out the music, and Vicky shouted into the mic, “Ladies and gentlemen of Start, I have one question for you: Are you ready to party?”
“Woo!” a few people shouted, moving closer to the stage.
“Hit it!” Vicky said, and the Dirty Curtains began to play.
They were extraordinary.
I say this not as Vicky’s friend, and not as the girl who booked the band to play, but as a DJ who has listened to thousands upon thousands of bands, who lives with earphones on, who attended her first live concert at the age of eight months because, as my father said, “Even infants like James Brown, right?” I’ve heard it all and I’m hard to impress.
But Vicky’s band blew me away.
In a flapper-style dress and gold heels, she strutted around the stage like Tina Turner on steroids, her hair cascading down her back, her eyes flirting with the crowd, her voice never faltering. Behind her, the guys played their instruments madly, building a wall of sound for Vicky’s vocals to rest on top of.
Everyone in the club pressed closer to the stage, and the cameras came out. The room filled with bright sparks of light.
Vicky marched to the front of the stage and held the mic up to her bright-red lips, almost like she was kissing it. The words came out of her like a cannon shot.
“Hey there. Yeah, you. You with the eyes.
Do you like what you see?
Do you like my chest?
Yeah, do you, do you?
Do I pass your test?
Yeah, do I, do I?
> Do you like my hair?
Well, here’s the thing, baby…”
Here she leaned forward, like she was about to tell the audience a secret, and she snapped out the last line:
“I don’t care!”
The room filled with whoops and cheers as the Dirty Curtains slammed through the final chords of the song. When it was over, Harry was visibly covered in sweat, and Dave chugged about half a bottle of beer, his hand shaking. But Vicky looked as crisp as if she’d just emerged from a day at the spa.
“Hey, Start,” she said into the mic, batting her false eyelashes. “We’re the Dirty Curtains. And we like you.”
“We like you, too!” shouted a voice from the back of the room.
Vicky chuckled. “Well, you’re about to like us just a little bit more. Boys, let’s go!”
Harry smacked his drumsticks together, and they were on to the next song.
I was so captivated by Vicky’s performance that I didn’t even notice Pippa approaching me until she was standing right next to me in the booth. She was wearing a black slip dress and a large hairclip with jewels and feathers. She had a cocktail in her hand, which made me suspect that whatever sort of anti-partying ethic her parents had tried to instill in her over the past few weeks hadn’t worked that well.
“Hi, Pippa.” I felt my heart beat faster.
“Hiya,” Pippa replied, blinking rapidly. “Um, Vicky’s doing great, isn’t she?”
I nodded and waited for her to go on, because no way Pippa had come over here just to tell me that Vicky was “doing great”—which was, by the way, the understatement of the year.
“Look, Elise, I just wanted to say … well, thank you.”
“For what?” I asked.
“For this.” Pippa gestured around the room. “Thank you for giving Vicky the chance to play.”
I shrugged. “I’m not doing her a favor or anything,” I said. “She’s incredibly talented. She deserves this.”
“Obviously,” Pippa agreed. “But people don’t always get what they deserve.” She shifted her weight from foot to foot. After a pause, she spoke again. “Vicky is my best friend. I’d do anything for her. Anyone who makes Vicky this happy is good with me. No matter what.”
“Thank you,” I said quietly. “And I’m sorry,” I added, “about the whole Char thing.”
“Oh.” Pippa’s cheeks flushed a little. “Yeah.”
“But you know,” I went on, hoping that Pippa could handle a little honesty, “it wasn’t all my fault. Char kissed me first. I just kissed back.”
Pippa’s face drooped, like the idea of Char kissing me physically hurt her. “I know,” she said. “I mean, I figured. I guess I told myself it was all your fault so that I could keep believing it wasn’t what Char wanted. I think I just … wanted him to be something that he isn’t.”
“Me, too,” I said. “But he isn’t.”
“But I really think,” Pippa said, perking up, “that he could be. You know?”
“What?”
“Obviously Char made mistakes. And so did I, and so did you. But I just know that if I give him some time to think it through, and explain to him why he hurt me, he will be better next time.”
“Seriously?” I said.
Pippa’s eyes were bright with feverish intensity as she said, “Listen, Elise. I have met a million guys, and I have never felt about any of them the way that I feel about Char. Everything about him is perfect. I mean, except for some of the things he’s done to me. But I honestly, honestly believe I can fix that part.”
I said nothing. Because I didn’t believe that at all. People are who they are and, try as you might, you cannot make them be what you want them to be.
Side by side, Pippa and I watched the rest of the Dirty Curtains’ set together. Vicky had the audience in the palm of her hand. She shone brighter than any camera flash in the whole club.
When the last song drew to a close, the room burst into applause. Vicky pointed at me and shouted into her mic, “Thank you, DJ Elise, for booking us to play, and for being Glendale’s hottest DJ!”
I blushed and rolled my eyes, but the applause somehow grew even louder as all eyes and cameras turned to me.
“We love you, Elise!” Vicky called.
The crowd picked up the cry. “We love you, Elise! We love you!”
I let this go on for another few seconds before I started up the turntables again and pressed play on the Pulp song “Common People.” There was a collective shriek of excitement, and then the room exploded back into motion.
I looked out over the crowd and breathed in deeply. All this was mine.
In a way, Amelia Kindl had been right when she once said to me, “I saved your life.” She was right, but not in the way she meant it. When she saw the suicide note on Elise Dembowski’s Super-Secret Diary and called my father, she set into motion the chain of events that led to me being in the DJ booth tonight. And that, in a way, had saved my life.
I was playing the Justice vs. Simian song “We Are Your Friends,” and everyone was jumping and flailing and singing along—“Because we are your friends, you’ll never be alone again, well come on!”—when Harry approached the DJ booth. “Hey!” he yelled up to me. “Is it okay if I…?”
“Of course!” I waved him up.
He climbed in next to me. “You are doing such a good job,” he blurted out at the same time that I said, “You guys rocked!”
We both laughed.
“Seriously, you were awesome,” I said. “I had no idea the Dirty Curtains were so good.”
“Me neither!” Harry beamed. “And you know what? There was this old dude in the audience, and he’s in some famous seventies band, and he told Vicky he thinks the Dirty Curtains could really be going places, and he wants to introduce us to his manager! Is that insane or what?”
I cracked up. I couldn’t help myself. I looked across the bar to my dad, who was chatting with the bartender. “You’re right,” I said to Harry. “That’s insane.”
“Okay, now let’s talk about how this is the best party I have ever been to in my entire life,” Harry said. “Like, even better than my seventh birthday party when my mom bought me a Star Wars cake and we played Pin the Light Saber on the Jedi. Okay, just kidding, that was actually my thirteenth birthday.”
I laughed again. “Hey, Harry,” I said, and then I stopped.
“Yes, Elise?”
I swallowed. “Do you want to go to a way less exciting party tomorrow night?”
“With you?” Harry asked.
“Yeah. It’s called the Glendale High Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal. It’s in the school gym.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll totally go to that with you.”
We looked at each other and smiled. We were still looking at each other when the sound cut out.
I registered the shock on Harry’s face an instant before I realized that the music had stopped. Frantic, I fumbled with the computer, the mixer, the wires, everything, trying to figure out what had gone wrong. I couldn’t find the problem. I didn’t know. Char had been right: I was too young, too inexperienced, and of course I had screwed this up. And he wasn’t here; there was nobody to rescue me from silence.
Only there was no silence.
Everyone in that room kept singing, as though the music was still with them—no, more than singing, screaming really, insistent, off-tune, beautiful.
“Because we! are! your friends! you’ll never be alone again! Well, come on! Well, come on! Well, come on! Well, come on!”
Their hands were in the air, raised toward me, heads thrown back, a spinning collection of lights and sound and people. An instant later, I figured out which wire I had knocked out. I replugged it and the song kicked back in, exactly in time with the singing crowd. And they all went nuts.
“Because we are your friends, you’ll never be alone again!”
And for the first time in my life, I knew that was true.
I caught my breath, took a bi
g gulp of water, and smiled. My party raged on.
You think it’s so easy to change yourself. You think it’s so easy, but it’s not. True, things don’t stay the same forever: couches are replaced, boys leave, you discover a song, your body becomes forever scarred. And with each of these moments you change and change again, your true self spinning, shifting positions—but always at last it returns to you, like a dancer on the floor. Because throughout it all, you are still, always, you: beautiful and bruised, known and unknowable. And isn’t that—just you—enough?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am lucky to have so many supportive friends in my life, and it is thanks to their combined efforts that This Song Will Save Your Life came into being.
Thanks first and foremost to Joy Peskin, who is not only a friend to me, but also an extraordinary mentor, inspiration, teacher, and editor, too. I have been so fortunate to get to work with you over the years.
To the whole of Foundry Literary +
Media, especially my agent, Stephen Barbara, for the devotion with which you take care of my career, and of me.
To the entire team at Farrar Straus Giroux, for welcoming me with such enthusiasm. Special thanks to Angie Chen, whose editorial insight is matched only by her talent with a pair of knitting needles; Elizabeth H. Clark, for the gorgeous cover design; and Kathryn Little and Molly Brouillette, for their energy and creativity.
To my copy editor and best parade-going friend, Kate Ritchey. There are no grammatical errors in this book. And if there are, that’s my fault, not Kate’s.
To my writing partner, Rebecca Serle, for dreaming big, and for daring me to dream even bigger.
To Katie Hanson, for sharing with me such a wonderful home for a writer to create.
To my parents, Amy Sales and Michael Sales, for, well, basically everything.
To all the DJs who have knowingly or unknowingly helped change my life. Special thanks to New York nightlife legend and international scenester, DJing skills consultant, and the voice of our generation, DJ VH1 (aka Brendan Sullivan). And to DJ Brian Blackout (aka Brian Pennington) for his kindness, ingenuity, sense of humor, and unwavering support.