by Anna Hecker
He sits up suddenly, bringing our faces level and reminding me all over again that we’re alone. In his bedroom. On his bed. “Jazz?”
“Yeah. You know: skiddly-bee-bop, lots of snare … that kind of thing?”
He gives me a lopsided smile. “So that tune you made up earlier: was that jazz?”
“Yeah. It was 3/4 time, probably for trumpet, bass, and drums. I actually based it off the way your keys jingled when you walked.” I’m talking too fast. I tell myself to slow down, to keep my cool.
“And you just … do that? Write songs in your head while you’re walking down the street?”
“Sure. There’s music everywhere. You just have to listen for it.”
“Interesting and talented.” Derek shakes his head. “And cute. You really should try DJing for real. Maybe I could help you get some gigs.”
“You think?” The word tickles something inside me: gigs. Was Shay serious when she said DJs can make serious money? Could that be me?
“I do.” Derek’s voice drops low, drawing me in. We’re sitting closer now, our thighs officially touching. The soft cotton of his jeans feels like it’s searing a hole in my flesh.
I can’t think with his face this close to mine.
He smiles with only his eyes and tilts his head. Silence stretches around us until it feels like every sound in the world has been sucked away. I want to move closer but I’m paralyzed, scared I’m reading this wrong. Or that I’m reading it right.
His phone rings.
He moves away. The moment ends. He looks at his screen and groans before answering.
“Hi, Mom.” He holds up a finger, rolling his eyes.
A soprano squall rises from the speaker.
“No, I said tomorrow.”
The squall thickens.
“No, I definitely said tomorrow. There’s no way I can make it out today, I’m in the middle of something important.”
Important. Does he mean me?
“I’m sorry, Mom. I told you I’d come out and finish it Sunday. Not Saturday. Can you please wait one more day?”
The squall drops to an alto, the spaces between words expanding.
“Okay, then. I’ll see you tomorrow. I love you, Mom.”
A single squeak.
“Come on, don’t be like that. We had a misunderstanding. I said I love you, okay?”
Three words, reluctantly.
“Okay. Bye.”
He jams the phone back in his pocket.
“Don’t ask,” he says to me. His voice sounds like sawdust.
“I won’t.” I try not to let disappointment swell my voice. I rub my hands together, stretch my legs. “Well. Should we get back?”
His lip twitches. “I guess we should.”
I ease myself off the bed and follow him through the neighborhood in silence, Derek jingling whenever his right foot hits cement. It isn’t until we round a corner and the music from the party rises to greet us that I realize something.
Derek stops suddenly. “The earplugs,” he says.
“I know. I just remembered.”
Our eyes meet. I make a noise like a fountain bubbling over, and a chuckle rumbles low in Derek’s throat. Suddenly we’re laughing so hard we have to hold on to each other to stand up.
“I can’t believe we forgot them,” Derek gasps, his hands on my elbows.
“I know.” I steady myself on his shoulders, our bodies inches apart.
“We should go back.” He stops laughing and looks in my eyes, and my stomach flips hard. “Do you want to go back?”
“Ye—” I start to say.
“Derek!” The bouncer at the gate booms out his name, his face an angry block of concrete. “These kids tried to sneak in.” He points to a trio of guys with baseball caps pulled low over their foreheads.
“Shit.” Derek looks from me to the bouncer, and sighs. “You should probably give me your number,” he tells me. “For earplug delivery purposes.”
“Oh.” My face goes hot. “Yeah, of course.”
I give it to him, and he types it in his phone and then texts me a winky-face emoji so I’ll have his number too. And then even though he has to stay with the bouncer while I go back into the party, even though the music is loud and boring and Shay is busy dancing with her friends and it takes me almost an hour to find Yelena and Britt, the rest of my night feels like hearing your favorite song on the radio—not just once but on repeat all night long.
CHAPTER 13
Derek doesn’t text the next day, or the next. But even as a day turns into a week and my giddy anticipation peters out into disappointment his walk stays with me, and I can’t forget the tune I started humming on the way to his loft.
I enter it into Sibelius so his foot hitting the pavement becomes a kick-drum, the shuffle of his jeans a snare and the jingle of keys a marimba, coppery and fleeting. The bass line is the easy roll of his shoulders, the way the sun glanced off his hair. And the trumpet is how I felt being with him, that dizzy airiness so full of possibilities.
When the arrangement is done I title it ‘His Walk’ and send it to Crow and Nicky, then FaceTime them to find out what they think. It’s been six days, three hours, and twenty-seven minutes since I said goodbye to Derek, and by now I’m pretty sure I just imagined that moment in his bedroom, when the silence stretched around us for miles. I’m doing my best to forget him. I’ve even started thinking about hooking up with Peter again when I go to Windham over the Fourth of July, for Visitors’ Weekend—Funyun breath be damned.
“What do you think?” I cut to the chase as soon as Crow answers. It’s the end of the last free period of the day at Windham, when I know they’ll be hanging out in the communal lounge. Familiar worn couches and framed portraits of great musicians swim into view as I balance my laptop on my lap in bed. I try to swallow the rush of FOMO.
“Nicky!” Crow turns and yells over her shoulder. “Stop flirting and get over here. It’s Mira!”
Nicky? Flirting? The only other openly gay guy at camp last year was a sad-eyed bassoonist who wore the same holey Igor Stravinsky T-shirt every day. I wonder if Nicky decided to go for it anyway—or if there’s someone new on the scene.
Nicky pops into the frame, his cheeks scarlet and his hair mussed.
“Who’re you flirting with?” I ask.
“Nobody,” he says quickly. “Crow’s imagination has gotten the better of her, as usual.”
I decide to let it go. We only have a few minutes until lights-out, and I need to hear what they think about my piece. “So what do you think of ‘His Walk’?” I ask.
“Oh, it’s okay.” Nicky’s face goes redder. “I mean he has those long legs, and …”
“Nicky!” Crow backhands him lightly on the shoulder. “She’s talking about her piece.”
“Right. I knew that.” Nicky’s face is the color of stewed tomatoes. “It’s good!”
“It’s excellent,” Crow corrects him. “The bass is hot!”
“And the marimba,” Nicky agrees, his eyes flitting past my shoulder, to someone in the lounge I can’t see. “I like the marimba.”
“Maybe we could play it for Visitors’ Weekend?” I suggest. “At one of the recitals. They’d let me sit in for one piece, right?”
“Ugh, I wish,” Crow sighs. “Between recitals and the ensemble concert I’m playing two different versions of ‘Embraceable You.’ Two! Can you believe it?”
A knot starts to form in my stomach. “They already finalized the program?” I was counting on Visitors’ Weekend to debut this piece. It’s the only chance I’ll have this summer to play in front of a crowd.
“Yeah, last week.” Crow squints at me from below the brim of her fedora. “You didn’t know?”
“How would I know?” My stomach twists. “It’s not like I’m there.”
Crow scrunches up her forehead. “I thought we told you. Maybe you were so busy with all that raver stuff you missed it?”
“Raver stuff?” My voice goes flat. “Did you seri
ously just call it that?”
“Whatever.” Crow takes off her glasses and cleans them on the tail of her men’s dress shirt. “I’m almost positive we told you.”
“Crow.” I speak very calmly and evenly, because I know if I don’t I’ll scream. “You told me Regina started a food fight in the dining hall. You told me two string players got caught hooking up in a paddleboat. You did not tell me the deadline to submit pieces for Visitors’ Weekend was coming, because I would have remembered that. I would have written this faster.”
“We can still give it a couple run-throughs,” Nicky jumps in. “Just like, informally, during free hours. I’ll book a practice room.”
“I don’t want a practice room.” The knot in my stomach squeezes tighter. “This piece is good. I want people to hear it.”
“I’m sorry.” Nicky shakes his head. “I don’t know what to say.”
“People will hear it someday,” Crow adds. “We’ll play it all the time at Fulton. Every night!”
I stay silent. All the disappointment of the last few days comes crashing over me: Not hearing from Derek, which matters even though I keep telling myself it doesn’t. Feeling like a third wheel when I hung out with Britt and Yelena and they gabbed endlessly about clubs in the city I can’t get into and people at Pepperdine I don’t know. And now losing my only chance to perform at Windham this summer, my only chance to play for a real, live audience before my audition.
Nicky reads the disappointment on my face. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs, the pink draining from his cheeks and making him look sallow in the fluorescent light. “We’ll figure out a way to make it up to you.”
A counselor calls for lights-out, and Crow and Nicky give me apologetic air-kisses before signing off, swearing again that they’ll make up for it somehow when I see them on the Fourth of July. I pick up my trumpet and play a long, angry blast that echoes through the empty house. Britt went into the city with Yelena and my parents are still at the gym, trying to fix a leaky pipe in the basement so they can save money on a plumber.
I play the melody from my new piece, first to tempo and then with a slow, bluesy swing. I try it in a minor key, echoing the way I feel. But it sounds lonely all by itself. That’s the thing about jazz: it’s not the kind of music you play alone. Jazz is improvisational, collaborative, built in the moment. You can practice on your own, but when it comes to really feeling the music in your blood you need other people; you need your combo.
But you don’t need other people to DJ.
I open my laptop and click into my DJ software, my fingers suddenly itching to get at the controls. As I slip into a noise-scape of drum-machine beats and fat, juicy bass, I’m transported back to the party last weekend, the connection I created with the crew as they set up. If I can’t perform my jazz pieces this summer, maybe I can find a crowd to DJ for instead.
My mind flicks back to my conversation with Derek in his bedroom. Play some parties, he said. Make some mixes. Get your name out there. Maybe I can help get you some gigs.
I haven’t been invited to play any parties and have no idea how to get my name out there, but I bet I can figure out how to make a mix.
As I begin selecting tracks and layering them together so they blend like my favorite flavors of ice cream, some of the sting of the past week melts away. I may not be able to control the program for Visitors’ Weekend; I can’t control Britt’s partying or Derek’s lack of texts or my family’s finances.
But I can control this. When it comes to this, I have all the control in the world.
CHAPTER 14
I text Shay as soon as my mix is finished. She’s meeting up with some friends in a park and invites me to come along, so I scrunch some moisturizer into my hair and dig out my least nerdy top, a plain black tank that’s a hand-me-down from Britt.
Shay’s friends have staked out the area near a skateboard half-pipe, marking their territory with a patchwork of blankets and beach towels and a Bluetooth speaker blasting upbeat house music. As I squeeze in next to Shay they take turns falling off a pair of skateboards and alighting on the blankets like a flock of pigeons.
I’ve seen these people before, surrounding Shay after her set in the warehouse and swallowing her into their crowd at This Is A Lot. Shay tells me they’ve all been going to parties together since her freshman year, and I can tell by the way they act. They’re friendly enough when Shay introduces me, but they talk mostly to each other, in a patter so thick with shared history and in-jokes it may as well be another language.
My throat constricts as I realize that this is how Crow and Nicky and I must sound. I can almost picture them in the dining hall right now, probably dumping Froot Loops and Cap’n Crunch on bowls full of soft serve. FOMO strikes hard, leaving a searing emptiness in my chest.
“So you made a mix?” Shay asks, turning to me. She has a plastic tackle box open next to her and is giving herself a manicure, complete with tiny jewels she attaches to her nails with tweezers.
I nod. “Is it okay if I play it?” I ask, gesturing to the speaker.
“Go for it,” her friend Ty says, grabbing his iPhone and silencing the house track. “Shay says you’re really good!”
“Thanks.” My hands go clammy as I connect to the speaker and hit “play” on my mix. I’ve been obsessing over it for the past three days, tinkering with the order and smoothing out my transitions. Now I’m nervous to be debuting it not just for Shay, but also her entire crew.
A third of the way through, I can’t take the suspense anymore. “What do you think?” I ask Shay.
“It’s dope!” She reaches for a lavender rhinestone. “Definitely high energy. And your transitions are tight.”
“I’d dance to this,” Ty adds, giving me a shy half smile from under shaggy bangs.
“Anything you’d do different?” I ask. I’m used to Crow and Nicky’s brutal honesty, but with this they wouldn’t even know where to start.
Shay scrunches up her nose. “I didn’t love that third track. With all the whooshing sounds?”
“Agreed,” Ty says. “Too slow.”
“Like that set at that party in Baltimore,” their friend Lin giggles. “With the rain?”
“Oh man.” Ty shakes his head. “That was a crazy night.”
I try not to squirm as they launch into a memory I’ll never be a part of, then another and another. As soon as the mix is over, I pounce on Shay.
“So?” I ask impatiently.
“Like I said, it’s dope.” She turns to her friends. “Right, guys?”
Lin and Ty nod.
“Okay.” I drum my fingers on my leg. “So once I fix that third track—then what?”
“What do you mean?” Shay asks, blowing on her nails.
“What do I do with it after that?”
“Why?” Shay fans her fingers through the air. “You change your mind about wanting gigs?”
“Maybe,” I mumble, looking down at my feet.
“Hah.” She gives me a triumphant grin. “Told you—everyone wants to be a DJ. ’Cause it’s dope as shit.”
“Dope as shit,” Lin choruses, laughing.
I feel like I’ve been caught with my hand in the candy jar. “So let’s just say, hypothetically, that I did want gigs.” I try to look casual as I wipe my hands on my shorts. “What would I do?”
Shay shrugs. “Post it online. Send it out to your followers. Ask people to share it. Send it to promoters and see if they’ll book you.”
“Right,” I say, like I knew it all along. Like I have any followers. “That makes sense.”
“I know—it’s a hustle.” She pats me gingerly on the knee, careful not to mess up her manicure. “DJing is like ten percent making music and ninety percent figuring out whose ass to kiss.”
I laugh, even though I’m groaning on the inside. “I feel like I should embroider that on a pillow,” I say, disconnecting my phone and putting it in my pocket.
“Make it pink and I’ll buy it off you,” Shay j
okes. “You heading out?”
I nod. “It’s a long drive home.”
She stands and kisses me on the cheek. “Text me if you want to hang again,” she says. “We come here a lot.”
I wave goodbye to her friends and spend the drive home wondering if I should really take her advice and post my mix online. Is there a possibility it could get me gigs—and that, eventually, I could start making money?
At home I swap out the third track and export the mix to mp3 format. Then I sit staring at the green waveform for a long time. Up until now I’ve just been messing around: downloading tracks, beat-matching alone in my room, playing a slot I wasn’t booked for at a party that hadn’t started yet. But now it’s starting to feel different. It’s starting to feel real.
I shake my head. I’m being ridiculous; posting this mix won’t change anything. It won’t make me a DJ. Electronic music is just a stopgap to fill the void that Windham left in my life. As soon as Crow and Nicky come home I’ll have my combo back. I can start really playing jazz again, not just practicing alone in my room, and my real life as a musician and composer will resume.
Until then, it doesn’t hurt to experiment.
I go to the website Shay recommended and create a profile. It asks for a photo and my DJ name, so I snap a quick selfie standing in front of my egg-crate-foam wall and type Mira Mira into the name bar. It’s the best I can come up with, and in a way it’s a tribute to Shay, the way she always says my name.
Then, before I can chicken out, I upload my mix and push it live. My breathing is the loudest thing in the room as I sit there waiting for something to happen.
But, of course, nothing does.
I think about how I don’t have any followers or know any promoters.
And then I think about how that’s not, strictly, true.
I promised myself I wouldn’t text Derek if he didn’t text me first. I don’t want to seem too eager, or like I see something between us that isn’t there. I’m not one of those girls who goes chasing guys who aren’t interested. I’m like Miles Davis: I play it cool.
But if I’m texting Derek as a promoter, not a guy I like … that’s different, right? That’s not being desperate. That’s just hustling. And according to Shay, I have to hustle if I want to get gigs.