This Song Will Save Your Life

“She did. It’s complicated.”

“Just try me,” I said. “I love complications.”

He laughed. “Okay, look. Pippa and I hooked up after Start last week. This week she showed up expecting me to … I have no idea. Ask her out? Be her boyfriend? Play ‘Chapel of Love’ and get down on one knee in my DJ booth and propose to her? Needless to say, I didn’t do any of that. And I made it pretty clear to her that I don’t intend to. So then she got mad. And then she got drunk.”

“Do you like her?” I asked.

“Has anyone ever told you that you ask a lot of questions?” he said back.

“You know, it’s possible that one or two people have mentioned that to me over the course of my life. Do you like her?”

“Of course I like Pippa. But I don’t like her like that.”

I thought of Pippa, her high heels and stu

“Because she’s not…” He paused, searching for the reason, then shook his head. “I just don’t want to be tied down like that.”

“So then why did you have sex with her?”

“Because she’s hot.”

There was a long silence. I stared out my window.

“I told you it was complicated,” Char said at last.

“It’s no worse than trigonometry,” I muttered.

Char cleared his throat. “In other news, I don’t think I thanked you for taking over the turntables tonight. Thank you.”

“It was fun. Well, it was hard. But it was fun, too.”

“You were good.”

It was a very small compliment, but it came from someone who mattered, about something that mattered. I felt a smile spread across my face. “Really?”

“Yeah. It was cute. How did you learn to play?”

“I just taught myself last weekend.”

Char choked a little. “You’re joking.”

“I’m sorry; I can teach myself anything. Well,” I corrected myself, “almost anything.”

He glanced at me. “That’s a weird thing to be sorry for.”

“No, it’s not. Take this right here, and then it’s two lights on.”

“Your transitions could use some work, though,” Char went on. “You don’t know how to beat match at all. And you looked kind of freaked out the entire time.”

“Hey!” I exclaimed. “I’ve had, like, eight hours of practice. Give a girl a break.”

“If you want, I could teach you.”

“Really?” I said.

“Of course really. It’s probably more interesting than teaching yourself. Let me give you my number. Just text me over the weekend if you want to come over to my place and practice.”

I programmed his number into my cell, and then I stared at it for a long moment. Char had a phone number. He had a home. He probably had a job or a college and a last name and parents and all of that, too. He didn’t just spring into existence late on Thursday night and then blink out again at two a.m. He was a real person.

I wasn’t sure I liked that.

“Is it this turn here?” he asked.

“Oh, you can just leave me at the corner. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going to let you wander the streets alone at this hour.”

I considered telling him, It would not be the first time. But all I said aloud was, “Fine, then take this left. It’s that white Colonial across the street. Number 77.”

Char coasted to a stop and stared out the window at my house. I was glad to see that it was as dark and quiet as I’d left it. Although my parents had never yet caught me sneaking out, that didn’t mean they never would.

I tried to see the house through Char’s eyes. The gingham curtains in the living room. The welcome mat. The swing set in the yard. The two low-emissions cars parked in the driveway.

“This is a nice house,” he said.

“Thank you.”

He looked at me then like he was really seeing me for the first time. “What’s a nice girl like you doing at a warehouse nightclub at two a.m. on a school night?”

“It’s complicated,” I said. And then I got out of his car and went inside.

Sometimes you just have those days where everything goes wrong. But sometimes, and totally unexpectedly, something can go right.

7

My hands were shaking when I arrived at Char’s home on Sunday afternoon. I had texted him earlier in the day to ask if he was free to teach me about DJing, and he wrote back, SURE! COME OVER @ 3 AND WE’LL MAKE MUSIC :) So he had invited me here, I reminded myself.

But still. That didn’t mean he actually wanted me here. As I rang the buzzer to his apartment building, I imagined him, maybe with a bunch of his friends, hiding behind a parked car, watching me, laughing, and saying, “Oh my God, I can’t believe she actually showed up. Like she believed I was serious!”

That wasn’t what happened. What happened was that Char answered the door, looking like he had just woken up, but nonetheless happy to see me. “Hello!” he said. “If it isn’t Elise, the precocious DJ.”

I gave him a silent glare. I don’t need to take a bus all the way across town on a weekend for someone to make fun of me. I can do that just by going to school.

I had told my mom that I was spending the afternoon at Sally’s house. I briefly considered telling her that I’d made a new friend and I was going to hang out with him, figuring she would be delighted to hear that my social life was blossoming. Then I decided that, because my new friend was a nearly-twenty-year-old male whom I’d never seen in daylight before, maybe my mom didn’t need to know.

“Did you bring your laptop?” Char asked.

I held it up for him to see.

“Excellent. Let’s do this.”

I followed Char as he bounded up four flights of stairs and then down a short hallway. He was wearing cutoff jeans and a plain red tee with a small rip in the back, and he had a Chicago Cubs baseball cap jammed down over his unruly hair. In this outfit, he still looked like the Char I knew, but he also looked like somebody else. Like he could have been any of the guys at my school—a little older, but no more special. I suddenly understood why Mel kept telling me to “fix up, look sharp.” The everyday Char didn’t wear fitted suits or leather jackets. Maybe the everyday Pippa didn’t wear four-inch heels or sequined dresses either. The everyday me didn’t play music at late-night dance parties. I couldn’t tell which was the way Char actually was: Char at Start, or Char at home.

He unlocked the door to his apartment. Actually, apartment would be a compliment. It was a room. A big room, with a bed at one end and a kitchenette at the other, but still just a room. There were a bunch of boxes stacked up in the middle of the floor, and Char’s DJ setup rested on top of them: a turntable, a mixer, a laptop, and speakers on either side.

Char looked around the room, his lips pursed, like he was seeing it through my eyes. “Right,” he said. “I just moved in, is why there are all these boxes still.”

“Oh, when did you move?” I asked politely.

“October.”

I squinted at him. “You know it’s April, right?”

He shrugged.

I looked around at his unswept floor, unmade bed, and white walls—blank except for that Trainspotting poster about “choose life” and an enormous Smiths poster that said GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA on it.

Then I shrugged, too, set down my computer, and said, “Okay, so teach me something I don’t know.”

He laughed and sat down on his bed. “I’ve never taught anyone to DJ before. I don’t want to sound like your bio teacher.”

“I don’t take bio,” I told him. “I’m in chem now. I’m a sophomore.”

He rolled his eyes. “I guess the thing to know about DJing is that it’s not just playing one song after another song, like you were doing on Thursday. That’s good, and it takes practice to do that using the equipment. But that’s not enough, because, at the end of the day, anyone can put together an iPod playlist and press play, but not just anyone can have my job.