This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales

  I thought of Pippa, her high heels and stunning dresses and adorable haircut and winning dance moves and charming accent. “Why not?” I asked.

  “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.

  “There are two things that make someone a great DJ. One is technical skills. Not leaving gaps between the songs, not accidentally playing two songs at once, starting songs from the point that you want—that kind of thing. One of the most important things to master is beat matching. Do you know what that is?”

  “It’s when you fade in one song while you’re still fading out the other,” I answered, while looking around the room for a place to sit down. Nothing. No chairs, no couches, no rug. The only place to sit was on the bed, next to Char. But the idea of that made my hands feel shaky again. Did he have sex with Pippa here, in this bed?

  “Right,” Char said, like he was answering my unspoken q
uestion. “If there’s a pause between songs, people will use that as an opportunity to go to the bathroom, or get another drink, or for whatever other reason leave the dance floor. Your goal, as DJ, is to make them stay on the dance floor. So when you match the beats from one song to the next, there’s an overlap, but it sounds harmonious, not cacophonous, and no one even notices that they’re dancing to the next song until they’re already in it. Give it a shot.”

  So I hooked up my laptop to Char’s mixer, and he talked me through transitioning from “Love Will Tear Us Apart” to “Young Folks.” But it did not sound, as he had suggested, harmonious. It sounded like a headache.

  Char leaned back against his pillows and watched me, a smile playing on his lips.

  “Okay, what am I doing wrong?” I asked after the third time that I completely failed to align the two songs.

  “It’s just hard,” Char said. “For starters, you’ve picked two songs that happen to be really tricky to beat match. Start with something more straightforward. I learned to do this by transitioning from ‘This Must Be the Place’ into ‘This Must Be the Place.’ It’s easier to figure out how songs match up when they’re the same song.”

  So I tried doing that for a while, but still I couldn’t get the beats to hit at the same time.

  “I think I’ve ruined this song for myself,” I told Char. “Have I ruined it for you, too? I’m sorry. It used to be so enjoyable.”

  “It takes more than ten minutes of repeating the same song for me to grow sick of it,” Char said. “But there are definitely songs that I’ve ruined for myself. Like ‘Girls and Boys.’”

  “The Blur song?” I said, resting the headphones around my neck for a moment. “But it’s so good!”

  “Ah, that just means you don’t go out enough. I’ve been going out three or four nights a week for the past three years. That means I’ve gone out roughly five hundred times. And every single time, I have heard that song. Now, the word girls appears in that song thirty-two times. That means that I have heard Damon Albarn say the word girls more than sixteen thousand times. What percentage of my life do you think I have spent listening to that song?”

  I shrugged. “Math.”

  “Algebra?” he asked.

  “Geometry. Algebra was last year. I’m a sophomore, Char.” I put the headphones back on and tried again for the “This Must Be the Place” into “This Must Be the Place” transition. No luck.

  Char hopped off the bed and came over to stand next to me. He reached across me to press pause on my computer. Then he gently removed the headphones from my head and flipped them so that one side was pressed against his ear and the other was pressed to mine. His head was just a few inches away from my own. “Okay,” he said, and he started the song from the beginning again. Then he took my free hand and pressed it to the turntable. He rocked our hands back and forth on the record so that I could hear the same beat of the song repeat over and over in the headphones. “You hear that?” he asked. “That’s the kick. You want it to match the downbeat on the other song.”

  He gestured at me to start the other song, and then in my free ear I heard him start to count measures, while in the headphones I heard only the kick of the first song as we kept rocking our hands forward and backward together. “And one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one—”

  He pulled my hand off the record, and the two songs took off together, perfectly in sync.

  He let go of my hand but didn’t move away. “Now slowly take that slider from one side to the other,” he instructed, and I did. “And that, Elise,” he concluded, turning to face me straight on, “is how to beat match like a DJ.”

  Suddenly, “This Must Be the Place” wasn’t ruined for me anymore. Suddenly it was the greatest song I had ever heard.

  “You know,” he said, studying me, “you actually have a fantastic smile.”

  “Three years of braces,” I explained.

  “No, seriously,” he said.

  “They also pulled four teeth. Before the braces. That probably helped.”

  “Why don’t you smile more often?” he asked.

  “I smile about as often as I feel like smiling,” I answered. “Sometimes more, because I read this study that said people like you better when you smile.”

  Char laughed. “Does that work? Are people really that easy to trick?”

  “In my experience,” I said, “no.”

  “Bummer.” He returned to his bed.

  “So how’s Pippa?” I asked, switching over to an old Smokey Robinson. The transition sounded messy again, but a little better this time.

  Char sighed.

  “You know,” I said, “just speaking of people who want people to like them better. It’s a natural transition.”

  “No offense, but your transition from ‘This Must Be the Place’ to ‘This Must Be the Place’ worked better.”

  “How is Pippa?” I repeated.

  “Pippa texted me on Friday with a million apologies and thanks, since Vicky told her that I was the one who carried her home from Start. So that seemed good, because if she could text, then at least we knew that she was alive.”

  “And how did you respond?” I asked, scrolling through songs on my computer.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You just didn’t text her back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Seems a little rude, Char.”

  He leaned his head against the wall. “I just don’t want to lead her on, you know?”

  “So that’s the last that we’ve heard from Pippa?” I asked. “A text acknowledging that she’s alive?”

  Char looked shamefaced. “Not exactly.”

  I sighed. “What did you do?”

  “Well, I ran into Pippa and Vicky at Roosevelt’s last night.” I must have looked blank, because he added, “It’s a bar. They have this amazing monthly soul night. The DJ spins only forty-fives, and his collection is out of this world. Last night he was playing this Lee Dorsey song I’d never even heard before—”

  “Pippa,” I reminded him.

  “Pippa. Right. I brought her home with me.”

  I stopped the song with a screech. “You’re telling me you didn’t want to lead her on, so you brought her home with you?”

  He rested the back of his hand against his forehead. “I hear what you’re saying. I don’t know. It made sense at the time.”

  “When did she leave here?”

  “About an hour ago.”

  I looked around Char’s room again, seeing it now with fresh eyes. Pippa was just here.

  “Vicky is going to kill you,” I said.

  Char gave his pillow a shove. “Vicky is overprotective. It’s not like I’m some pariah, preying on Pippa’s naïveté. She knows how I feel. She wasn’t drunk last night, or at least not as drunk as she usually is. She made her own rational, adult decision to come home with me. She wanted to.”

  I thought about Pippa on Thursday, passed out on a bench. “I think Pippa wants a lot of things that aren’t good for her.”

  Char shrugged. “Don’t we all?”

  I rubbed my thumb across the inside of my left wrist and didn’t reply.

  “This is a downer,” Char said abruptly. “I shouldn’t be burdening your young mind with my old-man problems.”

  “Once again, if you missed it, I am a sophomore. And furthermore? It’s not like you have to be a legal adult to have problems.”

  “Oh, really?” Char laughed. “What are your problems? Chem class is that hard?”

  I kept my thumb on my wrist and said nothing.

  “Anyway,” Char replied, “you came all the way over here to learn to DJ, not to hear about all the ways that I’ve screwed up with girls.”

  “Go on, then.”

  “Okay, like I said, there are two things every great DJ needs to be able to do. One is to master the technical skills. Which you’re doing. Good job. Unfortunately, that’s about ten percent of what it takes to DJ right.

  “The other
part, the part that really matters, is that you need to be able to read a crowd. You can’t just play whatever songs you like. You have to figure out what people are responding to, what they want to dance to, which songs they already know and like and which songs they’re going to like once you have introduced them. Every crowd is different, and even at Start, every week is different. That is why I still play ‘Girls and Boys’ sometimes. It doesn’t matter that I’ve heard Damon Albarn sing the word girls more than sixteen thousand times. As long as people still want to dance to it, it is still worth playing.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So how do I do that? How do I figure out what people want?”

  “You watch them,” Char said. “You stand in the DJ booth, so you’re near them but not part of them. And whenever you can, you look up from what you’re doing and you see how they’re reacting.”

  Char’s words made me think of all the magazines I had read, all the movies I had watched, all the blogs I had studied, trying to figure out what it is that people want me to do. “I don’t think I’m very good at reading the crowd,” I said.

  “That’s because it’s an acquired skill,” he said. “It takes practice, sometimes years of practice. And sometimes even the best DJs get it wrong. I think it’s natural to just want to play your favorite songs and force everyone to love them as much as you do. And sometimes, in the right context, they will. Over the past two years, I have turned everyone at Start into a huge fan of this random oldies song called ‘Quarter to Three.’”

  “I don’t know it,” I said.

  “Exactly. And the kids at Start beg me for it now. But it took a while. Most people don’t immediately like new things. They want to dance to the songs they know. As DJ, you obviously know more songs, and better songs. That’s why it’s your job. But you can’t always be teaching them. Sometimes you have to play along with them. It’s a balance.”

  “So you just stand up there and look around the room and figure out what will make people happy?” I asked.

  “Pretty much. So, go on. Give it a shot.”

  “Okay.” I looked down at my computer, then back up at Char. “Wait, who is my pretend crowd?”