This Song Will Save Your Life (17 page)

The next day at school, we were forming our circle at the beginning of theater class when Lizzie slipped in next to me and cooed, “Eloquent Elise, how many words do you know?”

I blinked at her.

“A million?” she pressed. “A thousand? A hundred? You must know more than a
hundred
words, Elise. After all, you are
so
eloquent.”

“I … don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t
know
?” The kids nearby giggled. “But how can that be? Eloquent Elise, I thought you knew
everything
.”

So I took a deep breath, and I drew myself up to my full height—which, at the time, was roughly four feet—and I recited, “You are just jealous of me. You’re jealous because I’m smart and I’m talented and I know who I am.”

There was a moment of silence in which I thought that maybe, finally, I had bested them. Maybe Lizzie was about to be like, “Oh my God,
you’re right
.”

Instead, Lizzie and her friends began to shriek with laughter. I felt like I was surrounded by a thousand cawing birds.
“I’m smart and I’m talented and I know who I am,”
they sang at me, over and over, for the rest of the period, and throughout every theater class thereafter, until the words that had once sounded so uplifting became an insult, a joke.

Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore, so I quit theater for another arts elective. But painting and chorus were full. So I had to switch into remedial reading. I spent the rest of the semester learning to read picture books of
Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Because that is where the eloquent go.

So now, four years later, as I thought about confiding in my dad, I tried to figure out what it was that I thought he might be able to change. And the answer was: nothing.

So I said: nothing.

But it was okay. The blog and the silence and the secrets and the Chava and Sally lunchtime suicide help line. It was okay because that wasn’t everything. I had my night life, too, and that was what was real.

I hung out with Vicky more and more. I could tell from their raised eyebrows and suppressed smiles that my parents were thrilled about this, clearly thinking,
A friend! Elise has a real, live friend!
But aloud they played it cool, acting like, “Oh, yeah, Elise has friends all the time.” And for my part I volunteered no information about Vicky. She belonged to a different world from my parents’, and I was going to keep it that way.

Vicky brought me to her favorite clothing boutiques and I brought her to my favorite record stores. On Friday night I skipped dinner with my dad to meet Vicky downtown for pizza and a movie at the indie cinema. We spent most of dinner playing a game called When We’re Famous.

“When we’re famous,” Vicky said, “I’ll perform at Radio City Music Hall and my rider will include a bucket filled with cinnamon jelly beans. Just cinnamon, no other flavors. A stagehand will have to go through and pick them out. And if he accidentally leaves in any cherry jelly beans, because he mistakes them for cinnamon, I will have him fired on the spot.”

“When we’re famous,” I said, “people will buy action figures that look like us. No little girls will play with Barbies anymore. They will only want rock music action figures.”

“When we’re famous,” Vicky said, “we can open a camp for girls who are artists, and it will be free, so even if their parents say ‘No one makes a
career
as a musician’ and refuse to spend a penny on their arts education, they can still afford to come.”

“When we’re famous,” I said, “everyone will know our names.”

The next week I met up with Vicky and Harry at Teatotaler, which is like a coffee shop except for (surprise!) tea. Harry and I individually took notes on
Macbeth
, which we had both been assigned at our respective schools. My English class was a full act ahead of his, so I kept spoiling it for him.

“Oh, no,” I murmured, turning a page.

“What?” Harry asked. He glanced up from his book.

“Nothing.”

A moment passed.

“Oh,
no
,” I said again, sounding even more horrified.

“What?”
both Vicky and Harry asked this time.

“You don’t want to know.”

“Okay,” said Vicky, and she went back to pretending to read a thick book of literary criticism for one of her classes while texting with Pippa.

“I want to know,” Harry said.

“Well, if you’re sure…” I leaned in and whispered, “All of Macduff’s family just got murdered.”

Harry groaned and tossed his copy of the play aside. “I hate you.”

I shrugged. “I told you that you didn’t want to know.”

“Excuse me, babe.” Vicky looked up from her phone for long enough to flag down the male barista who was clearing the table next to ours. “Any chance you’d treat a girl to another tea bag?” She batted her long lashes. “Something
steamy
.”

The barista looked confused. “You can order up at the counter, ma’am.” He walked away.

Vicky sighed and her eyelashes went back to normal. “No one appreciates my feminine wiles.”

Harry snorted.

“Hey.” Vicky turned to me. “Do you want to hear the new Dirty Curtains song? We just recorded it last weekend.”

“I’d love to!” I answered at the same time that Harry whined, “Aw, Vicky,
no
.”

“Why not?” Vicky demanded.

“Because.” Harry’s face was red. “It’s
embarrassing
. We’re just going to watch Elise while she has to sit there and pretend to like our music? I mean … she’s a DJ!”

I giggled into my teacup.

“Harry,” Vicky said, “I don’t know how to break this to you, but you are in a band. And that means that sometimes people are going to hear our music. Deal with it.”

She pressed a few buttons on her cell phone, and then the opening drumbeats of a song kicked in. Vicky turned up the volume as loud as it would go. The guitar came in next—rich, raw, powerful. And then Vicky’s voice.

“Screw you, too.

No, I don’t want you back.

With your sneers and your jeers

And your worthless attacks.”

The barista came over to us again. “Hey,” he said, “could you guys turn that off? This is a public place, and it’s annoying the other customers.”

“Sorry,” we said in unison.

“Did you like it, though?” Harry asked me after the barista walked away.

“I can’t wait to listen to the whole thing.”

Harry flushed. “You’re, like, obligated to say that, though.”

“I still mean it,” I said. “You guys are
really
good.”

“Way too good for this place,” Vicky agreed, slamming shut her book. “Let’s get out of here and go annoy strangers somewhere else.”

It was good to have Vicky.

And then, of course, there was Char.

Char and I fell into a pattern, too. Every Thursday night, I would walk over to Start as soon as my family was asleep. Char would say hi to me like we were just friends, nothing more, and I would plug my laptop into his mixer like we were just friends, nothing more. We never greeted each other with a hug or a kiss; nothing. I would start each Thursday night convinced that whatever Char and I had between us was over now, and I would be walking home at a relatively reasonable hour.

And by the end of each Thursday night, Char and I were making out in the DJ booth like our lives depended on it, my hands in his back pockets, his hands in my hair, our tongues exploring each other’s mouths, coming up for air only when it was time to transition into a new song.

It wasn’t because we got drunk as the night went on. I didn’t drink at all, and Char didn’t drink much because, as he pointed out, “This is my
job
. You can’t get wasted at your job.”

It wasn’t an effect of alcohol. It was more like we got drunk on the night.

Invariably, even if I was done with my half-hour set by one a.m., I would hang around until Start ended, at two. Then Char and I would load the equipment into his car, and he would drive us to his apartment, where we would fall into bed and continue what we had started in the bar, only with far, far fewer clothes. We would keep that up until one or both of us fell asleep.

At five thirty, my phone alarm would go off.

“Jesus
Christ
,” Char groaned into his pillow. “It’s the middle of the goddamn
night
.”

Then I would make Char drive me home immediately, before my mom woke up and noticed that I wasn’t there.

This was easier the first night, when I walked over to Char’s from my dad’s. My dad was late to bed and late to rise, especially on weekends. So when I jolted awake at eight a.m. on that first Saturday to the feeling of Char kissing my neck, it was easy to scramble out of bed, into Char’s car, and home before Dad had even gotten out of bed to collect the morning paper.

Getting back to my mom’s house before she woke up, however, presented a different sort of challenge. This was a woman who operated on about six hours of sleep every night. “There’s just too much to do in a day,” she often said, as if this were a bad thing, though you didn’t have to know her well to know that she
loved
doing too much in a day.

Thus, Char and I woke up at five thirty a.m.

“Remind me why I’m doing this?” Char asked on the second Friday morning that we did this, as we sat in his cold car, the streetlights still on overhead.

“Duh, because you love me,” I joked. But Char was practically asleep in the driver’s seat, and he didn’t laugh.

And that was the last I would hear from Char until the next Thursday night. No text messages. No Saturday night dates. Nothing. Just a friendly greeting when I showed up at Start six days later, followed by a thousand kisses.

I knew Char wasn’t my boyfriend. But was he anything to me? And was I anything to him? I wanted to ask him to explain this to me, but I couldn’t, because I suspected that I was supposed to understand already. I suspected that our relationship, if I could even call it that, was just one more thing covered in the Handbook for Being a Real Person, which somehow I had never received.

“How do you know so much music?” Char asked me late on the following Thursday night as we lay in his bed together, my head resting on his chest. At Start earlier, I had played a set of late sixties soul. Char hadn’t recognized any of it, and I could tell he didn’t like this, because he told me it was his turn again well before my half hour was up, while the crowd was still enthusiastically dancing. I wanted to keep playing, but I didn’t. After all, it was
his
night.

I had discovered that Char knew a lot of
facts
about music. He knew the names of drummers from famous bands, and then what other bands they had later gone out to start. He knew the names of dozens or possibly hundreds of music labels, and who had produced Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
, and which members of the Beach Boys were brothers and which were cousins.

I didn’t know any of that stuff. Music wasn’t history class; I didn’t need to memorize a thousand dates and names. I just
cared
a lot about music.

You’d think this might make me cool, since music is supposedly cool, but it doesn’t work like that. It turns out that caring a lot about anything is, by definition,
uncool
, and it doesn’t matter if that thing is music or
Star Wars
or oil refineries.

“My dad introduced me to a lot of music when I was very little,” I told Char, then added, because we were in bed together and this seemed like an intimate thing to reveal, “He’s in a band.”

Char propped himself up on his elbow. “You have a cool dad. What band?”

“The Dukes.”

“I don’t know them,” Char said.

“Yes, you do.” I sang the chorus of the Dukes’ big hit: “Take my hand, baby, and run away with me. Take my hand, and I’ll be your man.”

“That’s your
dad
?” Even in the darkness, I could see how wide Char’s eyes had grown.

“Well, he’s the bassist,” I said.

“But didn’t the Dukes break up ages ago?”

“No way. The Dukes have been together for
decades
. They play cruises, casinos, seventies revues. You know. The big time. The four of them all grew up together in Philadelphia. They started the Dukes for a middle-school talent show. And then they just stayed together. Forever. My dad says that the band has been the most long-lasting relationship of his entire life.”

“Is that, like, his full-time job?” Char ran his hand through my hair, twisting it around his fingers.

“Being a Duke would not be much of a living. The drummer is a lawyer now, the guitarist and the singer started an accounting firm, and my dad works at a music store. They just do Duke shows occasionally. Like when Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are unavailable.”

That last bit was intended to make Char laugh, but he didn’t. “I can’t believe you never told me this before,” he said, as if he and I were constantly having long, meaningful conversations about our personal lives and I had for some reason kept this particular piece of information a secret.

I shrugged. “I don’t know what
your
parents do.”

“Yeah, but they’re not in a
famous band
.”

He didn’t, I noticed, tell me what his parents did.

“My dad’s band isn’t famous,” I said. “They had one song that was a huge radio hit, and then two LPs of songs that no one has ever heard. Honestly, it’s kind of sad.”

“Sad?” Char echoed.

“Yeah, like, every couple months these middle-aged guys put on fringed leather jackets as if they’re thirty-five years younger and sing about ‘dancing to the radio,’ or whatever. Like the best part of their lives happened when they were our age. They play an afternoon show for a sparse crowd of equally middle-aged people who only know one of their songs, and they do it all so they can make a couple thousand bucks that they can use to fix the plumbing in their houses and send their kids to summer enrichment programs.”