“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.”