“Those girls!” I screeched, pointing at Emily, Petra, and Ashley.
“Um, why?” Char asked, and I saw them, just for a brief flash, as he probably saw them: three harmless-looking teenage girls, delicate features, pretty smiles. Like they couldn’t cut you until you were so disfigured that you hardly recognized yourself.
“Because they’re underage!” I screamed.
“Yeah…” Char said dubiously.
“Don’t they have parents?” I raged. “What the hell kind of parents let their teenage daughters go to a bar on a school night? This isn’t the goddamn Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal. This is the real world.”
Char cleared his throat pointedly. “Seriously?”
I grabbed his skinny tie and pulled him in close to me, and I spoke right into his face. “Char, listen to me. I am the DJ. And I don’t want them here.”
As soon as I let go of him, Char left the booth. He headed straight for the exit and stepped outside. A moment later, he returned with Mel. Char pointed to where Emily and her friends stood, now with pink drinks in their hands.
Mel strode directly over to them. He towered over all the people on the floor; everyone moved aside to let him pass. I watched him speak to the girls briefly. I saw them smile and bat their eyelashes, trying to flirt their way out of it. Then I saw their mouths harden and their eyebrows narrow. Mel just stood there with his arms crossed. Emily pulled a card out of her pocket and handed it to him. A fake ID, I bet. Mel glanced at it briefly before snapping it in half with one hand. Then he escorted them to the door.
Emily took one look back at the club, her mouth hanging open in the astonished expression of a girl who has never before been denied anything. And now she saw me. Her eyes caught mine right before the heavy metal door slammed shut behind her.
I had once thought that I wanted to get revenge by dying. But getting revenge by living, and living well, was much, much sweeter.
Char came back to the booth. “Do you want to explain what that was all about?” he asked me.
“Nope.”
He rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes. “Well, are you happy now?” he asked.
“Yes.” And I transitioned into “Walking on Sunshine.” The crowd perked up immediately. Vicky shot me a thumbs-up sign from the floor.
“Elise,” Char asked, leaning in close, “are you, you know, okay?”
I closed my eyes. “Kiss me,” I said. And he did.
I remembered how Pippa had described the thrill of being friends with the DJ. You always have somewhere to stash your coat, and sometimes he’ll play songs for you. But that was kids’ stuff. That was nothing compared with the power of being the DJ.
But I also felt like an eggshell that had gotten a tiny crack. You can’t repair something like that. All you can do is hope that it sticks together, hope that the crack doesn’t grow until all your insides come spilling right out.
13
When I got to our lunch table on Tuesday, Sally and Chava were already seated. With some guy. Seriously. Sally and Chava knew a guy, apparently. His hair was dyed slime green, he had a fake septum piercing, and his face was riddled with acne scars.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not blaming anyone for having pimples. At this particular lunchtime, I myself had one massive pimple on my chin and one that looked kind of like a mini unicorn horn right in the center of my forehead. These things can’t be helped. But here’s what can be helped: removing your fake nose ring and using it to more effectively pick at your pimples while sitting at a lunch table with Sally and Chava. Which is what this guy was doing.
Nonetheless, he was a guy.
I sat down. “Hello, friends.”
“Elise!” Sally cried in delighted surprise. “You’re just the person I wanted to see.”
“Sure,” I said.
“This is Russell,” Sally went on. She reached out her arm as if to put it around him, but then she seemed to think better of it and just pointed instead.
“Hi,” Russell wheezed out around a mouthful of his burger.
Chava started to laugh cheerily. I stared at her. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that Russell is so clever!”
I unwrapped my peanut butter sandwich.
“Why don’t you tell Elise that funny story you were telling us earlier?” Sally prompted him.
As Russell launched into a description of this one time when his online role-playing game turned particularly violent and he had to resort to inhumane tactics to save the day, I let my attention wander. As I gazed into the distance, who did I see walking toward my table but Emily Wallace. She led a group of five beautiful people. Her hair swished with every step she took, and she carried her books in a gleaming leather shoulder bag.
This was one of the other rules that started at some point, maybe around eighth grade. It turned out that it wasn’t cool to carry your school supplies in a backpack. I didn’t know that it wasn’t cool to have a backpack. It used to be cool, I think. Even after Lizzie Reardon told me not to, I still kept using my backpack. Because textbooks are heavy. Do girls like Emily Wallace never ache from the weight of all those books?
I could hear Emily’s high-pitched voice float above the din of the cafeteria. “Yeah, we had so much fun,” she was telling her minions. “It was way overpriced, though. Like, six dollars for a hard lemonade? But these college guys fully offered to buy us drinks. We left kinda early, though. Petra’s mom would have lost it if we’d stayed out any later. I mean, it was a Thursday.”
“Hey!” I heard Petra object.
“The bouncer was kinda weird, though. I mean, he…”
And at that moment, Emily’s eyes met mine. I resisted the urge to look away, to play ostrich. Instead I stared right back at her, and I tried to send her this message through my eyes: Don’t you dare talk about Mel like you know him.
Emily’s voice faltered. She blinked and looked away. Then she made an abrupt turn and led her posse down an aisle toward their table in the center of the room, away from me.
I had never seen anything like it.
“So do you want to?” Russell was asking, and it took me a moment to come back to earth and realize he was speaking to me.
“Do I want to what?” I asked.
He coughed a number of times, his hacking getting louder and louder until I half expected him to expel an owl pellet. Sally flinched away, like he might be contagious. At last, Russell coughed out, “Do you want to go to the summer formal with me?”
Chava clapped her hands delightedly. She is a sucker for romance.
“Me?” I asked.
Russell nodded a bunch and slurped down his Coke, which seemed to help with the coughing.
“Do you even know my name?”
He nodded again, less vigorously.
The Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal is a relatively new addition to the Glendale High social calendar. It used to be that there was only one formal dance at the end of the year, and that was prom. Obviously. Only juniors, seniors, and their dates are allowed to go to prom, so this led to some seriously immoral and occasionally illicit maneuvering on the part of lower classmen trying to score tickets. Two years before I started at Glendale High, some sophomore girl apparently offered to tell everyone that she had given a senior guy a blow job in exchange for him agreeing to take her to prom as his date.
At this point, the school administration must have realized that they desperately needed an occasion for freshmen and sophomores to spend their money on; thus, the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal was born. It’s now a very big deal among the community of people who care about school dances, and almost no one bothers to bribe or blackmail her way into actual prom anymore.