I breathed out, slowly. “Thank you for asking me, Russell,” I said, “but I’m afraid I already have plans that night, so I won’t be able to make it.”
“You don’t even know what night the formal is,” Sally pointed out.
This was true.
“It’s in two weeks,” Chava piped up.
“Two weeks from Saturday,” Sally said.
I nodded. “I have plans.”
Russell didn’t seem terribly devastated. He didn’t say anything like, “Don’t leave me, my love!” He said, to Sally, “Can I go now?”
She shrugged. He took off, leaving his burger wrapper and soda cup behind.
“Wow, Elise.” Sally turned on me. “You really are a snob, aren’t you?”
“Excuse me?” I blinked.
“All your journal entries about how nobody at this school is good enough for you. I was always like, ‘Oh, she can’t really mean that.’ But you do mean that.”
“Sally, what are you talking about? Who do I think I am better than?”
“Russell!”
“I don’t know Russell. Where did you even find him?”
“He’s a freshman,” Chava said.
“So what was he doing here?” I asked.
“He wanted to ask you to the formal,” Chava explained.
Suddenly it all became clear to me. “You wanted him to ask me to the formal.”
Silence from my friends.
“You made this poor freshman come over here and ask me out. Why? Just so you’ll have company at the dance, Sally, so you won’t have to stand there alone like always?”
“No!” Chava sounded shocked.
“For your information,” Sally snapped, “I won’t be alone. Larry Kapur asked me to be his date.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know how to respond to this. “Um, that’s great, Sally.”
“I just thought it might be fun for us to double-date,” she said. “Share a limo or something. You know, like friends do.”
“Plus,” Chava said, “you’re always talking about how no boys ever like you and how lonely you are.”
“I’m not,” I said, flashing back to last Thursday night, Char’s mouth on mine, our bodies pressed together—
“You know, in your journal,” Chava said. “We didn’t want you to be sad anymore. That’s all. So that’s why we encouraged Russell to ask you to the dance.”
“Encouraged,” Sally repeated.
“We didn’t say he had to. We just wanted you to know that boys do like you. Like Russell.”
I thought of Char’s breath in my ear, his tongue on my neck, his hands on my stomach.
“Thank you,” I said. I shook my head, like I was trying to shake Char right out of my mind. “That’s really sweet of you guys.”
And it was, actually. That was the surprising thing of it. I’d assumed Sally and Chava had some malicious or at least self-serving reason for “encouraging” Russell to ask me out, because in my experience, when my classmates acted like they were trying to help me, they were usually just trying to help themselves. But all my DJing had taught me something about reading a crowd. And when I read Sally and Chava right now, all I saw in them was exactly what they claimed: they wanted me to be happy.
It was weird. But being friends with Vicky had made me realize that some people were just like that. Some people were nice to you, simply because they liked you.
“So will you go to the dance, then?” Sally asked.
I smiled and took a bite of my sandwich. No matter how pure my friends’ motives were, they were not getting me into any non-mandatory school event. “I really do appreciate it, guys,” I said. “But no way.”
During my DJ set on Thursday, Pete came over to the booth. He scribbled a note on a Post-it, stuck it to the hem of my dress, and walked away.
I picked it up. When you’re done playing, come talk to me, it said.
Pete didn’t have to wait long. I was done about twenty seconds later, when Char ran over. “What did Pete want?” he asked me.
I shrugged and showed Char the note.
Char’s forehead wrinkled. “I’ll take over. You should go talk to him, I guess. I’m right over here if you need backup.”
That didn’t sound good. I smiled weakly and climbed down from the booth.
I found Pete sitting alone on a stool at the bar. “Elise!” he exclaimed, adjusting the brim on his fedora. “DJ Elise. Wait, you don’t have a DJ name, do you?”
“DJ Elise is fine,” I said.
“Do you have a last name?” he asked.
No one at Start knew my full name: not Char, not Vicky, not Harry. But Pete was a real grownup. He clearly expected me to have a real name. “It’s Dembowski.”
“It’s great to talk to you again, Elise Dembowski,” Pete told me. I hadn’t seen him since the first time I met him, when Vicky was trying to get his attention. He booked Start, but he didn’t come every week. Tonight he was wearing loose jeans, a plaid button-down shirt, and a dad-like haircut. The only giveaway that he wasn’t an elementary school teacher was his hat.
“Do you know what I want to talk to you about, Elise?” Pete asked.
I could think of a lot of options, none of them good. He wanted to talk to me because he’d found out I was only sixteen, for example. Or he wanted to talk to me because Char was supposed to have gotten permission to let me DJ Start with him, after all. Or maybe Pete wanted to talk to me because it was against the rules for two DJs to hook up with each other.
Some people will tell you that honesty is the best policy, but I disagree. In instances like this, I fully believe that feigned ignorance is the best policy.
“No,” I said. “What do you want to talk to me about, Pete?”
He smiled. “May I buy you a drink?”
I narrowed my eyes. If this was some trick to catch an underage drinker, I wasn’t falling for it. “That’s okay, thanks.”
Pete nodded. “I hear you. I don’t drink, myself.”
My gaze flickered to the glass on the bar in front of him.
“Ginger ale,” he explained. “I’ve been on the wagon for five years. I used to party way too hard. I gave up all the substances back then, but I’ve never been able to give up the scene.”
“What made you stop drinking?” I asked, interested despite my concern that this was all some elaborate setup to get me banned from Start forever.
“Well, I was at the Mansion one night—do you know the Mansion? Downtown? No, never mind, you’re too young. Anyway, I was at the Mansion and accidentally sober. We’d all taken ecstasy, but I’d gotten mine from some shady dealer—shadier than normal drug dealers, if you can picture that—and I guess he gave me a placebo pill, hoping I wouldn’t notice. But I definitely noticed. We were all on the floor, dancing and talking and hitting on girls, and I had this moment where I looked at my friends and realized they were all acting like idiots.”
I laughed a little. I couldn’t help it.
“I know,” Pete said. “Obviously people on drugs act like idiots. Didn’t we all learn that in junior high? But I didn’t get it until I saw it. It was chilling, I tell you. Anyway, that was my moment.
“Three months earlier my girlfriend at the time had overdosed on painkillers and spent a week in the ICU, all hooked up to IVs and shit. But that was not my wake-up call. My wake-up call was at the Mansion. The next day I enrolled in Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and every other Anonymous club I could find. I even remember the song that was on the speakers the moment it happened, when I decided I wanted to quit, start a better life.”