When the Beat Drops Page 3

  I’ve heard electronic music before, on TV and through tinny car speakers in the high school parking lot, and it never made any sense. I never understood why people would want to listen to music made by a computer when the sound from real instruments is so much richer and more complex … so much better.

  But this music isn’t the same as the major-key, 4/4, utterly predictable drum-machine songs that underscore every car commercial on TV and Dance Blast class at the gym. This beat is everywhere, percussion lines woven together in colorful tonal textile before unraveling just enough to keep the crowd on their toes, hints of distorted cello and bright, pure vibraphone darting in and out of the beats like playful fireflies.

  Britt takes my hand and I stumble forward, the bass thrumming in my veins as we make our way through the crowd. This is how this music is meant to be played, I realize: not over car radios but from speaker towers that are taller than our house. It’s so loud I don’t just hear the music; I can actually feel it inside of me, vibrating my bones.

  Yelena’s hair bobs ahead of us, weaving past a row of vendors selling T-shirts and glowsticks and water, dodging luminous dancing bodies. Video projections swirl across a far wall, a mash-up of Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and girls Hula-Hooping in the desert, and there’s a geodesic dome covered in color-changing LED lights.

  On the other end of the room, in a raised booth flanked by massive speaker towers, a DJ with waist-length hair hollers into a microphone.

  “I’m DJ Headspin,” he screams, “and I’m here to make your head spin!” The crowd goes nuts. It looks like he’s conducting a psychedelic symphony and everyone on the dance floor is an instrument, and I wonder what it must feel like to hold that kind of power, to be able to make so many people move.

  “Come on!” Yelena shouts through the wall of music. She takes Britt’s hand and Britt grabs mine and we snake through clots of people dancing around backpacks piled on the floor, their movements creating rhythms on top of rhythms, adding layers to the music that have never been there before and will never be there again. I brush past limbs glistening with sweat and mumble apologies nobody can hear. A girl in a furry hat with teddy-bear ears backs into me, stepping on my foot. She turns and places a damp hand on my arm.

  “Are you okay?” she screams, inches from my face.

  I nod. Her pupils are huge, with only a thin rim of green peeking out. Her jaw works frantically over a wad of gum.

  “I’m glad you’re all right!” she calls after me as Britt tugs my arm, dragging me forward. “I love you!”

  My eyes dart back to the girl, who is already dancing again, bouncing up and down like she’s on a pogo stick. I must have misheard her. Why would a stranger say I love you?

  I’m still mulling it over when a tidal wave of sound crashes down on us and I realize we’ve made it to the front of the room. I crane my neck, following the speaker towers to a bridge where DJ Headspin flips switches on what looks like the flashing motherboard of a spaceship, one giant headphone pressed to his ear. The song he’s playing sounds like robots dancing and soda fizzing, like a storm of metallic rain.

  Directly in front of us, heavy curtains block the area next to the stage. Yelena says something to a bouncer the size of a house, and he shakes his head. Anger flashes across her face and she releases a torrent of words; I can’t hear anything, but I can tell by the way her arms are flailing that she isn’t pleased.

  The bouncer shakes his head again, and she blows out a frustrated stream of air and steps aside, fishing out her phone and typing furiously.

  “Can we go?” I whisper to Britt. “That bouncer looks like he wants to eat us for breakfast.”

  Britt shakes her head. “When Yelena wants something …” she begins.

  But I don’t catch the rest because at that moment an arm slithers out from a break in the curtain and taps the bouncer’s shoulder.

  There’s an entire world tattooed on that arm: stylized animals and climbing vines, craggy mountains and crashing waves, all of it woven into a tapestry that glides smoothly over taut, tan muscles.

  The bouncer leans toward it, listening. He glances at the three of us, nods once, and opens the barrier just wide enough for us to slip through.

  Britt’s fingers close around my arm. I feel the bouncer’s meaty glare on my back as Britt pulls me forward, through the break in the curtain, to the unknown world backstage.

  CHAPTER 4

  It’s quieter back here, with the speakers facing away from us and the thump-thump-thump of the party muffled by the heavy velvet curtain.

  “Hey, you finally made it.” I turn toward the voice, blinking in the sudden glare of work lights. It’s the owner of the arm, a college-aged white guy with full-color tattoo sleeves under a black T-shirt. There’s a walkie-talkie clipped to his jeans.

  My gaze makes its way from his wrists to his neck to a face like a Miles Davis song: calm and chaotic and sharp and sweet and sad all at once. I instantly want to listen to him on repeat, to run my hands through his messy dark hair and trace the indentation below his cheekbone. I want to touch every picture on his arm as he explains them to me one by one, and then I want to go back and start again. This feels less like my tingly little crush on Peter Singh at camp and more like the first time I listened to Kind of Blue all the way through, like the music was slicing me open and turning me inside out.

  “Derek Ryan!” Yelena flutters her fingers. “Aren’t you happy to see us?”

  “Yelena Andreyev. Of course.” He gives her a hug and his eyes find mine over her shoulder. Even in the darkness, they’re a shocking blue.

  My knees turn to soup. I grip a nearby pole for support.

  “Who’re your friends?” Derek asks, releasing Yelena without releasing my eyes. His voice is warm and grainy, like sunbaked sand.

  “Duh, of course! This is Britt—we go to school together—and that’s her little sister, Mira. It’s her first party, can you believe it?”

  Derek extends his hand. His touch turns my skin to hot lava, makes me want to melt into the floor. Maybe I’m remembering it wrong, but I don’t recall touching Peter Singh ever feeling like this.

  “You like it?” he asks. “Your first party can be a little overwhelming.”

  Overwhelming is an understatement. “It’s … loud,” I say idiotically.

  “Mira!” Britt throws her hands in the air, but Derek laughs, a big, boisterous laugh that fills every corner of the room.

  “I hear you,” he says. “We love our subwoofers, not gonna lie. But here.” He fishes something out of the pocket of his slim, dark jeans. “Catch.”

  “Don’t—” I start to say as he tosses me a tiny cellophane package. I reach for it, thinking maybe this one time my handeye coordination will do its job. The package glances off my fingertips and skitters to the floor.

  My cheeks burn, but I force myself to stay cool as I crouch to retrieve it. “Must have left my reflexes at home,” I joke.

  “Earplugs,” Derek explains as I stand. “Don’t want you going deaf at your very first party.”

  “Thanks.” I turn them over. “You just carry these around?”

  He starts to reply but a voice erupts from his walkie-talkie, something about a security situation at the door.

  “Be right there.” Derek turns to us. “Sorry, duty calls. Catch you ladies later.”

  “Wait!” Yelena’s hands flutter by her face. “I’ll walk with you, okay?”

  Derek nods, and she adjusts her backpack and shoots Britt a look I can’t quite interpret. “Be right back.”

  Before he leaves, Derek’s pale blue eyes find mine and hold them for a long beat. “Hey, remember,” he says, backing away slowly. “You only get one first party, so make it count.”

  Then he’s gone, Yelena bopping along next to him. Britt leans against a wall and I follow her lead, trying to look like I hang out backstage at giant warehouse parties every night of the week. I pull out my phone to check the time, which seems like a cool, ca
sual thing to do—until it actually registers and I do a double take.

  “Crap, Britt.” I show her my phone. “We have to get home. We’re going to miss curfew.”

  “Like they’ll notice?” Britt raises an eyebrow. Even though we technically have an eleven o’clock curfew, our parents are always asleep by then—they get up at five a.m. to open the gym, so they go to bed early and sleep hard. In high school, Britt went out every weekend; some nights I’d hear her come home and follow her into the bathroom to hold her hair while she puked. It was enough to turn me off heavy drinking for good, but if our parents noticed, they never let on. Sometimes I wondered if they were ignoring it on purpose, hoping Britt would just slow down on her own. Or maybe they really didn’t care, as long as she kept her grades up and kept winning soccer trophies.

  “Yeah, but still …” I begin. I have to get up at seven tomorrow to drive Crow and Nicky to camp. If I don’t get to bed soon, I’ll have giant bags under my eyes when I finally see Peter again.

  Just then Yelena bursts through the curtain, her cheeks flushed.

  “I’m back, bitches!” she calls. “Let’s go dance.”

  My stomach clenches. I’ve tried to avoid dancing in public ever since the eighth grade, when my aunt Shonda joked that I clearly got my dancing skills from my mom’s side of the family.

  “Hold out your hands,” Yelena commands.

  I stick my arm out, hand down. Maybe Yelena wants to do some kind of team-building cheer, like Britt always does before soccer games.

  “Um, Yelena?” Britt looks suddenly nervous. “I don’t think you should….”

  “Here you go, darling.” Yelena grasps my arm, turns it over, and sticks a pill in my palm. It’s a clear gelcap, about three-quarters full of brownish-white powder.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  Yelena does a theatrical double take. “Seriously? You don’t know?” She turns to Britt. “Did she think we were all coming here to play Parcheesi or something?”

  “Not exactly.” Britt bites her lip. “I was going to tell her. Just … not like this.”

  “Then how, exactly?” Yelena perches a hand on her hip. “Engraved invitation? Singing telegram?”

  Britt’s eyes dart back to me.

  “Tell me what?” I look from the pill to Yelena to Britt, who’s twisting one of her remaining curls way too tight.

  “Mira, honey.” Yelena closes my fingers around the pill. “This is molly. It makes you want to dance.”

  “Molly?” I still don’t get it.

  And then I do.

  The dancers with saucer-sized pupils. The psychedelic visuals projected on the walls. It all makes sense now. I feel like an idiot.

  I flash back to a PSA I saw on TV: a guy at a concert taking a pill, then sweating through his clothes and saying all of these crazy, paranoid things. A diagram showed the pill dissolving in his bloodstream and eating holes in his brain, and it ended with minor-key organ music and a somber voice-over intoning: “Say no to drugs. Or else.”

  “You mean drugs.” I scowl at Yelena. “You want me to take drugs?”

  Yelena dissolves into laughter. “Oh my god, you sound so straight-edge, it’s adorable. I love your sister!” she says to Britt.

  Britt isn’t laughing. She looks mortified.

  “You do this stuff?” I whirl to face her. I can’t believe it. My golden girl sister—beautiful, popular, gliding through life as easily as she cuts through opponents trying to block her on the soccer field—takes drugs?

  Britt looks down at her feet, kicking at the floor. “Sometimes,” she says. The music drops into a breakdown, a low bass rumble that sounds like a groan.

  “Why?” I ask finally.

  “Um, because they’re awesome?” Yelena cuts in. “It’s not like she murders puppies or anything. It’s just fun.”

  Britt looks up, and her gaze shushes Yelena fast. Her eyes meet mine, round and almost pleading. “It is fun,” she says. “But: it’s more than that. It kind of makes everything come together in this really beautiful way.”

  “Aw.” Yelena throws her arms around my sister and gives her a peck on the cheek. “You’re so poetic, Britt. You know what that makes me want to do?”

  “Molly,” Britt and I sigh at the same time.

  “Bingo.” Yelena sticks out her tongue, a pill cradled neatly in its crease. She closes her mouth, swallows hard, and gives us a cat-that-ate-the-canary smile. “Britt?” she arches an eyebrow. “You want in or not? And, Mira, don’t tell me you’re not just a little curious?”

  “Nope.” I shove the pill into Yelena’s hand. My heart is racing. This is a side of Britt I’ve never seen before, a side I didn’t even know existed. “No way. N-to-the-O. That stuff eats holes in your brain.”

  Yelena lets out a howl of laughter, and even Britt cracks a grin. “That is such bullshit!” Yelena cries. “Where’d you hear that, a PSA?”

  Heat snakes up my neck. “What?” I ask. “You only have one brain.”

  Britt shrugs, finally looking me in the eye. “You only have one life,” she says.

  CHAPTER 5

  Back out in the party, surrounded by jumbles of gyrating bodies, I try not to stare at my sister. It’s been about twenty minutes since Britt took the pill, and I keep checking to see if her pupils are growing, and wondering if she’ll start sweating buckets like the guy in the PSA, or telling strangers she loves them.

  Instead she’s just dancing the way she always does: like the music’s coming from inside of her, and her hips have a mind of their own. Aunt Shonda never had anything bad to say about Britt’s dancing skills.

  “C’mon!” She catches me looking. “We’re supposed to be having fun!”

  “I am having fun,” I mutter. But the truth is, I can’t focus on the music when I’m also worried about Britt. Drugs took down too many of my jazz idols. What if they ruin my sister’s life, too?

  “Liar.” Britt grabs my hands and spins me in a circle. She throws her head back, teeth sparkling white in the lights, and even though I can’t hear it over the music I can see the shape of her laugh. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on her face and she looks happy in an open, childlike way, like when we were little kids catching fireflies on warm summer nights. That was before my parents bought the gym, when we still lived in New Haven on the same block as Grandpa Lou, in an apartment building with a big backyard where all the kids would play together and trap lightning bugs in glass mason jars.

  We moved out of that apartment and bought the gym ten years ago. Was that the last time I saw Britt like this, so open and happy and free?

  “Oooh!” Britt drops my hands. “Something’s happening!”

  I lean in to get a better look at her pupils, but just then a spotlight flicks on, illuminating a woman in a spangled leotard balancing on a trapeze suspended from the ceiling.

  “Cool!” Britt breathes. The pounding bass stops and a tinkly piano piece comes on as the trapeze artist pitches forward into a swan dive, falling face-first toward the floor.

  I gasp along with the crowd. But the dancer catches herself, swinging over the sea of faces. I crane my neck and watch her flip above our heads, always coming a hair’s breadth away from plummeting into our arms. Each time she dives we suck in our breath; each time she catches herself, we let it out again, our breathing as synced as the senior jazz ensemble at music camp.

  The silvery piano music spikes into a crescendo and the trapeze artist whips her body in circles until she explodes into a triple somersault, light bursting around her as she lands with graceful bow by the DJ booth.

  I clap hard as the plodding bass kicks back in. “That was amazing!” I turn to gush to Britt.

  But my sister is gone.

  “Britt?” I spin in a circle, looking for her half-shaved head or Yelena’s creepy backpack. Nothing.

  Irritation zips through me. Britt promised we’d stick together. How am I ever going to find her in this crowd?

  Snaking around hordes of swe
aty dancers seemed easier with Yelena leading the way. On my own the dance floor is all sharp fingernails and jabbing elbows; clusters of people dance hip to hip, too close to let me through. Saying, “excuse me” doesn’t work. Nobody can hear me over the beat.

  I make it to a wall and sink against it, fishing out my phone. A No Service message laughs back at me, and my irritation boils into anger. Is Britt ditching me again, pretending I don’t exist just like she always did in high school? The bass grows more insistent, a jackhammer pounding between my eyes. I have to get out of here.

  I push back into the crowd. My toe hits something soft, throwing me off balance. I windmill my arms, trying to catch myself, but the floor comes screaming up at me, hard and concrete and moving way too fast.

  Not again, I think as my body hits cement.

  Pain surges through my knee and my tongue throbs, my mouth pooling with blood. It takes a moment to gather myself: a moment I spend facedown on the floor, a pile of backpacks under my ankles.

  Someone taps my shoulder and I look up to find a circle of faces peering down at me. A guy wearing dozens of plastic beaded bracelets grasps me under the arms and helps me to my feet. A girl in an Alice in Wonderland costume offers a hand so I can steady myself. I wince as I grasp it.

  Something wet and sticky trickles down my shin. I’m bleeding through my jeans. A girl with a white bandana around her neck follows my eyes. Without a word, she unties it and hands it to me.

  I can’t just bleed all over a stranger’s scarf. I try to give it back.

  “Keep it!” she insists, her mouth close to my ear. “I have more.”

  Her friends press in close. They make shapes with their mouths that I guess are supposed to be comforting words as I dab at my knee, tie-dyeing the bandana in blood. My throat feels thick, my eyes itchy and full; not from the pain, but from falling on my face in front of a bunch of strangers. Again.