When the Beat Drops Page 5

  “Jesus, Crow!” I explode. “We didn’t bone. We didn’t even kiss!”

  She steps back, looking hurt. “Okay, jeez. Sorry I asked.”

  “No, I’m sorry. I’m just tired.” I push open the door to the cabin and its familiar smell rushes in, wood and violin-bow rosin and the peppermint-scented cleaner they use in the bathrooms. It brings back every memory of giggling with my friends here past lights-out, our impromptu jam sessions and good-natured feuds over the shower. It seems impossible that I’m not staying for another eight weeks of this. Impossible, and hugely unfair.

  Crow follows me and makes a beeline for the corner, flinging her laundry bag onto the top bunk. “My bed is still free! Claimed for the Crow dynasty! Victory at last!”

  I follow more slowly, her suitcase growing heavier with each step. As Crow scrambles up the ladder I’m drawn to the bunk below, the one that used to be mine. But instead of my old green blanket, there’s a bright pink bedspread splashed with yellow daisies. A pink plastic alarm clock sits on the shelf where my headphones should be, and a pair of yellow Tweety Bird slippers peeks out from under the bed.

  “Ugh, I forgot how hard it is to make a top bunk,” Crow complains.

  “Yeah.” I try to shush the cellos playing a self-pitying dirge in my stomach, but the more I look around the louder they get. If I stay here one more minute, I’m going to completely lose my cool. “Hey, Crow, I gotta go.”

  She peeks over the edge of the bunk, blinking behind her thick glasses. “You’re not staying for lunch?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “So just have ice cream.”

  The memory of the soft-serve machine in the cafeteria only makes the cellos play louder. I loved that ice cream, and the fact that I could eat it anytime I wanted after a lifetime of my health-nut parents forbidding processed sugar from ever entering our home. A ball of helpless rage rises in my throat. I’m about to lose it.

  “I actually—don’t feel good,” I say, my voice thick. “I better go. I’ll see you at Visitors’ Weekend, okay?”

  I turn and find the doorknob, tears clouding my eyes.

  “You don’t even want a hug?” Crow is saying, but I can’t stay here, not even long enough for that. I shake my hair into my face and half walk, half run back to the car, praying nobody will recognize me and see me losing my cool. I don’t want their comfort or their pity. I just want to be alone.

  Finally I’m at the parking lot, the LeSabre’s sticky vinyl seat burning my thighs. I back out fast, gravel spraying metal with tiny pings, and draw a long, shaky breath as I put the car in drive, leaving Windham’s frigid lake and throngs of excited music nerds in my rearview mirror.

  The summer yawns in front of me, empty and lonely and stale. There’ll be no soft serve, no jam sessions, no making out with Peter Singh, no music theory grad students offering insightful comments on my compositions. All I have is the gym and Britt and an audition to prepare for, and the memory of a tattooed, blue-eyed party promoter who may or may not have held my gaze for a beat too long.

  Halfway down the road I slam my foot on the brake and pull onto a shoulder. I yank out my phone and find Shay’s number, staring at the way it shimmers on my screen.

  Hey, it’s Mira from last night, I type. I hit Send and then I’m back on the road again, driving forward into the loneliest summer of my life.

  CHAPTER 8

  Shay wants to learn about jazz. She tells me this in a series of text messages peppered with unicorn GIFs and blinking emojis, offering to give me DJ lessons in exchange. So after work that Tuesday I drive down to her place in the Bronx, parking in front of a big brick building that looks just like all the others on her block. The old men sitting outside eye me curiously as I trudge by with my trumpet case and laptop, their voices a rough melody over the smack of their dominoes.

  I find the buzzer marked Perez, and as I make my way up to her apartment in a rickety old elevator I worry for the thousandth time that things will be different with Shay in broad daylight. Will she realize what a dork I am compared to all the glittery people on her Instagram feed? Will she take one look at me, make some excuse about how she’s too busy to hang out, and never text me again?

  “Mira Mira!” She opens her door wearing a loose white tank top that says diva across the front in rhinestones, her hair in a messy pink topknot. The warm singsong of her voice immediately eases my fears, and I smile at her two younger sisters as they glance up at me from the TV in the living room.

  “DJ Shay.” I smile back.

  “Man, that never gets old.” She hands me a glass of sweet, bright-yellow lemonade. “Want to see my glamorous home studio? It’s in the basement, where all the really rich and famous DJs keep their equipment.”

  I laugh. “Do I need a VIP wristband?”

  “No, girl. You’re rolling with me.” She shouts at her sisters that she’ll be right downstairs and to stay out of trouble as I follow her back to the elevator, which spits us out in an underground room filled with rusty metal dividers.

  “Storage units,” she explains as we weave through a maze of little metal rooms filled with moldy cardboard boxes and couches spilling stuffing. Some are packed to the ceiling, but Shay’s is impeccably clean. She’s organized it like a tiny studio, with her flight cases and speakers resting on a table made from plywood laid across two sawhorses. She’s even added a pair of beat-up bar stools and a fluffy pink rug. “Baller, right?”

  “The very lap of luxury.” I perch on one of the stools. “So you want to learn about jazz?”

  She nods, twisting a pink strand of hair around her finger. “It’s so dope you knew who that sample was. I want to know shit like that.”

  “Well.” I power up my laptop. “You’ve come to the right place.”

  “Get out.” She leans in closer. “You made a PowerPoint?”

  My cheeks go hot. In addition to working at the gym, practicing trumpet, and working on compositions for my audition, I’ve spent the past four days creating a beginner’s history of jazz for Shay, complete with photos and audio clips and even a few historically accurate trumpet solos. Looking at it now, I realize how insanely, obsessively nerdy it must seem. I wait for her to start laughing, or tell me to get out again but mean it literally this time. Instead her eyes soften, and she holds a hand to her heart.

  “You didn’t have to do all this.” She looks delighted. “I was just thinking you’d play me some tracks or something.”

  “Yeah, well …” I turn back to my laptop, hiding my smile. “Let’s just start.”

  With that I dive into the roots of jazz, starting in New Orleans with the blues and ragtime and Dixieland, then heading north for swing and big band and detouring into Harlem for bebop. Each song fills me with aching familiarity; these are the tunes Grandpa Lou played for me when I was just a little girl, too young to know what the music was but old enough to know I loved it.

  Grandpa Lou never played an instrument—when he was a kid there was never money, and when he grew up there was never time. Instead he listened, and when I came along he made sure I had the opportunities he never got. I’ve always loved jazz thanks to him, but now it’s more than just a sound or a set of skills. It’s how I keep his memory alive.

  Shay taps her feet to Scott Joplin’s ragtime and closes her eyes at Billie Holiday’s smoky, sorrowful vocals. Sometimes she asks questions but mostly she just listens, taking it all in. When I pick up my trumpet for a Miles Davis riff she shakes her head, her eyes sparkling.

  “Damn, you’re talented!” she says, and the compliment warms me down to my toes. “Play more!”

  “Really?” I ask, picking up my trumpet again. I play a few more songs, including my part from Lou’s New York, and her eyes go wider with each note.

  “You wrote that?” she asks.

  I nod, pride swelling inside me. It feels good to share music with someone again; Crow and Nicky have been so busy settling into life at camp that we’ve barely had time to text, let a
lone talk about jazz.

  “Shit.” She shakes her head. “I don’t know about teaching you to spin now. What if you show me up?”

  “You don’t have to,” I say. Honestly, it’s more than I was expecting this summer to be able to share jazz with someone who really listens and actually cares. But Shay is already flipping open flight cases and pressing buttons. She turns on the speakers with a pop and sizzle and the room seems to come alive; I can almost feel the electricity pulsing around us.

  “I totally do,” she says. “I offered, right?”

  The turntables stare up at me and I remember the zing of excitement when I pressed the LOOP button at the warehouse, the way DJ Headspin commanded the crowd like the moon guides the tides. I think of Crow and Nicky at camp without me, and my empty room at home; the itch in my fingers to jam with people who aren’t here and the long, boring hours minding the front desk at The Gym Rat.

  I shrug. “May as well.”

  Shay presses a button and her equipment lights up, a rainbow of colored buttons and blinking LED screens. A beat like popcorn bursts through the speakers, kick drum and snare echoing off the concrete walls. “So the whole point of DJing is to keep people dancing,” she says over the music. “And the only two things people won’t dance to is silence, and music that sucks.”

  She plugs in her headphones. “Your job is to choose good music and keep it playing. Basically, you never want to give your dance floor an excuse to take a break.”

  She points to the CDJ on our right. “This is Channel One. The mixer—this box in the middle here—has two channels, and you can toggle between them using this slider—it’s called the crossfader. Right now it’s all the way to the right, so there’s only music coming through Channel One. Got it?”

  I nod. So far, it’s not exactly rocket science. Sibelius, my music composition software, is way more complicated.

  “This track is 128 beats per minute,” Shay continues, “but I can use the pitch slider to speed it up or slow it down. Try it.”

  I pinch the cool metal between my fingers and push it all the way up. The beat goes into hyperdrive, the melody distorting into rapid Minnie Mouse squeaks.

  “Yikes.” I yank my hand away.

  “Crazy, right? Now try pitching it down.”

  This time I’m slower. The track goes sluggish, until it sounds like it’s struggling through tar.

  Shay grins. “That’s the basics. I’m gonna queue up a track on Channel Two, but you’ll only be able to hear it through the headphones. It won’t come through the speakers. Got it?”

  She slips her pink rhinestone headphones over my ears. Suddenly my head is a mess of beats, drums smacking against each other like waves hitting rock. I grimace.

  She reaches over and stops the turntable to my left. My ears clear.

  “So your job is to match the beat from Channel One with the beat from Channel Two,” Shay tells me. “You can use the pitch sliders or the jog wheel—that’s this part here that looks like a record spinning. If you do it right, nobody will even hear the transition. And if you do it wrong …” She releases the turntable, sending the beats into chaos again.

  I nod, stepping up to the rig and settling the headphones over my ears. This ought to be easy with my musical background. I hit START on the CDJ to my right and the now-familiar beat fills the room. I let it go for a few bars before bracing myself for the new beat to come through my headphones. Then I press START on Channel Two.

  A gust of noise sweeps through the basement like a five-car pileup, rattling the metal storage cages.

  “Aaaagh!” I leap back, throwing the headphones onto the table. “What the … ?”

  I can tell Shay is trying not to laugh.

  “Oh.” I deflate. I forgot to move the crossfader, so now I’m playing both channels at once.

  “Try again,” Shay says encouragingly. “Nobody gets it the first time.”

  I turn away from her, my face burning, and settle the headphones over my ears. At first it’s just a jumble of sound: rhythms circling and raising fists and wrestling each other to the ground. I have no idea which beat goes with which song.

  Sweat starts to tickle my forehead. This is not as easy as I thought.

  Shay places a tentative hand on my arm. “I’ll give you a hint,” she starts.

  I shake my head. I don’t want any hints. I should be getting this. I’m a musician, dammit.

  My hand feels like a spider creeping toward the pitch slider. I ease it down to zero, then nudge it just a little more. My pulse slows with the beat and soon I’m able to pick out the new track in the thicket of noise, like finding and following a ribbon in a braid.

  “Oh!” I turn to Shay.

  “See?” she mouths.

  The beats are almost the same speed now, only off by a fraction of a bar. Shay mimes touching the jog wheel, and I rest my fingertips on it. The beat pauses. I pick it up and it starts again. From the corner of my eye I see Shay nodding, tapping her foot in time to the song.

  I release my fingers and let the track spin through to the end of a phrase. I can feel the purr of the machine under my fingertips, trembling like a greyhound at the gate. I check the crossfader, making sure it’s still all the way to the right. And then, with the first track almost over, I release the jog wheel and begin edging the crossfader to the left, bringing the second track in nice and slow.

  Shay’s mouth goes slack. She raises her eyebrows, and when I take off the headphones I can hear my mix in the speakers, the beats perfectly synced. I let them stay there for a few measures before sliding the crossfader all the way to the left.

  “Daaaamn,” Shay says slowly. “You’re picking this up really fast.”

  My face flushes. This feels like the first time I composed a full jazz piece on Sibelius, in my Intro to Composition class at Windham. The teacher, who was notoriously stingy with compliments, played it for the class and called it “remarkably good.”

  “Let’s try another,” I suggest.

  Shay cues up a song, moving aside so I can mix it in.

  “Am I getting it?” I ask as the songs blend together, mellowing into a single groove.

  She nods, her lip between her teeth. “Damn. It took me, like, a week to learn this.”

  “Beginner’s luck?” I joke, even though I’m not sure it is. I’ve always picked up music quickly—it’s the only thing I’m really good at.

  “Yeah, maybe.” There’s a shade of dusk in Shay’s voice but she keeps going with the lesson, teaching me how to play with levels and when to bring in the highs and lows and mids. A couple of times I almost trainwreck, which is what Shay calls it when the beats stop running parallel, crashing off the tracks like a train derailing. But mostly I manage to keep the tunes going, and as song blends into song I feel my body ease into the music like it’s a warm bubble bath. I stop stressing about my Fulton audition, stop missing Crow and Nicky and all my friends at camp, and let the music engulf me and my mind telescope inward until there’s nothing in the world but these songs and knobs and sliders and buttons. It’s like learning to play the trumpet all over again, and as I master each new skill I shed a piece of the pain and anger of my Windham-free summer. It feels good to be learning something new—even if it’s not the type of education I was expecting.

  “Alright, that’s enough.” Shay finally snaps off her system with a loud pop. “It’s getting hot down here, right?”

  “Sure,” I say, gathering my laptop as she slides her equipment back into its cases. “I’m starting to see what you like about this.”

  “No shit. Cause you’re good.” The door to her storage cage rattles as she bangs it shut behind us. “Just don’t go stealing my gigs, ‘kay?”

  “Never,” I assure her. “I don’t even want to be a DJ.” But even as I say it I’m remembering the way it felt to make an entire warehouse full of people jump in the air at once.

  “Sure you don’t.” Her sneakers squeak against the cement floor. “Everyone wants to be
a DJ.”

  “Everyone?” I raise an eyebrow. “Like, your mom and stuff?”

  “Okay, almost everyone.” She gives me a playful shove. “Cause it’s dope as shit, right? And if you do it right, you can make serious money.”

  “Really?” My ears perk up. Money is one thing I can always use more of. My parents can only afford to pay us minimum wage at the gym, and every penny of that goes into my car or my college fund. “Are you making money now?”

  “Not yet.” Shay presses the button for the elevator and taps her foot to some beat only she can hear. “Warehouse gigs pay, like, fifty bucks. I made way more selling molly, but who wants to do that all night?”

  Molly. My shoulders tense at the word. A few days ago it was innocuous, melodious even: a girl’s name with a sweet little trill. Now it’s eating holes in my sister’s brain.

  “You sold molly?” I ask. Shay seems like the opposite of a drug dealer, small and sweet and open instead of big and shady and mean.

  She stares down at her toes, scuffing them against the floor. “Not a lot. Just until I bought my CDJs. My ex had a hookup, so it was easy. Besides, it’s not one of those nasty drugs like crack. It doesn’t kill people.”

  I still can’t get over the fact that the bubbly girl in front of me used to be a drug dealer. “Weren’t you worried about getting caught?” I ask.

  “Hell yeah. That’s why I stopped.” The elevator arrives with a sigh and Shay sends us groaning upward. “He said cops would never arrest me ’cause I’m a girl, but I was still scared as hell.”

  The elevator doors wheeze open and I realized we’re not on Shay’s floor. Instead we’re at the base of a dark stairwell with a metal door at the top. Fire Exit Only, a big sign on it warns. Alarm Will Sound.

  “Should we really … ?” I ask as she pushes the door. I brace myself for a pealing wail, but all I hear is Shay’s gritty laugh.

  “They disabled this thing years ago,” she says, stepping into the sudden square of light. “It’s the best thing about living here.”

  I follow her through the door and gasp. The entire world is spread out below us … miles of the Bronx’s low brick buildings with Manhattan’s skyline in the distance, silver spires gleaming against the last pastel streaks of a cotton-candy sunset. As I step onto the roof a breeze lifts my hair, making it dance in the air. To the north the apartment buildings peter out into suburban houses and low green hills. Coletown is up there somewhere, and way off in the distance are Crow and Nicky and Peter and Windham Music Camp. The wind plays a scale up my spine as I realize that Derek’s out there somewhere too, planning his next warehouse party or just being gorgeous, doing whatever else it is that he does.