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.”

Char propped himself up on his elbow. “You have a cool dad. What band?”

“The Dukes.”

“I don’t know them,” Char said.

“Yes, you do.” I sang the chorus of the Dukes’ big hit: “Take my hand, baby, and run away with me. Take my hand, and I’ll be your man.”

“That’s your dad?” Even in the darkness, I could see how wide Char’s eyes had grown.

“Well, he’s the bassist,” I said.

“But didn’t the Dukes break up ages ago?”

“No way. The Dukes have been together for decades. They play cruises, casinos, seventies revues. You know. The big time. The four of them all grew up together in Philadelphia. They started the Dukes for a middle-school talent show. And then they just stayed together. Forever. My dad says that the band has been the most long-lasting relationship of his entire life.”

“Is that, like, his full-time job?” Char ran his hand through my hair, twisting it around his fingers.

“Being a Duke would not be much of a living. The drummer is a lawyer now, the guitarist and the singer started an accounting firm, and my dad works at a music store. They just do Duke shows occasionally. Like when Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons are unavailable.”

That last bit was intended to make Char laugh, but he didn’t. “I can’t believe you never told me this before,” he said, as if he and I were constantly having long, meaningful conversations about our personal lives and I had for some reason kept this particular piece of information a secret.

I shrugged. “I don’t know what your parents do.”

“Yeah, but they’re not in a famous band.”

He didn’t, I noticed, tell me what his parents did.

“My dad’s band isn’t famous,” I said. “They had one song that was a huge radio hit, and then two LPs of songs that no one has ever heard. Honestly, it’s kind of sad.”

“Sad?” Char echoed.

“Yeah, like, every couple months these middle-aged guys put on fringed leather jackets as if they’re thirty-five years younger and sing about ‘dancing to the radio,’ or whatever. Like the best part of their lives happened when they were our age. They play an afternoon show for a sparse crowd of equally middle-aged people who only know one of their songs, and they do it all so they can make a couple thousand bucks that they can use to fix the plumbing in their houses and send their kids to summer enrichment programs.”

Char laughed a little, his breath tickling my ear. “When you put it like that, it does sound pretty sad.” He paused. “But I guess that’s not how it feels to me. I mean, I don’t know your dad. Maybe he is just forcing himself through the motions so he can bring home some extra money. Maybe he really hates it, and maybe every day he wishes he was eighteen again. But maybe he found something he loved to do and people he loved to do it with when he was a kid, and he’s lucky enough that he still gets to do it years later.”

“If you were fifty-three years old and still DJing the exact same songs, except at the Illinois State Fair Big Tent at two in the afternoon, would you feel like your life was sad or lucky?” I asked Char.

Char shrugged. “I guess you’d have to ask me again in thirty-three years. I think I would feel lucky. I think what would make me feel sad would be if I were fifty-three years old and I wasn’t playing music anymore.”

“I would be sad if you weren’t playing music anymore, too,” I told him.

He rolled on top of me then, and kissed me long and hard. And there was nothing sad at all.

* * *

The following Thursday night, I was in the middle of my set, and everything was going smoothly. People jumping around to the Rolling Stones. Vicky was there with Dave, and they had claimed dance space right in the middle of the floor. Char was at the bar, talking to some college-aged girl with highlighted, flat-ironed hair, but I didn’t mind, because he had already pressed his fingers into my lower back earlier, which meant I was basically guaranteed yet another night of getting home at dawn. I was wearing the rhinestone pumps that Vicky insisted I buy, one of my dad’s old band shirts that I had resewn to fit me, and a multicolored scarf that Vicky had lent me. Even Mel hadn’t found anything to criticize with tonight’s outfit.

Everything was going smoothly. Until the door opened a bit before midnight and Emily Wallace, Petra Davies, and Ashley Mersky walked in.

I was thrown into shock, like a queen whose castle’s ironclad fortress has somehow been breached. What were they doing here? This wasn’t high school. This wasn’t driver’s ed. This was Start. This was mine.

Emily and her friends hadn’t noticed me yet. They clustered in a tight circle, looking around the room, pointing and giggling. I could tell they had gotten all dressed up for their big night out, like this was a school dance. Emily wore a tight black strapless dress and fake eyelashes. Her makeup was perfect.

They looked ridiculous here, obviously high school girls costumed as make-believe adults. Ridiculous, but beautiful. There’s a reason why Emily is a model. There’s a reason why Ashley’s chest was voted “best rack” by the guys’ lacrosse team when she was only a freshman. Because they are the beautiful ones.

This song was winding down, so I put on my headphones to find a new one, but everything I tried sounded suddenly out of place. I tried to focus on my computer, but my eyes kept flickering up, and I was terrified that I would find Emily smirking at me. I wanted to drop my headphones and let the song play out while I ran straight out the door and all the way home.

But you are a professional.

I transitioned into the Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” I messed up the beat matching, so it sounded disorienting and wrong, but I didn’t even care. I scanned the room again for Emily and her friends. They were waiting in line at the bar. Still not looking at me. But they could look at me at any time. At any time, I could be discovered.

And then what?

Char left the girl with the highlighted hair, and for one second I was convinced that he was going to walk over to Emily, as he had walked over to me weeks earlier. That he was going to introduce himself to her, and ask her to dance, and invite her into the DJ booth. Just like me, only prettier and cooler and normal. I remembered how Char explained to me why he had sex with Pippa: “Because she’s hot.” What if he saw that Emily was hot, too?