Free This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales

booth, linked hands with Pippa, and ran out of the room with her. It was just me, standing alone, overlooking the party.
    Anyone who said I believe in you obviously didn’t know me very well.
    The Primal Scream song was nearing its end. I could hear the music beginning to fade out, and I could see on Char’s computer program that only twenty seconds remained. I took a deep breath, and then I shoved the slider over, as fast and as far as it would go.
    The response from the crowd was instantaneous. As soon as the opening chords of “Cannonball” came out, everyone in the room screamed as one. People raised their hands and their drinks to the ceiling. A big group of boys in the center of the room started jumping up and down like they were on a trampoline.
    The disco ball overhead scattered a million little lights over me, and I felt like I was sparkling from every inch of my body.
    “Oh my God,” Vicky said right into my ear. I had been so focused on the crowd, I hadn’t even noticed her climbing into the DJ booth next to me. “Not you, too!”
    “Not me, too, what?”
    “You’re smiling,” Vicky said accusingly. “You’re smiling like a crazy person. Are you in love with Char now, too ? Does everyone just have to go and fall in love with him on sight?”
    I was smiling like a crazy person because I had just made a hundred people dance, I had just made a hundred people scream, I had just made a hundred people happy. I, Elise, using my own power, had made people happy. But I didn’t try to explain this to Vicky. All I said was, “I’m not in love with Char. I don’t even know him.”
    “You see why they call him This Charming Man now, though, don’t you?” Vicky demanded.
    I thought about Char for a moment as I stared out over the party. I thought about the way he smiled at me, the way he touched me when we were dancing, the way he said I believe in you . “I guess he could be kind of charming,” I conceded.
    “Oh, ha,” Vicky replied sarcastically. “Ha, ha, ha.”
    *   *   *
    My entire childhood, I embarked on projects. Big, all-encompassing projects. When I was eight years old, my project was a dollhouse. I was everything to this dollhouse: contractor, architect, carpenter, electrician, furniture maker, and, once it was ready for dolls to live in it, I also played the roles of Mother, Father, and Baby.
    When I was eleven I became fascinated by collages. My bedroom was filled floor to ceiling with catalogs, magazines, and fabric samples. I spent hours every day gluing paper to paper, and I was very happy.
    When I was thirteen my big project was stop-motion animation. I spent most of my time writing scripts, crafting characters and scenery, filming them, editing the film, and uploading them to the Internet, where roughly three people watched them—my dad, my mom, and Steve.
    My last big project was becoming cool. That one didn’t work so well. I don’t know why, exactly. I put as much effort into becoming cool as I ever put into my collages, but my collages turned out beautiful, while becoming cool turned out ugly and warped. Since then I focused on smaller projects. Waking up in the morning. Doing my homework. Walking around at night. Breathing.
    I liked projects where I could take things apart and figure out exactly how they worked. The problem is, you can’t do that with people.
    Even though it had been months since my last big project, my parents were still accustomed to them. So when I asked my father for DJ equipment, he didn’t ask why.
    Because Dad works at a music store, he was able to get me turntables and a mixer for cheap. He brought them home for me on Friday evening, and I immediately ran up to my room and spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how to work the equipment. I didn’t even go downstairs for dinner.
    That’s one of the nice things about my dad’s house: there is no official Dinnertime Conversation. If my mother’s house is filled with chatter and