I look back up and find him watching my hand.
“Your set on Saturday was crazy. You were using a Push, two MIDI keyboards, and the CDJs?”
I raise an eyebrow. “You saw all that from the crowd?”
He shifts his weight. “Uh, I might have Googled you and found a Reddit thread theorizing about how you set your stuff up.”
I should be mad, but the first thing I feel is flattered.
“Well, that’s pretty close to what I use, yeah,” I admit.
“Your looping is crazy. I mean, I can improvise, but you...Where’d you even learn all that anyway? I still wish I could just bring my little controller to clubs and forget about everything else, and you’re out here being a fucking multi-keyboard savant.”
“Multi-keyboard savant? I’ll put that on my resume.”
He laughs again, and I move so I’m standing in front of the controls. It puts me closer to him, but it gives me something to focus on other than how much the way he laughs makes me want to thread my hands into his hair and pull his face down to mine.
I wonder if he’d taste the same. I didn’t get many chances to learn his taste, to commit the way his lips moved over mine to memory, but I can still close my eyes and feel myself kissing him like we’re back in his parents’ basement again.
So I keep them open and distract myself by miming out the beginning of my set while he keeps talking.
“I don’t throw the word savant around every day. I mean it.” I can feel his eyes on my fingers. “Hey, want to try something?”
“Huh?” I look up and see him dashing over to the side of the stage. He disappears into the shadows of the wings for a second, and I hear some switches flicking before the equipment in front of me boots up and comes to life.
“Play something!” Youssef calls out before making his way back over to the booth. “Let’s see those savant skills. You can’t get behind the DJ booth and expect to not have to play.”
“What? Is there even anything loaded in this?”
He points to a port in front of me. “Somebody’s USB is in there.”
“You want me to make a performance off a random USB whose contents I have not even looked at?”
He gets a familiar gleam in his eyes. “Do you accept this challenge or not, Paige?”
It’s what we used to say to each other before inevitably doing stupid shit that usually didn’t go well. We had a habit of daring each other to do things just for the hell of it.
We were teenagers. We were bored, and every second of our lives felt like it held a thousand opportunities. I forgot what it was like to be that alive, to let it all go and just say yes to the world instead of fighting my way through it. Sometimes it feels like that’s all I know how to do.
“Challenge accepted.”
I cue up the first track on the USB, and Youssef nearly loses it when Ginuwine’s ‘Pony’ starts blasting out of the club’s speakers. I just hunch over the controls and begin twisting dials as he laughs beside me. I actually use this song in a lot of my bar sets; people go crazy for it, and I’ve remixed it so often I decided to put a version on SoundCloud that ended up going kind of viral.
It doesn’t take Youssef long to stop laughing and focus on what I’m doing. I’m already in the zone, slipping into the dreamy, fluid state of concentration that takes me over like the rush of a river every time I’m behind the decks.
I grab the pair of headphones plugged into the system and slip them on so I can get the next track ready, still using my other hand to fuck around with ‘Pony’ and recreate my remix.
There’s some old school Daft Punk on the USB, so I start working it in and build up to a drop. Time has slowed down in that way it always does when I’m performing, like I can feel everything just before it happens, like I’m the one whomakesit happen. My hands fly over the controls, creating a new universe with every beat, and I’m both a slave to that world and the god who rules over it.
I crank up the tempo, letting it climb and climb until the speakers are filling the empty room with a high-pitched whine that bounces off the walls and steals the breath from my lungs before I finally let the beat drop.
I throw my head back and pull the headphones down to take it all in, turning to glance at Youssef with my face stretched in an ecstatic smile I couldn’t hold back if I tried.
His mouth is hanging open, eyes nearly bulging out of his head.
“What?” I shout, laughing a little as he keeps gaping at me while I use one hand to keep mixing. “You having a heart attack or something?”
“You’re not even looking at it!” he shouts back. “How are you doing that? How are you doing that andtalking?”
