This Song Will Save Your Life (15 page)

Yet neither of them responded by saying, “Girlfriend! Spill the gossip!” which is how your girls are supposed to talk to you, according to popular television. Instead, Chava said to me, looking very serious, “Elise, Sally and I just want you to know that we are here for you. We are your friends and we are here for you,” she went on grimly. “Like, in your times of need.”

“Okay, that’s great.” I raised my eyebrows at her. I assumed she wasn’t talking about Char kissing me, since that wasn’t exactly a “time of need.”

“And you can tell us anything,” Sally added. “In fact, you
should
tell us anything. That’s what friends do.”

“You should tell us anything so that we can be supportive,” Chava said. “You know, of whatever it is that you tell us.”

“Plus, we tell you everything,” Sally added. “So it seems only fair.”

“I do tell you everything,” I said, which was not true. But I told them more than I told anyone else at school, so it seemed like a lot.

Sally said, “You didn’t tell us that you want to kill yourself.”

I heard a loud
whoosh
in my ears, and I felt dizzy, like the earth was suddenly rotating around me very, very fast. I pulled my sleeves down over my wrists in an instant, like a reflex.

“I don’t want to kill myself,” I said in a shaky voice.

“You see, she doesn’t tell us anything,” Sally complained to Chava.

“Who said I wanted to kill myself?”

“You did,” Sally said.

“You just claimed that I never tell you anything!” I slammed my fist against my locker, and Sally and Chava exchanged a look of concern.

“We read it in your blog,” Chava said.

“I don’t keep a blog.”

“Okay, your ‘online journal,’ then,” Sally said with a sigh.

“I don’t keep one of those either.”

“Elise, you can trust us,” Chava said gently.

“Then can I trust you to tell me who claims that I have a goddamn blog about my suicidal tendencies?”

Sally wrinkled up her nose. Predictably, Sally’s parents do not allow her to swear. She was probably supposed to put a quarter in a jar just for listening to me.

“Everyone,” Chava said, blinking hard, like she was trying to hold back tears. “Everyone has read it.”

I shoved past them and ran down the hall to the computer lab. I sat down and typed in “Elise Dembowski” to Google. The first option that popped up was “Elise Dembowski, MD.” The second was “Elise Dembowski Tampa Florida school superintendent.” But the third line read, “Elise Dembowski suicide.”

I clicked on the link, then stuck my fist into my mouth and bit down while I waited for the page to load. When it came up, it was a design scheme of orange stars, with the heading “Elise Dembowski’s Super-Secret Diary,” and the sheer juxtaposition of my name and my least-favorite color was shocking to me.

I started reading.

May 6:
i hate my life and i just want to die. nobody likes me, and i deserve it. why WOULD anyone ever want to be friends with me? i’m ugly and boring and stuck up. i wish i could kill myself, but ever since the last time i tried, my parents keep our medicine cabinet locked up and they hide our knives. i hate my parents—why won’t they just let me die? i’d be doing them a favor. xoxo elise dembowski

May 1:
just think of all the attention i would get if i killed myself. i bet they would have a school assembly about me and people would have to say nice things about me, even if they didn’t mean them. maybe the paper would even run a feature on me! xoxo elise dembowski

April 27:
confession time: no boy has EVER kissed me. actually i guess that’s not a surprising confession since i am so awkward and gross. i know that i will be alone for the rest of my life, so i just hope that the rest of my life is short. xoxo elise dembowski

April 21:
today i made a list of everyone who i hate. my name is at the top of the list, obviously. amelia kindl is second. if only she hadn’t turned me in that first time i tried to commit suicide. then i could just be dead right now and wouldn’t have to keep living my pathetic, worthless life. but no. i told her, and she betrayed me. she puts on this ‘nice little girl’ act, but it’s just an act. i won’t ever forgive her. xoxo elise dembowski

I stopped reading not because I wanted to but because I couldn’t see the computer screen anymore. Black spots crowded across my vision, and I realized I hadn’t taken a breath since I started reading. I took my fist out of my mouth and exhaled, and my eyes got better, but nothing else did.

Somebody had taken my life, my identity, every negative thought I had ever had, and they had perverted them, twisted them into something grotesque. A version of me, but not me.

There was no question in my mind that this was what Amelia Kindl had been talking about during scoliosis testing when she spoke to me, for the first time all school year, to say, “And now there’s
this
.”

Who had done this, and why? Who would possibly expend the time and energy just to hurt me this much?

But the answer to that came to me instantly: lots of people. Jordan DiCecca and Chuck Boening had easily managed that iPod theft last year, so there was no reason why creating a fake Web site about me would be beyond their abilities, except for the fact that they may or may not know how to type in full sentences.

Lizzie Reardon, it seemed, had endless time to devote to bullying me. Writing a dozen blog posts over the past two weeks wouldn’t be nearly as hard for her to pull off as the time in seventh grade when she orchestrated a supposed date between me and Mike Rosen that wound up with me getting pelted with water balloons while waiting alone in front of the Baskin-Robbins, wearing my favorite lace dress.

Then there was that “Elise Dembowski: Let us give you a makeover!” ad that Emily Wallace and her friends had run in the eighth-grade yearbook. If they were each willing to chip in $25 to have a laugh at my expense, I felt sure they could get it together to create a free Web site that would give them an even bigger laugh.

It didn’t matter who had created this fake diary. In a way, that was the worst part about this: there were
so many people
who didn’t like me, I couldn’t even narrow down a list of suspects. It could have been anyone.

I logged out of the computer and went to class then, because I didn’t know where else to go. Amelia glared at me from her desk, and Mr. Hernandez gave me a demerit for being late. I sat at my desk, taking notes on autopilot, and writing affirmations in the notebook margins, like the psychiatrist had told me to.
I am a good person. I like myself the way I am. Many people love and care about me. I have a purpose in life. I don’t want to kill myself.

I wrote over and over the words, pressing my pen down as hard as I could, until I broke through that sheet of paper and ink bled onto the page behind it.

As Mr. Hernandez lectured, I looked around the room and tried to figure out who had read my fake diary. Chava had said
everyone
. But what did that mean? Amelia had read it, that much was clear from the way her face scrunched up when she looked at me. Which meant that Amelia’s friend, the mummy documentary girl, must have read it, too, since she crossed her arms and glared at me when she noticed me looking at Amelia. A few rows ahead of me, two boys were whispering, and then I clearly heard one of them say “suicide girl.” Mr. Hernandez clapped his hands and said, “All right, folks, can I get some attention up here?” but I still felt the eyes on me.

Chava was not an exaggerator. Everyone had read it.

The moment class ended, I grabbed Amelia’s arm. My voice shook as I said, “Look, Amelia. About that thing you read—I didn’t write that. That wasn’t me.”

For some reason, I felt this intense need for her to know. I wanted to clear my name, of course. But also—and this is pathetic—there was some part of me that couldn’t give up on this dream, the dream of friendship between me and this normal, nice, happy girl. The dream had already died, it had died on the first day of the school year, yet I still felt like if I just told her the truth … if she could just understand …

But Amelia pulled her arm away and said, “Of course it’s you. Who else would have known enough to write all that?” And when I didn’t say anything, she went on, her voice trembling, “Please, Elise. I can’t handle any more of this. I never did anything to you. Please just leave me alone.” Then she hurried after her friend.

The rest of the day, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Amelia had said.
“Who else would have known enough to write all that?”
Because she was right: it wasn’t enough just to enjoy torturing me, like Lizzie or Jordan or Emily or anyone I had already thought of. Whoever did this also had to know, somehow, that I had once thought I wanted to kill myself, and that Amelia Kindl had ratted me out. Someone had to know what really happened on the first day of school.

After I cut myself, after I called Amelia, after she called 911, an ambulance drove up to my house, filling my dad’s quiet block with sirens and flashing lights. I opened the door to let in the EMTs because I didn’t know what else to do. “What’s the situation here?” one of them asked. So I held out my left arm. I hadn’t meant to, but I also hadn’t planned for anything like a 911 response team, and it seemed somehow like it would be rude to send them away with nothing.

Plus, I was scared. What if I had really screwed up my arm? What if I had cut through a tendon? Everything from my elbow down felt numb. I wanted to be saved.

The next thing I knew, the EMTs had loaded me into an ambulance and we were speeding toward the hospital. Some time after that, my parents showed up. Both of them, in the same room, which may have been the scariest and most disjointed part of the whole situation. Mom got there first, and she was completely calm and reassuring—until Dad arrived, at which point she freaked out at him, like this was all his fault. And Dad started out by crying and hugging me nonstop, until Mom’s hysterical ranting got to be too much for him, at which point he stopped crying and hugging and started defending his parenting skills.

Some time after that, and after my arm had been examined and disinfected and rebandaged, a woman came to talk to me. She was wearing a skirt and heels, not hospital scrubs, and she explained that she was a psychiatrist, and she needed to ask me a few questions.

“Have you ever tried to kill yourself?” she asked me.

And I answered, honestly, “No.”

“Do you ever feel so bad that you think about suicide?” she asked me.

And I answered, honestly, “Sometimes.”

So they kept me in the hospital for a couple days on suicide watch. Eventually I was allowed to go home, but my parents didn’t want me to go back to school right away. They wanted to keep an eye on me. I didn’t argue, because I didn’t want to go back to school either. I just went to therapy and downloaded new music. It was a fine life, but after a week or two of that, my parents decided that I was ready to go back into the world. I don’t know what made them think that. As far as I’m concerned, I have never been ready to go into the world.

I returned to school having been through so much, but somehow school was exactly the same. It still smelled like cleaning supplies and meat loaf. My locker still jammed when I tried to open it. Lizzie still criticized me when I walked past her. No one asked where I had been, because no one had noticed that I was gone. All I really wanted was attention, but I didn’t even get that.

Amelia was right. Who knew enough of that story to write it? I knew, Amelia knew, my parents knew. Some doctors and the school guidance counselor. But that was it. Even my little brother and sister only knew that I had been sick for a while, and then I got better.

By the time school ended for the day and, thank God, the week, I had become overwhelmed with the feeling that maybe I really
had
written that journal. Yes, those were someone else’s words, someone else’s story of me. But it was so close to true that it almost didn’t feel like a fiction. If everyone else believed that this was me, did it matter if it was true or not?

At night my dad and I ordered in Chinese food and watched an action movie on the living room couch together. If I seemed quieter than usual, he didn’t comment. He was quiet, too, which was fine by me. I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

After my father went to bed, I went to my room. I brushed my teeth and washed my face and tried to fall asleep. This should have been easy, since I had gotten so little sleep the night before. But it wasn’t. I lay in bed and watched the changing pattern of lights on my ceiling as cars drove by.
Why is it always like this?
my brain kept repeating.
Why are you always like this?

I got up, opened my laptop, and went back to Elise Dembowski’s online journal. I didn’t want to. I did it anyway.

May 7:
i know that some people don’t like the things that i write in this diary, but to them i say SHUT UP! this is MY diary, so i can say how i really feel. if you don’t like it, don’t read it. xoxo elise dembowski

As I sat alone at my desk in the dark, I thought about suicide. Sometimes I did that, thought about suicide, though not in an active way—it was more like pulling a lucky stone out of your back pocket. It was a comforting thing to have with you, so you could rub your fingers over it, reassure yourself that it was there if you needed it. I didn’t want to try to kill myself, didn’t want the blood and the hysterical parents and the guilt, any of it. But sometimes I liked the idea of simply not having to be here anymore, not having to deal with my life. As if death could be just an extended vacation.

But now what I thought about suicide was this:
If I died tonight, everyone would believe this journal was true.

Like Amelia, Chava, and Sally, everyone would forever believe that I had written that diary. Everyone would believe they knew how I “really felt.” And how dare they?

When I thought about suicide, I thought about Start. I thought about Char and Vicky and Pippa and Mel, and I thought about all the songs I had left to discover and all the songs I had left to play.