This Song Will Save Your Life (16 page)

I closed out of the Elise Dembowski diary, revealing Flash Tommy’s photo of me on the window below it. Tonight the Internet seemed filled with versions of me, like a fun house filled with mirrors. Some of them made me look prettier, and some of them made me look uglier, and some of them chopped me right in half, but none of them were right.

I changed out of my pajamas, put on my sneakers, grabbed my iPod, and slipped out of the house. I planned to walk as I did any night: I would walk until I was tired.

But songs and songs went by, and two miles, then three, and I never grew tired. Whenever I blinked, what I saw behind closed eyes was that diary Web page, a searing orange. I couldn’t go to sleep. I would walk until morning.

After a while, I looked around me at the darkened apartment complexes and I realized: I knew where I was. I had been here before.

I was just a few blocks from where Char lived.

And it hit me that this was where I had been walking all night long.

I found Char’s apartment in a courtyard surrounded by buildings that all looked the same. I leaned my head back to look up at the windows. They were all dark. I pressed my finger to Char’s buzzer, and I held it there for a long moment.

Silence.

A couple minutes went by, and I was just about to walk away when the door opened.

“Elise?” Char said, rubbing his eyes. His hair was sticking up in all directions, and he was wearing nothing but an old New Order T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. Even his feet were bare. It was all I could do to keep from throwing my arms around him and burying my face in his chest.

“What are you doing here?” Char asked, his voice confused. “It’s four in the morning.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Is everything okay?”

I shrugged.

“Do you want to come in?” He opened the door wider, and I stepped inside.

I followed him upstairs and down the hall to his apartment, which clearly hadn’t been cleaned since the last time I was here. His DJ setup still rested on boxes in the middle of the room, and the window beside his bed was open, letting in the fresh spring air.

“So what’s going on?” he asked as he locked the door behind us.

I found my voice enough to say, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.” Char rubbed the back of his head. “That’s okay. We won’t talk.”

He leaned forward and kissed me. I kissed him back this time, and his mouth was warm and soft. It felt like he was breathing life into every part of my body. I pressed my lips harder against his, and I felt his hands on my lower back, pulling me toward him.

I didn’t even notice that he was walking me backward until my legs hit his bed, and I collapsed onto it, pulling him on top of me, our mouths never separating. I didn’t know what to do with any part of myself, so I tried to mimic his movements as he ran his hands from my shoulders, down my sides, all the way to my thighs, before coming back up again.

“One sec,” he whispered to me. He stood up, and I readjusted myself on his bed while he went over to his laptop. I stared at the giant
GIRLFRIEND IN A COMA
poster on the wall opposite me. It seemed almost like a threat, which was creepy, but then I reminded myself that I wasn’t Char’s girlfriend, and that made me feel better.

After a few clicks on the keyboard, a song began to play from Char’s speakers. It was my Cure song, “A Letter to Elise.”

“You like this one, right?” Char asked.

“Yes,” I whispered back.

Before getting back into bed, Char pulled off his T-shirt, and when he lay down beside me again, I could feel the heat radiating from his body. He had a small tattoo of a record player a few inches below his collarbone. I brushed my fingers across it, scared to touch his naked torso anywhere else. I’d never touched anyone’s tattoo before. It just felt like skin.

Char kept his word: we didn’t talk. The only sounds were the music, and his breathing, and my breathing. He took off my shirt and my bra, and when I began to shiver, he pulled me closer to him, covering my body with his own. Time passed, but I lost track of it. Neither of us spoke at all until Char was pulling my jeans down my legs, and then it was me who broke the silence.

“I don’t even know your real name,” I said.

He paused, his hand resting on my stomach. “Does it matter?” he asked.

“Yes, it matters. I don’t even know who you are.”

“I don’t know your full name either,” he pointed out. “Just Elise.” He murmured into my ear, “I’ll tell you mine if you’ll tell me yours.”

I thought about this. What is a name for anyway? It’s for looking up people online. I thought about what Char would find if he searched for me.
Elise Dembowski, MD. Elise Dembowski Tampa Florida school superintendent. Elise Dembowski suicide.

“Never mind,” I said. “Forget names. Just Elise is perfect.”

“Personally, I prefer DJ Elise,” he said, touching his nose to mine.

I kissed him. “DJ Elise works for me, too.”

We went back to rolling around on his bed. I grew braver, my hands exploring more and more of him: his head, his shoulders, his back.

After some time, our hands became less restless. Char rolled me over so that my back was to him, pressed against his chest, with my legs curled against his legs. I could see out his window now, to the dawn that was just beginning to break. “Elise?” he said sleepily. “What did you come here for?”

I thought about that. I hadn’t consciously planned to come here at all, but it wasn’t an accident either. Yet what had I expected to happen? Had I thought Char would erase my fake online diary, and erase the memories of everyone who had read it, too? Had I thought I would pour out all my secrets to him and he would grant me absolution? He wasn’t a priest or a psychiatrist or a magician. He was just a boy.

“I came here because I didn’t want to be alone anymore,” I answered him.

“That’s a good reason,” he murmured.

After a few minutes I felt his arms slacken around my waist, and I heard his breathing grow deep and regular. Char fell asleep. And then finally, mercifully, so did I.

12

The next three weeks fell into a pattern. I went to class. I did my homework. At home, Alex’s poetry castle continued to grow larger and more elaborate until eventually Steve had to move it into the sunroom so we weren’t constantly tripping over it. At school, I ate lunch with Chava and Sally, who spent most of their time, when they weren’t trying to decide who might invite Sally to the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal, trying to convince me that life was worth living because a beautiful future awaited me.

“Someday you’ll get your driver’s license,” Chava told me.

“Someday you’ll go to prom,” Sally told me.

“Prom is even
better
than the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal,” Chava added.

It was unclear why these predictions would make me want to stay alive, but I didn’t argue. And I learned quickly that joking about suicide with these girls got me nowhere. The day I brought in a sharp knife to cut an orange for lunch, Chava started to tremble as though I had already slashed my throat and blood was now pouring out of my mouth. One day I said something along the lines of “I have so much homework, I want to die,” and it took me the rest of lunch period to talk my friends off the running-to-the-guidance-counselor ledge.

“I don’t want to kill myself,” I kept telling them.

But everyone else at school was saying that I did. And who do you think Chava and Sally believed, me or everyone else at school?

Actually, though they would never admit to this, I think they were secretly thrilled to be friends with someone who other people were talking about. Granted, what other people were saying about me was “If I were Elise Dembowski, I would want to off myself, too.” Nonetheless, my classmates knew who I was, which meant they practically knew who Chava and Sally were, too, which meant it was only a matter of time before my friends could ascend to their rightful places as Brooke Feldstein’s ladies-in-waiting.

It was funny: When I called Amelia, it was because I wanted attention. And now I was getting it. But this wasn’t the attention I had wanted.

Throughout it all, as May went on, Fake Elise kept updating the online journal. Some days I was talking about various ways to die. Some days I was talking about all the reasons why I hated myself. Some days I was talking about how I wished I had Ashley Mersky’s body, or Gina McKibben’s boyfriend, or Alexandra Pleet’s parents—whatever it was that could turn me into someone other than me, someone better.

The blog wasn’t updated every single day, and I know this because I looked at it every single day.

I don’t know why.

More than once I thought about showing it to someone in power. The vice principal, maybe, though I had never interacted with Mr. Witt outside of the iPod incident last spring. And honestly, that hadn’t gone so well for me, and I didn’t have reason to believe that he would handle this problem any better.

I could have shown it to Vicky or Char, because isn’t that what friends are for? And weren’t we friends? But just thinking about doing that made me feel ashamed. It would be like saying to them, “Here. This is what everyone thinks of me. What about you? What do you think of me now?”

I thought about telling my parents, or Ms. Wu, who was so eager for me to have a personal problem so that she could solve it. But ultimately I didn’t tell anyone. I just didn’t see what good it would do. Anyway, if I showed this blog to a parent or a teacher, wouldn’t they believe that it was true, too, just like Chava and Sally did? Wouldn’t they, like Amelia, believe that this was just another one of my cries for help?

On Wednesday evening, as my father and I sat in the living room, him reading the newspaper and me working on math problems, both of us munching on our takeout Thai, the room silent except for the Doors album on the stereo, I considered just saying it. If I opened my mouth, I felt like the words would fall out:
Dad, some kids at school are being mean to me.

But here’s a question for you:
And then what?

I remembered sixth grade. The first year of middle school, which seemed like a very big deal. We got an
arts elective
. We were eleven years old now, so we were finally trusted to make decisions about our own lives.

I took my arts elective choice very, very seriously. The options were painting, theater, chorus, or reading. Reading is not actually an art; it was a remedial class. I felt bad for the kids who had to take reading. It didn’t seem fair that they weren’t allowed to learn how to paint until they were able to read at grade level.

Anyway, after much deliberation, I chose theater. I liked to play pretend, and theater class seemed like an opportunity to play pretend, only with everyone paying attention to me.

What
actually
happened in theater class was that we played a lot of “theater games,” like the one where you make a sound and a motion at the same time, or the one where you walk around the room at different speeds, or the one where you mirror a partner’s motions. After three weeks of this it occurred to me that maybe our teacher, Madame Chevalier, did not actually know anything about theater.

One day she had us play a game where you alliterate your first name with an adjective about you. Like Lizzie Reardon was “Likable Lizzie”—even though I would describe a dead skunk as likable before assigning that adjective to Lizzie.

Maybe I will someday discover that all Broadway actors audition for roles by playing a game where they alliterate their first names with adjectives. Maybe I will discover that Madame Chevalier was some kind of method acting genius.
But I do not think that is going to happen.

Anyway, when it came to my turn, I said, “Eloquent Elise.” Which is following the rules of the game, right? But then everybody laughed at me. And called me “Eloquent Elise” for the next three days. Which you wouldn’t think would be a bad thing; I mean,
eloquent
is a compliment. But I could tell that no one was saying it as a compliment, and that was what confused me.

Eventually I went to my dad and I told him what was going on. I remember crying and just repeating “Why?” over and over.

“They’re teasing you because they’re jealous of you,” Dad said, taking my hands in his and looking into my eyes.

“Why?” I sniffled. Were they jealous that I was eloquent? Were they jealous that I knew what the word
eloquent
meant?

“They’re jealous of you because you’re smart and you’re talented and you know who you are.”

I stopped crying then. The words buzzed around my brain like hummingbirds, filling me with air.
I’m smart and I’m talented and I know who I am.

But now my father looked upset. “Come on,” he said, and he took me to the basement. There are four units in my dad’s building, so there’s a lot of stuff in his basement: baby strollers and washing machines and broken furniture.

Dad found a softball bat and used it to gesture at an old futon. “When I feel bad,” he said, “I like to come down here.”

The basement was cold, and I hugged my arms to my chest. “Why?”

“Because,” he said, “it gets all the bad feelings out of me.”

And then he raised the softball bat and started whacking the futon like a lunatic, screaming and swearing the whole time, his arms wild, the futon sagging underneath the impact of the bat again and again.
“Don’t you dare talk to my daughter that way!”
he hollered, his voice guttural, like a bear’s roar.

After a minute he stopped and turned to me, breathing hard. “Here.” He held the softball bat out to me. “Your turn.”

I hugged my arms in tighter and backed away. I didn’t want to hit that futon.
I wasn’t mad.
I didn’t need to scream and attack a piece of furniture. I just needed someone to like me.

After a long moment, my dad laid the softball bat down. We went back upstairs. And we never spoke about that incident again, even though I couldn’t shake the feeling that my dad was disappointed in me. Like he had wanted me to be as angry as he was, when I wasn’t angry at all.