This Song Will Save Your Life (4 page)

It turns out that I had been lying. I hadn’t thought I was lying, but I was. When I said that I really wanted to die, that I wasn’t a teen cliché, that I wasn’t doing this for attention, that I, for one,
meant
it. I hadn’t known it but I was lying, lying, lying. Because the next thing that I did was pick up my phone, with my right hand, and call Amelia Kindl to tell her that I had just cut myself. On purpose.

That’s what I discovered about myself on the first day of my sophomore year of high school: I didn’t really want to die. I never had. All I ever wanted was attention.

3

Here we are now. Here we are, the first Thursday evening in April, a full seven months after I slit my wrist and then called Amelia Kindl to tell her all about it. The sun has just gone down, and it’s dinnertime in the Myers household.

Members of the Myers household include my mom; her husband, Steve; their five-year-old son, Neil; their seven-year-old daughter, Alex; their dogs, Bone and Chew-Toy; and, sometimes, me.

I am part of the Myers household every Saturday to Wednesday, one month out of the summer, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving evening. The rest of the time I’m at my dad’s, on the other side of town. Except for sometimes, like this particular Thursday, we have to move things around because my dad’s away. This time I believe his band was playing a show at the Six Flags in Florida. When I was a kid, I would have begged and pleaded to skip school to travel with him, but by this point in my life I have been to so many Six Flags and Busch Gardens with my dad and his band that they just don’t excite me like they used to.

My parents’ schedule for me may sound confusing, but it doesn’t feel it. We’ve been doing the joint custody thing since I was six, so we got the hang of it a long time ago. At this point, everyone in my family has a smartphone with a synced-up Elise Calendar, and we just go wherever our phones tell us to.

Dinnertime in the Myers household requires everyone sitting in the dining room together, eating two different meals (mac and cheese or chicken fingers for Alex and Neil, real food for the rest of us), and having Dinnertime Conversation. Mom and Steve are the founders and copresidents of an environmental nonprofit called Bravely Opposing Oil Over International Lines, known to us insiders as BOO OIL. The idea is that if we have Dinnertime Conversation as a family, then the three of us kids will develop a more nuanced understanding of the world around us, so we will grow up to become educated members of a working democracy.

I would say there’s a 15 percent chance that, if I hadn’t been raised to be an educated member of a working democracy, I would have turned out cool. I’m not completely blaming my mother for my social problems or anything. I’m just saying that Lizzie Reardon clearly has no interest in being an educated member of a working democracy, and, so far, that seems to have served her well.

Here is what the Myers household’s Dinnertime Conversation sounded like on this particular Thursday:

Mom: “I have some good news: we’ve finally decided what sofa we’re getting.”

Alex: “WHAT?! We have to get a new
sofa
?”

Neil: “Whhhhyyyyy?”

You see that? Educated members of a working democracy in action. Everyone participates in the democratic process. All our voices are heard.

Mom: “Because the old sofa is disgusting.”

Steve: “The dogs have thrown up on it so many times, it’s vomit-colored.”

Alex: “I
like
the color of vomit.”

Neil: “Me, too.”

Mom: “Fine, then we’ll get a new couch that’s the same color, since you like it so much.”

Alex: “But if it’s the same color, then why can’t we just keep the old one?”

Mom: “Because, I told you, it’s disgusting.”

Neil:
(inaudible comment)

Steve: “What’s that, champ?”

Neil:
(eyes brimming with tears)
“I love our sofa.”

Alex: “It’s okay, Neil. We’re going to save it.”

Neil:
(sniffling)
“Ho-o-o-ow?”

Steve: “Yeah, how?”

Alex: “Elise, how are we going to save the sofa?”

Me: “A sit-in.”

Alex: “Yeah, a sit-in.”

Neil: “What’s a sit-in?”

Alex:
“Duh.”

Neil: “What’s a sit-in, Alex?”

Alex: “It’s a … It’s not a thing you can just
describe
.”

Mom: “It’s when a group of people decide that they want something to happen, so they sit in one place and refuse to move until their requests have been met.”

My mother can’t help herself: if anyone asks her a question about civil disobedience, she feels obligated to reply.

Alex: “That’s what we’re going to do. Who’s going to sit in at our sit-in?”

(Alex, Neil, and I raise our hands.)

Mom: “Really, Elise?”

Me: “I support young activists.”

Neil: “Let’s go now! Let’s go sit in now!”

Alex: “Quick, before the new couch comes!”

(Neil and Alex each grab one of my arms and try to pull me out of my chair.)

Me: “After dinner, okay? I’m going to stage a sit-in at the dinner table for a while. Then I’ll go join your sit-in in the living room.”

After Alex and Neil run off to protest our parents’ injustices, Dinnertime Conversation turns to the news of the world. Technically Dinnertime Conversation is always supposed to be about the news of the world, but sometimes we get sidetracked by other topics, like how much we love sofas, or whether Steve tried to sneak tofu into Alex’s macaroni again.

The big news story of today was that a boy in Arizona had brought a gun to school and opened fire on his homeroom class, killing three and wounding eight before turning the gun on himself.

“It’s a tragedy,” Mom said, which is the most blatantly true statement ever, but I guess that’s what you say when you can’t think of anything else.

“This is why we need stricter gun control.” I tore off a chunk of baguette. “I say this all the time. But does anyone ever listen? No.”

“You could stage a sit-in,” Steve said. “I hear you like sit-ins.”

“Love ’em,” I agreed. “Can’t get enough of them.”

“You wouldn’t do anything like that, would you, Elise?” Mom asked supercasually.

I knew what she was asking. I knew, but that didn’t mean I was going to make it easy for her. “I wouldn’t do anything like stage a sit-in advocating harsher restrictions on handguns?” I said. “I might.”

She frowned and stared down into her water glass. “I mean, you wouldn’t … do anything like what that boy did.”

This is what happens, by the way, when you cut yourself and then tell an oversensitive girl who does the oversensitive thing of immediately alerting 911. What happens is that, more than half a year later, your mother will ask you, in all seriousness, whether you would take a gun to school and shoot up the place. Because you are suspect now. You are a wild card.

Mom and Steve were silent, waiting for my answer. I stabbed my fork into my quinoa salad, then realized that stabbing probably made me look violent. “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t kill anyone.”

We’ve been over this before. Whether or not I would kill anyone, I mean. No, I wouldn’t.

I think that’s a boy thing anyway. Or, I don’t know, not necessarily just boys, but people who aren’t like me. I may
hate
Lizzie Reardon and Chuck Boening and now Amelia Kindl most of all, but I would never try to hurt them directly. I wanted to hurt myself. I blamed them, yes, but I blamed myself more.

After dinner, I joined Alex and Neil in the living room. We sat purposefully on the couch and took turns saying what we loved about it.

“I love that the pillows look kind of like faces so you can hold them up and make them talk to each other,” said Neil. He held up two couch pillows and demonstrated.

“Huh.” I looked at the pillows. They did have some dents and wrinkles that could possibly be mistaken for eyes and a mouth. “Good point, Neil.”

“
I
love that there’s this hole between these two cushions and it’s the perfect place to put my Barbies when they’ve been captured by the evil sea witch because it looks just like a whirlpool. And then the evil sea witch turns them all evil, too, because she gets inside their heads and they can’t think their own thoughts anymore, they can only follow her evil commands.”

I looked silently at Alex as she slid her arm in and out of the gap between couch cushions. I used to play make-believe games like that when I was her age, with the same hole on this same couch.

“You shouldn’t play that game, Alex,” I said finally.

“What? Underwater Capture?” she asked.

“Yeah. Other kids don’t play games like that.”

“Yes, they do,” she said, and even her eyes reminded me of myself, gray-blue and too big for her face.

“They don’t. They play games with other kids. Like School. Or House. Or soccer.”

“I hate soccer,” Alex said.

“I know. I hate soccer, too. But you should play it anyway.”

“Elise?” Neil had lain down on the couch and was resting his head on my lap. It was past his school-night bedtime, but my mom and Steve have never been ones to interrupt a sit-in. “Elise, it’s your turn to say a thing you love about the couch.”

“I love…” I absentmindedly rubbed my hand across the ragged, stained fabric. I supported young activists, but Mom was right; this couch was a piece of shit. “I love that this couch has never judged me.”

“Yeah,” Neil agreed sleepily.

“Yeah,” said Alex. “Good couches don’t do that.”

I sat there and did my American Lit reading until both of them fell asleep. Then Mom and Steve came in and picked them up to carry them upstairs to their bedrooms.

“You realize this is a sit-in, right?” I asked. “That means you two are scabs.”

“It
was
a sit-in,” Mom said, wrapping her arms around Neil. “Now it’s just a sleep-in.” She kissed me on the top of my head. “Good night, Elise. Don’t stay up too late.”

I waited for a while after the rest of my family went upstairs. Then, once all was silent and dark, I put on my sneakers and I snuck out of the house.

This is something that I started to do after I cut myself. Not right away; for the first few months, my parents were so freaked out that they basically kept me under house arrest. But half a year later, we were back to normal. It’s not like they
forgot
that their daughter had torn up her wrist with an X-Acto knife. I don’t think you can forget something like that. I just don’t think you can think about it every day without driving yourself crazy.

So in March, as spring was starting to peek through the cold, I began to walk at night. I’d wait until midnight or so, once everyone in the house was asleep, and then I’d put on my shoes, grab my iPod, and head out into the night.

It’s surprisingly easy to sneak out of my house. It’s an old building, built by some rich merchant family in the 1800s, so it doesn’t have a normal house layout. Mom and Steve’s bedroom is on the third floor, Neil’s and Alex’s are on the second, and I alone live on the first floor, in what had once been the maid’s quarters. If I were a different sort of person, I could have taken advantage of this situation to sneak out to something cool. Like keg parties. (I assumed some kids in my town had keg parties, though maybe I only got that idea from movies.) But, since I was just me, I just snuck out to walk alone.

I never knew how many miles I traveled. Something about that first day, when I walked five miles home from school, made me realize: five miles is nothing. So now I wandered around town, sometimes just for half an hour, sometimes until the sun was starting to rise, however long it took for me to get tired. No one saw me and no one knew, and for this reason, these nighttime walks were the only times that I didn’t feel trapped in my life.

Walking at night is like walking in a dream. It’s dark, so I don’t notice much of the scenery. I don’t wear my watch, so time becomes meaningless. I’m not carrying a tote bag or a backpack or whatever usually weighs me down in the daytime, so I feel light and bouncy. I listen to music as loud as I can, and I don’t think about anything.

I know some people would get scared walking alone when it’s so late, but I am not one of those people. I just don’t see anything to be scared of. For one thing,
Forbes
has declared Glendale to be America’s number-one safest city every year since I was a kid. (Except for one year, when there was a small rash of car break-ins. Glendale dropped to America’s number-two safest city, and there was a lot of outcry about how we needed to “reclaim our crown.”)

For another thing, I’ve never been scared of the dark or silence. When I was younger, my dad and I used to walk around his neighborhood together before I went to bed. He said he liked looking at the stars because it cleared his head. It clears mine, too.

Tonight I walked vaguely in the direction of my school, out of the residential area with its parks and big single-family houses, and into the bordering neighborhood, where mostly college students lived and hung out. I passed by their blocky four-story apartment buildings, then headed down the hill, bypassing shuttered coffee shops, boutiques, and restaurants. A few cars drove by. I saw a woman letting herself into an apartment, and a couple strolling along, pausing occasionally to peer in darkened shop windows. Nobody my age, of course.

At the end of the hill, I turned left onto a wider, grayer street that mostly housed warehouses and storage units. This was the route my school bus took in the mornings. There were no trees in sight, only a few spread-out streetlights, and two girls across the street. Standing still. Watching me.

My heart immediately started beating faster, and I snuck my hand inside my jacket pocket to click off my iPod so I could hear what was going on. In my experience, when people noticed me, it never led to anything good.

“Hey, you!” one of them shouted across the road.

Just keep walking,
I told myself.
It’s like when Lizzie Reardon calls your name in the hallway. Just keep walking. Think invisible, and if you’re lucky maybe you will become invisible.