This Song Will Save Your Life (6 page)

Then Alex came running into my room, screaming, “Mom says I’m supposed to tell you to get up! And she says it’s going to rain! And she says what do you want for breakfast!”

That’s the problem with life. You never get enough time to stare at your ceiling and try to figure out what’s going on.

At breakfast, not one member of the Myers household said anything to me like, “So, did you stumble across any nightclubs at one o’clock in the morning while you were pacing the back roads of Glendale?” Instead, people at breakfast said things like, “I have a five o’clock call with the funder, so can you pick up the kids from afterschool?” (Mom), and “Champ, I promise that is the same sort of Eggo we get every week. It just looks browner, but if you closed your eyes, it would taste exactly the same” (Steve), and “I’m not going to go to school, I’m going to sit on the couch all day, and you can’t stop me, ’cause I’ll be participating in the democratic process” (Alex), and “It looks like it’s whole wheat. You
know
I don’t eat whole wheat Eggos” (Neil).

So, clearly, nightclubbing was not at the top of anyone else’s mind this Friday morning.

I caught my school bus with seconds to spare and sat in the front row. After the first day of this year, I had given up on trying for the middle of the bus. What, you think that if you sit six rows back from the driver instead of one row back, people will be fooled into thinking you’re cool and join you? I tried that. That did not work. My classmates may be idiots, but even they are not so easily fooled.

I pressed my face to the smudged bus window and watched warehouse after warehouse roll past us as I looked for Start. And what I found was this: in the rain and in the morning, they all looked exactly the same.

I took my face away from the window and leaned back against my seat as the bus rounded the corner. If I hadn’t been there to see where the party had once been, I never would have known it was there at all.

School was normal, which is to say soul-crushingly depressing. I sat in class and wrote the lyrics to “Dancing in the Dark” in my best cursive handwriting in the margins of my notebook. I imagined Vicky sweeping into the room, with Pippa stalking in behind her on four-inch heels, and announcing to the class, “Elise is with us! None of you appreciate her, and you don’t even deserve her. Elise, it’s time. We are here to take you to your real life. You have suffered long enough through this one, but this was only a test, and the test is over now.” And then I would rise to my feet and join hands with them, and together we would run off into the sunset.

I drew a picture of all of this in my notebook. But that was as close as it was going to come to reality. Not least because it was only eleven thirty, so the sun wasn’t setting, and, even if it were, I wouldn’t have been able to tell, because it was raining.

Eventually it was time for lunch. Sophomores are
not
allowed off campus, and they are
not
allowed to wander the halls. Therefore, here were my options for how to spend my lunch period:

Option one: Sit in the library and read a book and listen to my iPod, which is basically the perfect way to spend thirty-five minutes of a school day, except that you are
not
allowed to eat in the library—nor are you allowed to eat in the halls or classrooms—so when I go this route, I am ready to faint from hunger by the time school lets out for the day.

Option two: Sit in Ms. Wu’s classroom and discuss math with her. This is actually a great bargain, since she doesn’t seem to know or care that we are
not
allowed to eat in classrooms. When I’m with Ms. Wu I get to eat my sandwich without running into any of the popular kids, because a defining characteristic of popular kids is that they do not like to hang out with math teachers. Furthermore, Ms. Wu tells me interesting math stuff, some of which might even prove useful when I take the SATs next year, and good SAT scores are my best hope for getting into a good college and therefore escaping this hellhole.

Unfortunately, Ms. Wu teaches during my Friday lunch period. Ms. Wu’s classroom is a good option on Tuesdays. But not on Fridays.

Option three: Sit in the cafeteria, at a table with my friends.

Oh, did I not mention that I have friends now? Did I somehow leave that out? I have friends now. Surprise!

My friends are named Sally and Chava. They are both less popular than me, and I don’t know why, but I hope it’s because they are unbelievably boring. They have only one interest, and that is: what the popular kids are doing.

Sally and Chava follow the popular kids’ lives like soap operas. Brooke Feldstein cannot give one blow job to one member of the school basketball team without Sally and Chava knowing about it, discussing it on the phone, following up on it with an in-person conversation, soliciting eyewitness testimony from anyone else who might have been within a two-mile radius, googling it, and placing bets on what brand of lip gloss Brooke was wearing at the time.

I must note that Sally and Chava are not friends with Brooke Feldstein. I don’t think they have ever talked to her. They just follow her antics from afar. They are Brooke Feldstein’s silent but adoring fan base.

Today I was hungry enough from walking all night that starving in the library wasn’t an option, and Ms. Wu’s Friday class ruled out that one, so I was stuck with my dear friends in the cafeteria.

The big news of the week was that Jordan DiCecca had broken up with his girlfriend, Laura, for this other girl, Leah. Everyone knew this. But had he
cheated
on Laura with Leah
before
breaking up with her? That was the real question.

“He definitely did,” said Sally over lunch. “There is no way Jordan would have broken up with Laura if he hadn’t already tried out Leah to make sure that she’d, you know, put out.”

Chava chewed on her lip, looking doubtful. “He could have just asked her. Like, ‘Hey, Leah, if I break up with Laura, would you have sex with me?’”

“Come on, you know Jordan,” Sally said. We didn’t. “He would want some sort of guarantee on his investment.” Sally bit into a stick of celery. Sally and Chava eat only raw vegetables for lunch because they are trying to lose weight. Then they split a pack of Entenmann’s donuts for dessert. They have explicitly stated that they believe that if they were seven pounds lighter (Sally) or thirteen pounds lighter (Chava), then they would have popular friends and not have to sit at the loser table with each other and me. This sounds pathetic and delusional, but I let them continue to believe it because, after all, it’s no more pathetic and delusional than believing that you can make friends by sitting in the middle instead of the front of the school bus.

“Laura and Jordan were together for more than a year,” Chava said thoughtfully.

Sally nodded. “It was a year in February.”

“That’s forever. This is such a huge change. It’s really sad, you know?”

I could tell she wasn’t kidding. Chava looked like Neil and Alex hearing that we were getting a new sofa. I guess nobody takes change that well.

“You could stage a sit-in about it,” I offered.

Blank looks from my friends.

“You know. ‘We won’t budge from this cafeteria table unless Jordan and Laura get back together!’”

Sally and Chava looked way less enthusiastic about this idea than Alex and Neil had.

“I’ll make protest signs for you to carry,” I went on. “If that would help you any.”

Sally leaned forward, lowered her voice, and said, “I wonder how long he and
Leah
will last.”

You may wonder how I managed to make these friends. Well, I will tell you: making friends is actually not that hard when you drop every single one of your standards.

Our cafeteria tables are unofficially arranged with the most popular kids sitting in the center. As you work your way out to the edges of the room, the tables become filled with less and less desirable people. Amelia Kindl’s table, for example, is four rows in from the back row. Sally and Chava’s table is in the very outer rim of the cafeteria, directly in front of the bathrooms. In every regard, it is the worst table.

I was out of school for a couple weeks after I cut myself. Which wasn’t even as enjoyable as you might expect, since I spent the entire time worrying about going back to school. When I finally did, and I entered the cafeteria for the first time, I looked for a table where no one would have any clout to order me to move, or to ask questions that I didn’t want to answer, or to make me clean up after them. I sat down at Sally and Chava’s table, and they didn’t tell me to leave, so now they are my friends, apparently.

“I wonder what she’ll wear to the dance tonight?” Chava mused.

“Probably something new,” Sally said wisely. “Leah always gets a new dress for dances.” She turned to me. “Hey, do you want to come over to get ready for the dance together?”

“Um.” I swallowed a bite of my PB&J. “Is there a school dance tonight?”

“The Spring Fling,” Chava replied, and she didn’t even add anything like
“Obviously”
onto her answer. Chava is a little dumb and impossibly boring, but she is doggedly nice.

“How did you miss all the posters and the announcements and the ads in the
Herald
?” Sally asked. “Honestly, Elise, sometimes it seems like you don’t even go to this school.”

“Well, that is the goal,” I said.

“Anyway, will you come over before so we can get ready together?” Sally asked. “My mother said I’m allowed to wear body glitter, just for tonight.”

“Ooh,” Chava contributed.

Sally has the sort of parents who evaluate her every time she leaves the house to make sure she doesn’t look like a “streetwalker” (Sally’s dad’s word, not mine). This sounds like child abuse to me, yet Chava thinks Sally is the lucky one because
Chava’s
family is so religious that she’s not allowed to go out on Friday nights at all, regardless of what she’s wearing.

“I’m not allowed to drive, though,” Sally added. “Just in case someone spikes the punch.” Sally has her driver’s license, but her parents constantly come up with reasons why she’s not allowed to use it. That still puts her ahead of Chava and me, since neither of us can drive at all.

Mostly I feel bad for Sally and Chava, but sometimes I’m jealous of them. Their parents clearly screwed them up for life, or at least for high school, so they have someone to blame for their uncoolness. I don’t have that luxury. I can only blame myself.

I picked apart my sandwich crust and tried to figure out how to reply to Sally without hurting her feelings. I recognized her invitation as a sign of friendship—honestly, I did. This was Sally’s way of being friends with me. But the thought of going over to her house and dressing up in whatever teenagers are supposed to wear to school dances, and being given permission to wear a certain amount of body glitter, and getting a ride with Sally’s parents back to this same building, where we could stand near these same people who would continue not to talk to us, only this time my least favorite music would be blaring in the background … I mean, you could not pay me enough money. And, in fact, no one would be paying me any money. On the contrary, I would have to pay five dollars at the door.

“Thanks, Sally,” I said, “but I’m not going tonight.”

“Oh, no!” Chava said, like something really bad had happened.

Sally wrinkled up her nose. “Don’t you like to dance?”

I thought about last night, about the flashing lights and the thrumming music and Vicky and Pippa, jumping up and down, their feet always hitting the floor at the exact same time. “Dancing is okay,” I said.

“So, you should come then,” Sally determined.

“No,” I said again. “But you have fun. Hey, I wonder who will ask you to dance tonight?”

And that distracted them. No one ever asks Sally to dance at these things, but that doesn’t stop her and Chava from thinking that someone might, someday. Tonight could be the night. The body glitter could make all the difference.

Maybe I should feel worse for Sally and Chava than I do for myself, but I am not that generous. Okay, they live in a fantasy world, but at least their fantasies give them a nice protective cushion. I have fantasies, too, like the one about Pippa and Vicky appearing in the middle of my history class to rescue me from my life. But, unlike Sally and Chava, I know that my fantasies are not going to come true.

*   *   *

That night, while Sally and Jordan and his new girlfriend and his ex-girlfriend were all at school, partying it up, I sat at home, making a springtime playlist in honor of the Spring Fling. I called it “Get Out of the City and into the Sunshine.” I left the window open, so my room smelled like fresh air, and I felt happy. I felt happy because everyone else was at school, while I, for the next fifty-eight hours, could be wherever I wanted to be.

At midnight, I laced up my sneakers and headed out, retracing my steps from the night before. Following my path back to Start. In addition to my iPod, I stuck a comb into my back pocket. You know, just in case I ran into any of them again—Pippa or Vicky or Char—I might want to fix my hair.

But I didn’t run into any of them. I reached the block where Start had been twenty-four hours earlier, and it was nothing, just an empty, ugly street. After walking back and forth and back again, I managed to identify the alleyway where I had trotted behind Pippa and Vicky. But it was just an alleyway. No Mel at the end of it, no party to guard.

I stood uncertainly in the middle of the silent street, dwarfed by warehouses. The school party had ended hours ago. And Start had never even begun. The nighttime offered nothing for me.

So I turned my back on where Start should have been, I turned up the volume on my headphones, and I returned to my home, alone.

5

I didn’t see Pippa or Vicky again for two weeks. If Start wasn’t on Friday nights (or Sunday nights either, as I discovered when I walked over there again, just to check), I thought it might happen again on another Thursday. But the next week I was staying at my dad’s, which is what the Elise Calendar says to do pretty much every single Thursday. My dad lives on the other side of town from Start. Even for me, that would be way too long a walk.