Текст книги "This Song Will Save Your Life"

Автор книги: Leila Sales

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Текущая страница: 14 (всего у книги 15 страниц)

18

“You could have told us,” Mom said as she drove me to Alex’s fair. Before my mother picked me up, Mr. Witt had called her to reveal the identity of the blogger and reassure her that Glendale High was once again, as promised, a Very Nice School. “You could have shown that diary to your father, or me, or Steve, and we would have put an end to this long ago.”

You couldn’t have put an end to it, I wanted to tell her. You don’t have the power of Emily Wallace.

“Don’t you think having a conversation about what was going on would have been more productive than ruining Alex’s school project?”

“I thought I was helping her,” I said. “At the time.”

“And now?” Mom asked.

“Now … no. I don’t think that anymore.”

Mom nodded. “You’re a smart cookie, Elise.”

I had always loved when she said that to me, because she was one of the only people in the world who didn’t make it sound like a put-down.

“So can I stop being grounded?” I asked.

Mom laughed lightly as she paused at a stop sign. “No matter how much you’ve seen the error of your ways, you really hurt your sister. And you really hurt this family. I can’t let you off the hook so easily. It wouldn’t be fair. You can’t be ungrounded, but here’s what you can do: you can come home.”

The idea of walking back into my mom’s house after a week away, lying in my big bed there, wrestling with Bone and Chew-Toy, sitting with Alex and Neil and Steve around the breakfast table, having Dinnertime Conversation … it made me smile.

“I’d like to come home,” I said. “I’d like that a lot.”

Mom parked the car at Alex’s school’s parking lot, and together we walked into the fair.

At Glendale East Elementary School, everyone was in high spirits. The soccer field was filled with the second graders’ booths. Older kids ran around selling popcorn and cotton candy. There was even a bouncy castle. Steve, Neil, and Alex had already arrived, and they were standing at Alex’s replacement booth, which consisted of a few cardboard boxes duct taped together with a handful of quickly scrawled poems sitting on top of them. It was nothing like the real poetry castle. It was more like a condemned poetry shack. Looking at it made my stomach turn.

“Hey,” I said, bending down to address my little sister. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

Alex shook her head and hid behind Mom’s legs. I briefly wished that my genetic code did not include quite so much stubbornness.

“Just hear your sister out, Alex,” Mom said, stepping aside. “Let her say her piece.”

Alex scowled and followed me a few paces away from her booth. She was tightly clutching one of her favorite Barbies, glaring at me like I might lunge out and start tearing her doll limb from limb.

“Alex,” I said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have ruined your poetry castle. I’ll never do anything like that again.”

She pretended to ignore me, mumbling to her Barbie as she made it crawl across a nearby tree branch, clearly playing some imaginary game.

This gave me an idea.

“You know that game you play, Underwater Capture?” I asked her.

“I can’t play it anymore.” Those were the first words my sister had spoken to me since last Friday. “Because of the new couch.”

“But you know the evil sea witch in Underwater Capture?” I pressed on. “The one who gets inside the dolls’ heads and turns them all evil?”

Alex nodded once, not looking at me.

“That’s like what happened to me, Alex.”

She looked at me then, her forehead wrinkled.

“It wasn’t a real sea witch,” I explained. “It was people I know. But that’s how it felt—like all these bad thoughts were in my head, and I didn’t know they weren’t really mine. And that’s why I wrecked your castle. It wasn’t the sea witch’s fault, since I’m the one who did it. But I did it because I was listening to her too much. Does that make sense?”

I couldn’t tell if I had taken this analogy too far, or if seven-year-olds even understand analogies, but after a moment, Alex nodded. “I’m sorry you had a sea witch,” she said.

“Me, too.”

“But—” She shook her head, as if shaking herself free from feeling any sort of sympathy for me. “You ruined my poetry castle. That’s mean, Elise. That’s the meanest thing anyone has ever done to me. And I know sea witches are evil, but I don’t care why you did it. You shouldn’t have done it.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Alex. I know.”

But it was too late; Alex had already stalked off.

And after that, I didn’t know what to do. What do you do when you say sorry, but that still isn’t enough?

I walked slowly around the fair. I saw a post office and a cookie store and a booth that sold worms and caterpillars, although the second grader in charge told me they were all out of caterpillars.

I smiled at all the kids and told them what good jobs they had done. But inside, I felt like my heart was breaking. Because Mom was right: Alex’s booth would have been the best one.

The thing was, Alex’s replacement booth was no worse than half the other ones out on this field. In a week, she had thrown together something that was just about as good as what her classmates had done. Just about as good as theirs, but a fraction of how impressive she was capable of being.

Because of me, and what I had done to her.

In that moment, paused between a booth that sold papier-mâché flowers and a booth advertising mud sculptures, I knew this, suddenly but finally: I wanted to DJ my party tonight. Not to prove Char wrong, not to put Emily and her friends on the guest list, not for anything like that. Simply because Alex deserved to be the best that she could be. And I did, too.

*   *   *

After the fair was over and all the booths had been broken down, Mom and Steve took me, Alex, and Neil out for pizza.

Pizza is a rare treat in the Myers household, reserved for special occasions like winning art contests, performing the lead role in the school play, definitively triumphing over the oil industry, or making it through the most traumatic second-grade school fair in all of history.

“Let’s get it with pepperoni,” Alex said as we headed to the parking lot.

“Let’s get it with maple syrup,” Neil said.

“Let’s get it with pepperoni and maple syrup,” Alex said.

We would get it plain, and with soy cheese. We always did.

Alex and Neil rode in Steve’s car, while I traveled to Antonio’s Pizzeria with my mother.

“Mom,” I said as we left the school, “I know I’m still grounded. But—can I be a little ungrounded?”

“Tell me what that means, and I’ll tell you yes or no.”

I took a deep breath. “Can I get, like, a furlough, just for one night? Tomorrow I swear I’ll go back to being grounded. But tonight I’m … supposed to DJ a dance party. At that warehouse where Dad picked me up last night.”

Mom sighed. “I know.”

“You do?”

“Your father told me he saw it listed in the paper.” She glanced at me sideways, and my face must have conveyed my surprise, because she said dryly, “Just because we’re divorced doesn’t mean we don’t know how to exchange a civil e-mail, you know.”

“So can I?”

Her fingernails drummed against the steering wheel, and her voice was tense as she answered, “You shouldn’t be out of the house that late at night. You’re way too young to drink—”

“But I don’t drink,” I protested.

“—and I can’t have you hanging out with drunk people either. Especially not ever drunk people who are driving you somewhere.”

“I don’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

“It terrifies me to think of you wandering the streets alone at night, because you’re a sixteen-year-old girl and you’re an easy target. And I don’t want you spending your time with so many people who are so much older than you, because I worry they are going to take advantage of you, just because you’re young. I don’t think you appreciate how recklessly you’ve been acting, and how lucky you’ve been so far. I can’t let this kind of behavior go on.”

So this was it, then. The moment when my mother forbade me to go back to Start. I wanted to feel shocked, but instead I felt only sadness.

And now, what would I have?

Well, I would have Sally and Chava. And that was something worth having; at least, more worth having than I had known.

I would have the respect of Emily Wallace and company. I didn’t expect that they would ever honestly like me, but that was okay; I didn’t expect to like them either. But I also didn’t believe that they would offer to give me a makeover any time soon.

I would have Vicky and Harry, and maybe someday, if she could ever forgive me, Pippa, too. They weren’t nightlife friends. They were real-life friends.

I would have memories of when I was golden.

I would have less than I had two weeks ago. But more than I had in September.

“But,” Mom was saying, as she turned onto the street that Antonio’s was on.

“But,” I repeated, coming back to the present.

“I’m not going to tell you that you can’t go.”

I blinked. “You’re not?”

She scanned the street for a parking space. “More than anything else that I don’t want, I don’t want to keep you from doing something that you love so much. I can’t do it. It wouldn’t be fair.”

I felt tears pricking my eyes, but not the same sort of tears that I had cried last Thursday night, coming home from Start. “Thank you,” I whispered.

“One condition,” Mom said, finding a spot and backing into it. “Your father will need to drive you there and home.”

I rubbed my eyes to clear them. “You’re kidding, right? You think Dad actually wants to hang out in a warehouse nightclub until, like, three a.m.?”

“No,” she said. “In fact, I know for sure that he doesn’t. But he wants to know you’re safe. We both want to know that you’re safe, always. And if that means your father stays up until sunrise sometimes, then that’s what we’ll do.” I opened my mouth, but she said, “Don’t even try to argue, or you’re not going anywhere.”

“Okay,” I said in a small voice. “It’s a deal.”

She turned off the car and faced me. “I’m really disappointed in you, Elise.”

“I know.”

“Not just because of how you treated Alex. I really believe you’re in the process of making that right, even if it takes time. But because of how you treated me. If you want to do something like go for a walk in the middle of the night, or party at a nightclub, tell me. I know I’m your mother, but I’m a reasonable person. I think we can work these things out.”

I brushed my hair out of my face. “You can’t always make me safe,” I said. “Just by having a parent home with me every evening, or grounding me, or giving me a chaperone every time I want to go out past nightfall. That’s not how it works.”

There are dangers everywhere, I wanted to explain to her. On the school bus, in the cafeteria, at Start, inside of me. No parent—no one at all—can step in and vanquish every one of them.

“I know that,” Mom said. “But I want to always make you safe.”

We got out of the car and joined the rest of the family in line at Antonio’s. Neil can handle standing in line for roughly three seconds before he gets bored and starts roaming and twirling around poles. Alex quickly convinced him to play a game where they pretended to be lions who were being harpooned by hunters, so they started crawling on all fours, stepping on other customers’ feet. Steve said reasonable things like, “Champ, the floor’s pretty dirty. Do you really want to get dirt all over your hands?” while I pulled out my iPod and pretended like I had never seen these people before in my life.

At last we got to the front of the line. “What can I get for you?” asked the guy behind the counter.

I looked up. I knew that voice.

It was Char.

The guy taking our pizza order, the guy in a tucked-in white button-down shirt and an apron, the guy speaking to my mother right now, was Char.

When he saw me, his eyes widened. He opened then closed his mouth.

“Roooawr!” Alex shouted from underfoot.

“One plain pizza, please,” Mom said to Char, fumbling in her purse for her wallet. “With soy cheese.”

It had been just over a week since Char and I had last spoken, since he had told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. A week isn’t very much time. Weeks often go by where nothing much happens at all.

But so much had changed in this past week. Even Char, here in the fluorescent lights, with his tomato sauce–stained apron, did not look quite the same. And while a week ago losing him cut me to the bone, today I saw him and just felt sad. I was sad that Char was never going to be the person I hoped he would be.

But I was never going to be the person he hoped I would be either. And I was just fine with that.

“Do you take credit cards?” Mom asked.

“Sorry, we’re cash only,” he replied.

This wasn’t how I imagined things going. But imagination is so often no match for the absurdity, the randomness, the tragedy of reality.

“So what brings you all to Antonio’s today?” Char asked as he made change for my mother.

“Just celebrating our kids,” Mom answered. “That lion on the floor just had the best booth at the second-grade fair.”

Alex made mewing noises and crumpled to the side, like the safari hunters had successfully stabbed her. She fell onto my feet, which seemed maybe like progress, since earlier she wouldn’t even let me touch her. I thought about how funny it was that Alex’s cobbled-together poetry hut still counted as “the best” for my mother.

“And this one”—Mom put her arm around me and squeezed—“is about to be the disc jockey at the best party this town has ever seen.”

“Mom!” I hissed. I wriggled out of her embrace.

On the floor, Alex also hissed. The murdered lion had somehow turned into a snake.

“She gets easily embarrassed,” Mom told Char. “Teenagers.”

If I had one of Alex’s imaginary hunting sticks in hand, I would not have hesitated to ram it into my mother’s mouth at that moment.

“Sounds like a big night,” Char replied. He looked me straight in the eye, as he had so many times before, and I wanted to throw my arms around him just about as much as I wanted to punch him in the stomach. “Good luck.”

I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Thank you,” I said.

A bell dinged. “Pizza’s up,” Char said. He reached behind him and handed the box to my mother. “Have a nice night, folks.”

“Oh, don’t worry,” I said as we turned to go. “I will.”

Together, the Myers household walked out of there: the founders of BOO OIL, a teenage DJ, and two mountain snakes, slithering all the way out the door.

19

When my phone rang a couple hours later, I knew who it was. I knew because this was one of the only phone numbers programmed into my cell phone, which my parents had kindly given back to me at school this morning. After what had happened last night, they said they wanted to know that they could reach me.

“Hello, Amelia,” I answered.

“Elise?” she said, her voice tentative, gentle, hopeful.

And just the way she said my name sent me back, back almost ten months. I looked over to the corner of my room, like I expected to see a ghost of myself still there, back pressed up against the wall, left arm cradled up to her chest, right hand holding the phone that connected her to Amelia Kindl.

“Elise?”

“Hi, Amelia.”

“What’s going on?”

“I cut myself.”

“Oh, no! Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are your parents there? What happened?”

“I cut myself. Three times.”

“You poor thing. How?”

“With an X-Acto knife.”

“Wait. What? Elise, what did you say?”

“My dad really likes to cut out articles from the newspaper. You know, to give to people when he thinks they’d be interested. Well, mostly just me. I don’t think he cuts out stories for anyone else.”

“Elise, is your dad there with you? Is anyone there?”

“No, it’s just that’s why he has an X-Acto knife. For the newspaper.”

“Are you bleeding?”

“Yes, but it doesn’t actually hurt that much. It’s weird; it doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. When I was six years old I got mad at my mom and slammed the door, only somehow I slammed the door on my fingers. There was blood everywhere that time. It hurt a lot more than this. It was an accident, though.”

“Elise, I’m going to call 911, okay?”

“You don’t have to do that. I think it’ll be fine.”

“No, I want to do it, okay? I want to help. Can I put you on hold so I can call 911?”

“You want to help me?”

“Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Can I put you on hold for just one second?”

“Great. Since you want to help me so much: do you see me, Amelia?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Do you see me! I’ve gone to school with you every day since sixth grade. Do you understand me? Do you understand why I did this to myself? Do you see?”

“Sure, Elise, of course. Let me—”

“Then can you please explain it to me?”

“I’m calling 911 now. Help will be there soon. It will be okay.”

“But can’t you just talk to me?”

Nothing. Just silence. And then, sirens.

“Elise, are you there?” Amelia asked, her voice in my ear jolting me back to present day.

“I’m here,” I said.

“Great! Look, I’m calling to apologize about Marissa. I only found out this afternoon that she’s the one who was writing that whole blog about you, and I feel awful about it. Just awful. I shouldn’t have accused you of saying mean things about me online, because of course it wasn’t you at all, but I thought it was.

“And I shouldn’t have ever told Marissa that you called me that time in September when … well, you know. It wasn’t any of my business, I know that. I promise I only told a few people: my parents, Marissa, one or two of my other best friends. I want you to know I wasn’t spreading it all over school that you … you know, hurt yourself. I was just so panicked after you called me, and I didn’t know what to do, so I talked it through with a few close friends. I wasn’t trying to spread rumors about you or anything.”

“Amelia,” I said, “it’s fine.”

“I really am sorry about the way Marissa treated you, though,” she said. “I had no idea she was like that.”

Amelia, it occurred to me then, was not very good at reading a crowd.

“I just feel like this whole thing is my fault,” she went on. “Is there anything I can do to make it up to you?”

I thought of all the responses I would have rattled off had she asked me this same question just a couple months ago. Let me sit with you at lunch. Invite me to hang out with you on weekends. Text me sometimes. Listen to this mix I made for you. Have dinner with my family, and when that’s over, pretend to do homework in the living room with me while my sister and brother distract us, and we pretend to care, but we don’t.

But Amelia is nice. That’s all. That doesn’t make her my friend, that doesn’t make her special, and that doesn’t make her anything I want her to be. It has nothing to do with me. She’s just nice.

So I said, “Amelia, don’t worry about it. It isn’t your fault.”

“I just … when I called 911 that time … I was trying to help. And I feel like it totally backfired, you know?”

“You did the right thing, calling an ambulance,” I told her. “You didn’t know how serious it was; you weren’t there with me.” I thought about how I would have responded if someone had called me in the way that I called Amelia. How scared would I have felt? How responsible? “I would have done the same thing if I were in your position.”

“Honestly?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I would have. It’s okay, Amelia. I’m not mad at you.”

After Amelia and I hung up, I sat on my bed for a moment, my phone cupped in my hand. There was still one other person that I needed to talk to. So I lifted the phone again, and I dialed Vicky’s number.

She answered after one ring. “Where the hell have you been?”

“Grounded,” I said.

“Grounded,” Vicky repeated.

“Yeah, I … It’s a long story. I did something mean to my sister, so my mom took away my phone.”

“You could have e-mailed or something,” Vicky pointed out. “You could have found some way to let me know you were all right.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“The last time I saw you, you basically told me that you’re suicidal because nobody likes you. The next thing I knew, you’d disappeared, Pippa and Char were making out, and you weren’t talking to me for a week. I’ve been freaking out, Elise. Harry has been freaking out. And he never freaks out.”

“I’m not suicidal,” I said. I held my arm out in front of me and twisted it back and forth. Palm up. Palm down. Now you look fractured. Now you look whole.

“That’s not the story your arm told.”

“I did that a long time ago. Before I knew you or Harry or Mel, or Pippa or Char or Pete, or Start. I didn’t know then how good life could be. But now I know. And I would never do it again.”

“I think I can speak with some expertise on the issue of personally inflicted bodily harm,” Vicky said. “May I?”

“Go for it.”

“It’s not worth it. Sure, high school sucks sometimes. Some people will mess with you, whenever they want, and for no reason except that they can. But hurting yourself is giving those people all the power, and they don’t deserve it. Why would they deserve to have control over your life? Because they’re cool? Because they’re pretty? That’s completely illogical.”

“Where did you learn all this?” I asked her.

“Like I said. Lots and lots of therapy.” She paused. “Also, almost dying from malnutrition. It gave me a lot of clarity.”

“Thanks, Vicky.”

“Anyway,” Vicky said, “now that you’re alive, the second most important thing: Is the party still on for tonight? You’re ungrounded?”

“For about the next nine hours,” I replied.

“Okay, then I need to go find something to wear that isn’t a nightgown.” She paused. “One last question on the self-mutilation thing.”

“I don’t really feel like having this conversation, Vicky.”

“We won’t. Just one last question. What did Char have to say about it?”

I frowned, confused. “Nothing. I mean, he doesn’t know. Why would he?”

“Because you were hooking up,” Vicky said softly. “For weeks.”

I thought about that—the number of times he had pulled my shirt off of me, or grabbed my hands in his, kissed my shoulder. “I guess he never noticed?”

“No,” Vicky said. “I guess he wouldn’t.” She didn’t say anything more.

“Speaking of Char,” I said, “I ran into him at a pizza parlor this afternoon.”

“What did he say?” she asked. “Did he apologize?”

“No.”

“Did he beg you to give him another chance?”

“No.”

She sighed noisily. “He’s such a waste of a good haircut.”

“Hey,” I said. “Do you know Char’s real name?”

Vicky didn’t even pause. “Sure. It’s Michael. Michael Kirby. Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

We hung up after that. Then I opened my computer, and I googled “Michael Kirby.”

I wanted to know who Char really was. No more personas, no more images, no more pretending.

It was easy—so easy that I had to wonder why I had never asked Vicky for his real name before. Within ten minutes, I had a whole picture painted of Michael Kirby.

He was nineteen years old, turning twenty next week. He’d grown up in Westerly, about forty miles from here, the middle of three kids. On the high school track team, he would occasionally, but not all that often, finish in the top five in the 400-meter. He was one of eight trombone players in his high school’s marching band. I watched a video of them playing at a county fair, but I had to watch it twice before I could tell which one of the blue-uniformed trombonists was him. Michael’s dad worked in construction and his mom worked part-time as a secretary for Russell Gold, DDS, “Where Your Smile Makes Us Smile.”

In Michael’s freshman year at state college, he’d joined the college radio station and lived in Hutton Dorm. There was a photo of him wearing pajama pants at a study break, with a caption reading, Michael’s special snack: Chex Mix! Now in his second year, he was only a part-time student; he spent the rest of the time as a server at Antonio’s Pizzeria. He maintained Antonio’s Web site, and when I clicked the “contact us” button at the bottom of the page, it opened an e-mail addressed to [email protected].

That was Char. It was all laid out for me across the Internet. It was a simple portrait of a person, like a million other people, and I felt the magic of Char float off into the air, as if I’d blown on a pile of dust.

But you know better than anyone how the Internet sees everything and nothing, all at the same time.

After I had learned all I cared to learn about Michael Kirby, I looked up my own name.

Why do you do this? Why do you want to see what other people say you are?

I suppose it’s because old habits die hard.

The first two search results were the same as always. Elise Dembowski, MD. Elise Dembowski Tampa Florida school superintendent.

But the third result was different. Elise Dembowski suicide had fallen down on the list. The third thing that came up when I typed in my own name was Elise Dembowski DJ.

I stared at my computer screen for a long moment, and I smiled. Then I closed my laptop and got ready for Start.