Текст книги "This Song Will Save Your Life"

Автор книги: Leila Sales

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2

Does this sound ridiculous and dramatic, to decide in the middle of a totally average school day that this life has gone on for long enough? Was I overreacting? Well, I’m sorry, but that is what I decided. You can’t tell me my feelings are overwrought or absurd. You don’t know. They are my feelings.

I had considered suicide before, but it seemed so played out, so classic angsty teen crying out for attention, that I had never done anything about it. Today I was going to do something about it.

But I want you to know, it wasn’t because I had to pick up other people’s trash that I decided my life wasn’t worth living anymore. It wasn’t because of that. It was because of everything.

I left school right then and walked the five miles home, having no other mode of transportation. The weather was warm and breezy, and the sun shone brightly overhead. I listened to my iPod and thought about how there are good things in life, like fresh air and sun and music. Basically anything that doesn’t involve other people. And it would be sad to leave all that behind forever, to never again see a cloud moving across the sky, to never again listen to the Stone Roses on my iPod as I walked in the sunshine. But at this point, having blown off half of my first day of sophomore year, I felt like I had pretty well committed myself to the suicide thing.

I came home to an empty house. My father works in a music store, and he wouldn’t be home until six p.m. That gave me a few hours to address some logistical questions.

First, how to die? My dad doesn’t own a gun, and even if he did I wouldn’t know how to shoot it, and even if I did I wouldn’t, since I am staunchly pro–gun control. I wasn’t going to hang myself because that seemed to require a lot of engineering skills that I didn’t have. And maybe I could ask the Internet “how do I make a noose,” but that creeped me out. I figured that if it creeped me out that much, I probably didn’t want to do it.

I’d once heard a rumor about a girl in New York City who tried to step off the roof of her apartment building and fall to her death. I guess that might work in New York City, but my dad’s apartment building is only two stories tall, so I discounted that idea as well.

I could overdose on pills, but I remembered, as I went through the bathroom cabinets, that my dad doesn’t keep many pills in the house. Dad is very into holistic remedies, and I don’t think you can overdose on echinacea and neti pots. I could go to the drugstore and buy more pills, but that would take another half hour at least, and I wanted to get cracking. Furthermore, if I tried to overdose but didn’t succeed, then I would run the risk of living, but being severely brain damaged. I am already socially disabled; I don’t need to be mentally disabled on top of that.

So I settled on cutting myself until I bled to death. I wandered around the house, looking for something sharp enough to kill me. I know, I know: razor blades. But do you keep razor blades just lying around your house? Why? Are you doing a lot of woodworking projects?

I found my dad’s X-Acto knife in the kitchen, buried under the front section of yesterday’s newspaper. That’s what my dad uses his X-Acto for: cutting out interesting articles without messing up the rest of the paper in the process. I picked up his X-Acto, and for some reason this overwhelmed me with sadness, but I didn’t know whether I was feeling sad about my father’s pathetic, unnecessary commitment to keeping his newspapers in good condition or whether I felt sad because I knew that, once I was dead, he would never want to cut articles out of the newspaper again.

I took the X-Acto blade upstairs to my room, where I sat down at my computer to make a suicide playlist. I didn’t really want to die to MP3s. I wanted to die to records. The sound quality is better. But each side of a record lasts for only about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t handle the idea of slipping out of consciousness for the very last time to the click … click … click … of a record that had reached the end and needed to be flipped over.

So I made a long playlist of songs that I thought I wouldn’t mind dying to. It wasn’t like making a road-trip playlist or a running playlist—I had never killed myself before, so I had no idea what I would want to listen to when it was too late for me to skip to the next song. Like, maybe when you’re dying, you actually want to hear something really upbeat. Maybe when the moment came, I’d want to die to ABBA.

I spent a long time tweaking the playlist, sometimes listening to songs all the way through because I knew I would never hear them again. My playlist wound up being two hours long because I didn’t know how long this would take, and I didn’t want to run out of music and die in silence.

Again, I knew I could look this up. How long does it take between the time you cut yourself and the time you die? The Internet would know. But I wouldn’t ask, because that made everything seem so clichéd. Another teenage suicide attempt, another cry for attention. It’s all been done before.

Only mine wasn’t going to be a cry for attention. Mine was going to be punishment. Punishment for Jordan DiCecca and Lizzie Reardon and those girls at lunch and everyone who had ever tortured me or turned their backs while I was tortured. And punishment for myself, too, of course. Punishment for being wrong.

But when I started thinking about punishment, I realized that I really wanted to leave a note, explaining why I had done it. What if Dad found me dead, and no one ever knew why, so none of the right people ever blamed themselves? Then what would be the point?

But a note was going to take me a while to write. I couldn’t just scribble off something like, “Goodbye, cruel world,” and stab myself through the heart. I wanted to explain it all, so everyone understood I wasn’t being crazy and melodramatic. I wanted to start from the beginning, so they understood why I did this. I wanted to name names.

And as I thought more about Dad finding my dead body and suicide note, I realized also that this would make things even worse between him and Mom. I knew exactly how she was, and she would blame him for my death, even though it wasn’t his fault. She would blame him because I was at his house, and she blamed him for everything that happened to me at his house, even things he couldn’t control, like the time I was staying with him and got strep throat.

So, okay. Look. This was getting complicated. I wanted to die, but I wanted to make sure Dad didn’t get in trouble for it, and I wanted to make sure all those bitches at school did get in trouble for it, and this was going to require a detailed suicide note and also probably a location that wasn’t Dad’s house. Plus I had spent so long on my playlist that it was already nearly five o’clock. So, realistically, this wasn’t a great day for dying. Which was a disappointment, but also sort of a relief.

Since I already had the X-Acto knife, though, and I already had the playlist, I decided to go into the bathroom to practice a little. To practice cutting myself, I mean. Just a little, so that when the time came to do it for real, it wouldn’t be scary. It would just be the logical next step.

I brought my laptop into the bathroom with me. I set it down on the floor and turned on “Hallelujah,” the Jeff Buckley version. I pulled a bottle of rubbing alcohol out of the cabinet and poured it over the X-Acto, to sterilize the blade. I wanted to hurt myself, yes, but I didn’t want to get an infection, too.

I sat down on the lid of the toilet. I held the X-Acto blade to the inside of my left arm. I stood up, walked out of the bathroom and back to my bedroom, and I picked up my teddy bear from my unmade bed. I carried him back down the hall to the bathroom, locked the door behind me, sat back down on the toilet seat, put my teddy in my lap, and started the song over from the beginning.

I again placed the X-Acto against the inside of my left forearm, but this time I pressed down. I drew a line straight across.

It didn’t hurt. It just felt numb.

So I cut a second line, just a little bit closer to my wrist. That didn’t hurt either. So I pressed down harder the third time, and I held it.

That hurt.

For a moment, I watched the blood bubble out of those thin slits through my arm. In Bio last year, I learned that blood is actually a dark maroon when it’s inside your body. It’s the exposure to oxygen that turns it bright red. And there must have been a lot of oxygen in my bathroom, because that blood was bright, bright red.

I stood up and turned the sink faucet on high. I held my arm under it to wash away the blood, but more blood kept coming out and kept coming out. Every time I tried to take it out from under the faucet, it just started bleeding harder.

You need to apply pressure in this sort of situation. Everyone knows that. So I kept my left arm still under the spray of the faucet while, with my right hand, I rooted around in the medicine cabinet for a bandage that would be big enough to cover my forearm. I finally found one wedged behind the bottles of rose hips and garlic pills.

I took my arm out from the sink and immediately pressed the bandage onto it. So that was good. That looked fine. I would wear long-sleeved shirts for a couple days and no one would ever know.

I grabbed my laptop in my right hand and my teddy in my left, and I unlocked the bathroom door and walked back to my bedroom. “Hallelujah” was just drawing to a close. That hadn’t taken long at all. I felt like I had been in the bathroom forever, but “Hallelujah” isn’t that long of a song.

I sat down at my desk and pulled out the Glendale High directory. It was in pristine condition. Because I never called anyone. Who would I have called?

I looked down at my arms, resting on my desk. Both of my hands were shaking. And blood was starting to seep through the bandage, dyeing it from gauzy white to bruised-apple red.

I stood up from my desk chair and carried my teddy bear and school directory into the corner of my room. I sat on the floor, pressing my back flush against the wall, all the way from my head to the base of my spine.

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.

“Girl over there!” she yelled again. “You’re going in the wrong direction!”

I stopped when she said that. For some reason, this statement really threw me. I wasn’t going anywhere, so how could I be going in the wrong direction?

“Come here!” she called.

I obey direct orders. That’s why I cleaned up a full lunchroom table, that’s why I gave Jordan my iPod, and that’s why I crossed the street now. Because someone told me to.

The two girls were leaning against a graffitied wall. The one who had shouted was a little taller than me, heavyset, and smoking a cigarette. She wore a black-and-white polka-dot dress with a bright yellow cardigan, and she had feathers in her hair.

“Start’s in there,” she said, cocking her finger at the building behind her.

This was like I’m sending Wrappers to the Gallos all over again. Start’s in there. Why did people always have to speak in code?

“Okay,” I said.

“Have you been here before?” she asked me.

I shrugged in a way that probably meant yes, but could have meant no.

“We haven’t been here since it was over in Pawtucket,” the polka-dot-dress girl went on, gesturing west with her cigarette, even though Pawtucket was roughly nine miles north of where we stood now. Also, how could they not have been somewhere since it was somewhere else? This whole thing was very Alice in Wonderland.

“Do you want a cigarette?” she offered me.

“No, thank you,” I said, then added, “I don’t smoke.”

She nodded. “That’s good. These can kill you.” She took a long drag on her cigarette, as if to prove the point.

Her friend spoke up for the first time. She was petite and had a blond pixie haircut. She reminded me a little of a foal, all gangly legs and round eyes. She spoke with an accent that made her words just a little hard to understand as she said, “Vicks, it sounds like you were offering her a cigarette because you were trying to kill her.”

The first girl’s mouth dropped open in faux horror, her bright red lipstick forming a big O. “I was being generous.”

The friend shrugged her bony shoulders. “Well, she doesn’t know us. For all she knows, you were trying to infect her with cancer.” She adjusted her short, fringed leather jacket over her gold sequined dress.

“You’re from England?” I asked the skinny friend, dissecting her accent.

“Originally,” she said. “I grew up in Manchester.”

“Manchester!” I exclaimed.

“You’ve been there?” She sounded surprised.

“No, but I’ve always wanted to go.”

“Don’t. Manchester is a shithole,” she said decisively. “The whole town looks like this.” She swung her arm out to encompass the blank street of warehouses.

“The Smiths are from Manchester, though,” I said.

“And New Order,” she added, sounding proud. “And Oasis.”

“Okay, blah blah, we get it, all the world’s greatest bands come from your hometown,” the polka-dot-dress girl threw in. “Thanks for rubbing it in.”

“Only because it’s such a shithole,” the British girl said. “People have to create some kind of art so they have something to think about other than their shitty lives.”

“Yeah, but Glendale’s a shithole, too, and how many world-class musicians come from here?” countered her friend.

“You. For example.”

The polka-dot-dress girl snorted and stubbed out her cigarette on the wall. “Yeah, right. Come on, let’s go back in before I smoke another one and give us all cancer.”

They walked a few feet away from me, then turned around when they noticed I wasn’t with them. “Are you coming or what?” demanded the polka-dot-dress girl.

And something about feeling like I was in a dream, or a Lewis Carroll hallucination, made me feel okay about answering, “I’m coming.”

I scampered after them as they turned a corner, down a small alleyway between warehouses. I was probably about to get kidnapped. But, honestly, I would have rather been kidnapped by these girls than remained un-kidnapped among my classmates. If getting kidnapped meant a trip to Manchester, I was all for it.

“What’s your name anyway?” the bigger girl called over her shoulder.

“Elise.”

She turned around to look me up and down. “Like the Cure song?”

“Yes,” I said.

She nodded her approval. “This skinny bitch here is Pippa. I’m Vicky, short for Victoria, of course.”

“Like the Kinks song?” I blurted out. Then I blushed. That sounded dumb coming out of my mouth. I sounded overeager, juvenile. Uncool.

But she gave me a broad, beaming smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Like the Kinks song.”

At the end of the alleyway stood a large black man with a shaved head and pierced ears, guarding a closed door.

“Hi, Mel,” chirped Vicky.

“Heya, Mel,” said Pippa, standing on tiptoe to kiss him on both cheeks.

“Who’s this?” he said gruffly. He squinted down at me.

“Elise,” I said. I stuck out my hand to shake his, but he kept his firm arms crossed over his chest.

“You got ID?” he asked.

All I had was my iPod. “Not on me,” I answered. “But I promise my name is Elise.”

“She’s twenty-one today,” Vicky butted in. “Isn’t that exciting? Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Elise—”

“If this girl’s twenty-one, then so am I,” Mel said with an eye roll.

“You mean you’re not twenty-one?” Vicky feigned surprise. “I swear, Mel, you can’t be any older than that. Your skin is baby-soft.”

The corners of Mel’s mouth twitched like he was fighting a smile. “I’m old enough to be your father, Vicks.”

“No way!” Vicky said. “My dad is old. You know that magazine old people get?”

“No,” said Mel.

“Well, there’s a magazine, and my dad has been getting it since I was six years old. Plus he goes to bed every night at nine. Mel, you have never been in bed at nine.”

Mel shrugged his broad shoulders. “Age is more than just a number. It’s a lifestyle.”

“So what you’re telling me here,” Vicky said, “is that Elise really is twenty-one, even if she doesn’t have the ID to prove it.”

Mel groaned and began to reply, but Pippa stepped forward. “Come on, Mel,” she said quietly, and I couldn’t tell what it was, if it was her posture, or the expression on her face, or her voice, or the halting way she touched her tiny fingers to her hair, but I couldn’t imagine anyone in the world saying no to her. “Be a gentleman. Elise is with us.”