This Song Will Save Your Life by Sales Leila

Author:Sales, Leila [Sales, Leila]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Published: 2013-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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