This Song Will Save Your Life

13

When I got to our lunch table on Tuesday, Sally and Chava were already seated. With some guy. Seriously. Sally and Chava knew a guy, apparently. His hair was dyed slime green, he had a fake septum piercing, and his face was riddled with acne scars.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not blaming anyone for having pimples. At this particular lunchtime, I myself had one massive pimple on my chin and one that looked kind of like a mini unicorn horn right in the center of my forehead. These things can’t be helped. But here’s what can be helped: removing your fake nose ring and using it to more effectively pick at your pimples while sitting at a lunch table with Sally and Chava. Which is what this guy was doing.

Nonetheless, he was a guy.

I sat down. “Hello, friends.”

“Elise!” Sally cried in delighted surprise. “You’re just the person I wanted to see.”

“Sure,” I said.

“This is Russell,” Sally went on. She reached out her arm as if to put it around him, but then she seemed to think better of it and just pointed instead.

“Hi,” Russell wheezed out around a mouthful of his burger.

Chava started to laugh cheerily. I stared at her. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s just that Russell is so clever!”

I unwrapped my peanut butter sandwich.

“Why don’t you tell Elise that fu

As Russell launched into a description of this one time when his online role-playing game turned particularly violent and he had to resort to inhumane tactics to save the day, I let my attention wander. As I gazed into the distance, who did I see walking toward my table but Emily Wallace. She led a group of five beautiful people. Her hair swished with every step she took, and she carried her books in a gleaming leather shoulder bag.

This was one of the other rules that started at some point, maybe around eighth grade. It turned out that it wasn’t cool to carry your school supplies in a backpack. I didn’t know that it wasn’t cool to have a backpack. It used to be cool, I think. Even after Lizzie Reardon told me not to, I still kept using my backpack. Because textbooks are heavy. Do girls like Emily Wallace never ache from the weight of all those books?

I could hear Emily’s high-pitched voice float above the din of the cafeteria. “Yeah, we had so much fun,” she was telling her minions. “It was way overpriced, though. Like, six dollars for a hard lemonade? But these college guys fully offered to buy us drinks. We left kinda early, though. Petra’s mom would have lost it if we’d stayed out any later. I mean, it was a Thursday.”

“Hey!” I heard Petra object.

“The bouncer was kinda weird, though. I mean, he…”

And at that moment, Emily’s eyes met mine. I resisted the urge to look away, to play ostrich. Instead I stared right back at her, and I tried to send her this message through my eyes: Don’t you dare talk about Mel like you know him.

Emily’s voice faltered. She blinked and looked away. Then she made an abrupt turn and led her posse down an aisle toward their table in the center of the room, away from me.

I had never seen anything like it.

“So do you want to?” Russell was asking, and it took me a moment to come back to earth and realize he was speaking to me.

“Do I want to what?” I asked.

He coughed a number of times, his hacking getting louder and louder until I half expected him to expel an owl pellet. Sally flinched away, like he might be contagious. At last, Russell coughed out, “Do you want to go to the summer formal with me?”

Chava clapped her hands delightedly. She is a sucker for romance.

“Me?” I asked.

Russell nodded a bunch and slurped down his Coke, which seemed to help with the coughing.

“Do you even know my name?”

He nodded again, less vigorously.

The Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal is a relatively new addition to the Glendale High social calendar. It used to be that there was only one formal dance at the end of the year, and that was prom. Obviously. Only juniors, seniors, and their dates are allowed to go to prom, so this led to some seriously immoral and occasionally illicit maneuvering on the part of lower classmen trying to score tickets. Two years before I started at Glendale High, some sophomore girl apparently offered to tell everyone that she had given a senior guy a blow job in exchange for him agreeing to take her to prom as his date.

At this point, the school administration must have realized that they desperately needed an occasion for freshmen and sophomores to spend their money on; thus, the Freshman/Sophomore Summer Formal was born. It’s now a very big deal among the community of people who care about school dances, and almost no one bothers to bribe or blackmail her way into actual prom anymore.

I breathed out, slowly. “Thank you for asking me, Russell,” I said, “but I’m afraid I already have plans that night, so I won’t be able to make it.”

“You don’t even know what night the formal is,” Sally pointed out.

This was true.

“It’s in two weeks,” Chava piped up.

“Two weeks from Saturday,” Sally said.

I nodded. “I have plans.”

Russell didn’t seem terribly devastated. He didn’t say anything like, “Don’t leave me, my love!” He said, to Sally, “Can I go now?”

She shrugged. He took off, leaving his burger wrapper and soda cup behind.

“Wow, Elise.” Sally turned on me. “You really are a snob, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?” I blinked.

“All your journal entries about how nobody at this school is good enough for you. I was always like, ‘Oh, she can’t really mean that.’ But you do mean that.”

“Sally, what are you talking about? Who do I think I am better than?”

“Russell!”

“I don’t know Russell. Where did you even find him?”

“He’s a freshman,” Chava said.

“So what was he doing here?” I asked.

“He wanted to ask you to the formal,” Chava explained.

Suddenly it all became clear to me. “You wanted him to ask me to the formal.”

Silence from my friends.

“You made this poor freshman come over here and ask me out. Why? Just so you’ll have company at the dance, Sally, so you won’t have to stand there alone like always?”

“No!” Chava sounded shocked.

“For your information,” Sally snapped, “I won’t be alone. Larry Kapur asked me to be his date.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know how to respond to this. “Um, that’s great, Sally.”

“I just thought it might be fun for us to double-date,” she said. “Share a limo or something. You know, like friends do.”

“Plus,” Chava said, “you’re always talking about how no boys ever like you and how lonely you are.”

“I’m not,” I said, flashing back to last Thursday night, Char’s mouth on mine, our bodies pressed together—

“You know, in your journal,” Chava said. “We didn’t want you to be sad anymore. That’s all. So that’s why we encouraged Russell to ask you to the dance.”

“Encouraged,” Sally repeated.

“We didn’t say he had to. We just wanted you to know that boys do like you. Like Russell.”

I thought of Char’s breath in my ear, his tongue on my neck, his hands on my stomach.

“Thank you,” I said. I shook my head, like I was trying to shake Char right out of my mind. “That’s really sweet of you guys.”

And it was, actually. That was the surprising thing of it. I’d assumed Sally and Chava had some malicious or at least self-serving reason for “encouraging” Russell to ask me out, because in my experience, when my classmates acted like they were trying to help me, they were usually just trying to help themselves. But all my DJing had taught me something about reading a crowd. And when I read Sally and Chava right now, all I saw in them was exactly what they claimed: they wanted me to be happy.