This Song Will Save Your Life

“How?” I asked.

“What do you mean, ‘how’? The same way anyone knows anything. I ask. People tell me stuff.”

“Well.” I cleared my throat. “Thank you, Emily. That was really … like, surprisingly kind of you. I appreciate it.”

“You’re probably wondering what I want in exchange,” Emily said, immediately undermining any credit I had given her for surprising kindness.

“Now I am.” I shut my eyes for a moment. If there’s one thing I never asked for, it was to sell my soul to Emily Wallace.

Emily turned her head to glance around, as if to make sure no one was there to hear her. Then she leaned in and said in a low voice, “I want to go to your party tonight. You know, the one that was listed in the paper. Also, Petra’s coming. And Ashley. Do not get us kicked out again. That is not acceptable.”

Emily flashed me her pearly white teen-model smile. If she’d been trying to sell me toothpaste, I might have even bought it.

I considered telling her that I didn’t even know if I was going to my party tonight—didn’t know if I wanted to, didn’t know if I was allowed—but that was, frankly, none of Emily’s business. “That’s it?” I asked.

She pursed her lips, like it hadn’t occurred to her that she might wrangle yet another payment out of me from this one good deed and she wanted to make sure she used it wisely. At last she asked, “So did you actually try to kill yourself? Or did that weird bitch just make up the whole thing?”

Silently, I held up my left arm, wrist facing Emily. She crossed her arms and kept her lips squished together as she examined me for a moment, sizing up those three perfect scars. Finally, she said, “You know that you’re supposed to cut down to kill yourself, right? You did it wrong.”

I looked at Emily and thought about what would have happened if I’d cut the other way. Or what wouldn’t have happened. Char wouldn’t have broken up with me. Alex wouldn’t be mad at me. Pippa wouldn’t hate me.

And I would never have met Vicky. I would never have had my first kiss. I would never have worn rhinestone pumps. I would never have heard Big Audio Dynamite. I would never have discovered Start. I would never have known I could be a DJ.

Emily Wallace didn’t know what she was talking about. She never had.

You did it wrong, she said.

“No,” I said to her. “I didn’t.” Then my mother’s car pulled up in front of the school, and I turned my back on Emily, and I walked away.

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 Di

“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 stubbor

“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.