Leila Sales: This Song Will Save Your Life

I thought all my clothes were fine. I liked them, even. They made a statement. The Indian sari that I had tailored into a summer dress. The Ramones shirt I got at a thrift store on Thayer Street, so threadbare that it just had to be an authentic relic of the seventies. The white boots with unicorns printed on them because, even though I’m fifteen, I still think the unicorn would be the world’s greatest animal.

But that is the problem with me. That, right there. Not just that I owned these clothes but that I liked them. That after ten weeks of learning what real people did, I still liked my wrong, wrong clothes.

So I threw my wrong, wrong clothes into garbage bags and tied them shut as tight as I could, as if my unicorn boots might try to stage an escape. I hid the bags in the attic of my mom’s house. Then I went on a shopping spree at Target for every knockoff Seventeen -style garment that I could find. Even then, the total wound up being way more than I had ever spent on clothes in any one of my thrift-store trips. It made me sick to look at the receipt.

But can you put a price on happiness? Really, if that’s what it costs to make you glad to be yourself, then isn’t it worth it?

On the first day of sophomore year, a Thursday, I sprang out of bed at six a.m. It takes time to make yourself look like a cool person. You can’t just roll out of bed looking cool, or at least I can’t.

So I got up. I washed and conditioned my hair. I shaved my legs, which is something I didn’t know you were supposed to do until an ill-fated all-class pool party at the end of eighth grade. I put on my first-day-of-school outfit, which I had tried on a zillion times already: loafers, fitted jeans, a T-shirt without any writing or patterns on it, a headband. Headbands are back, you know. I read it in a magazine.

“I’m going to school,” I announced to Dad.

He blinked at me over his newspaper. “No breakfast?”

“No breakfast.” My stomach felt tight and jittery; breakfast was the last thing I wanted.

Dad’s gaze drifted to the table, which was piled high with bread rolls, jam, bananas, milk, a pitcher of orange juice, and boxes of cereal that he had obviously set out for me. “You want breakfast like a monkey?”

“Dad, please.” I never have to go through this routine at my mom’s house.

He picked up a banana. “What do monkeys say?”

When I was a kid, I was really into bananas. I still like them, but when I was in elementary school I basically subsisted on them. My dad thought it was hilarious to make me ask for them by scratching at my armpits, jumping up and down, and saying, “Ooh ooh ahh ahh.” You know. Like a monkey. So I thought it was hilarious as well. Anything that was proven to make my dad laugh made me laugh, too.

Sometime during middle school, it occurred to me that the monkey act might be stupid. But my dad never got over it.

“Ooh ooh ahh ahh?” He tossed the banana from hand to hand.

“I have to go, Dad.” I opened the door.

“All right, kiddo. Knock ’em dead.” He put down the banana and stood up to give me a hug. “You look great.”

And I guess that should have been a warning sign, too, because dads do not have the same taste as teenagers in what looks great.

I walked to the corner to wait for the school bus. Usually I’m running to catch the bus just before it pulls away because I’m cherishing every last moment in my house, where it’s safe, before I have to go face the next eight hours.

But that morning, I made it to the bus stop with minutes to spare. I’m never early to anything, so I didn’t know what to do with myself. I watched cars driving past and people coming out of their duplexes in business suits, off to work. I fought the pounding urge to put on my headphones. All I wanted was to listen to music, but wearing headphones makes you look cut off from the rest of the world, antisocial. I wasn’t going to be antisocial this year. I was decidedly pro-social.

A few other kids showed up at the bus stop, too, but none of them spoke to me. It was so early, though. Who wants to have a conversation so early in the morning?

The school bus finally pulled up, and we all got on. I did not sit in the front. The front is where the losers sit, and I was not a loser anymore. Instead I sat in the middle of the bus, which is a relatively cool place to sit, even though I didn’t feel cool about it. I felt panicked and nauseated about it, but I did it anyway. The bus drove off, while I sat on the peeling olive-green upholstery, taking deep breaths and trying not to think about what happened the other time I sat in the middle of the school bus.

It was last April, and for whatever reason I wasn’t sitting in the very first row, like usual. Chuck Boening and Jordan DiCecca suddenly sat down next to me, and I had been so excited, even though I had to press my body against the window to make room for them both.

It’s not like I was so excited because they are so hot, even though they are. It was just because they were talking to me, looking at me, like I was a real person. They were asking me what I was listening to on my iPod. They seemed genuinely interested. And I lost my head.

“I always see you with your headphones on,” Jordan said, leaning in close, and that was flattering, that anyone cared about me enough to recognize that I always did something.

“Yes,” I said, and did not elaborate that I always had my headphones on so I wouldn’t always have to hear the world around me.

“What are you listening to?” Chuck asked.

“The Cure,” I said.

Jordan nodded. “Oh, cool. I like them.”

And that was exciting, too, that this suntanned soccer champ and I liked the same eighties goth band. I believe that a person’s taste in music tells you a lot about them. In some cases, it tells you everything you need to know. I thought, in that moment, that if Jordan liked the Cure, then he wasn’t the cookie-cutter preppy boy I’d always assumed. And I imagined that he thought, in that moment, that if I liked the Cure, then I wasn’t the tragic loser he had always assumed. We were both more than our labels, and maybe we could be friends and go to concerts together.

So when Jordan went on to say, “Let me see,” I handed him my iPod.

Why? Why did I believe he had to see my iPod to know what I was listening to? I told you, it’s the Cure! You want to know more, I’ll tell you the title of the song! You want to know more, I’ll tell you how many minutes and seconds into it I am! But shouldn’t I have wondered why he needed to actually hold my iPod?

I handed it to him, and he grabbed it and ran off to the back of the bus with it, and with Chuck, and with everyone else on the bus cheering them on.

Was it really everyone else on the bus? Or was that just how I recalled it now, five months later? Some people on that bus must have had something else going on in their lives. Some girl must have recently broken up with her boyfriend. Someone must have been worrying about his bio test. Really, could every single person on that bus have just been caught up in the thrill of seeing my iPod stolen? Really?

It seemed like it, yes.

So what do you think I did? Did I go charging down the aisle of that bus, eyes ablaze, and demand that Jordan and Chuck return my iPod, because it did not belong to them, because they did not deserve to listen to the Cure under any circumstances, let alone under these? Did I use my righteous indignation to reclaim my iPod, and did I emerge from this struggle triumphant, with everyone else on the bus now cheering for me ?

No. Instead, I let them run to the back of the bus with my iPod. I let them go. And then I leaned my head against the window and I cried.