Leila Sales: This Song Will Save Your Life

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.

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.