This Song Will Save Your Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.

 
    3
     
    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