This Song Will Save Your Life Read Online Free PDF

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.
    Mom and Steve were silent, waiting for my answer. I stabbed my fork into my quinoa salad, then realized that stabbing probably made me look violent. “No,” I said. “I wouldn’t kill anyone.”
    We’ve been over this before. Whether or not I would kill anyone, I mean. No, I wouldn’t.
    I think that’s a boy thing anyway. Or, I don’t know, not necessarily just boys, but people who aren’t like me. I may hate Lizzie Reardon and Chuck Boening and now Amelia Kindl most of all, but I would never try to hurt them directly. I wanted to hurt myself. I blamed them, yes, but I blamed myself more.
    After dinner, I joined Alex and Neil in the living room. We sat purposefully on the couch and took turns saying what we loved about it.
    “I love that the pillows look kind of like faces so you can hold them up and make them talk to each other,” said Neil. He held up two couch pillows and