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

demonstrated.
    “Huh.” I looked at the pillows. They did have some dents and wrinkles that could possibly be mistaken for eyes and a mouth. “Good point, Neil.”
    “ I love that there’s this hole between these two cushions and it’s the perfect place to put my Barbies when they’ve been captured by the evil sea witch because it looks just like a whirlpool. And then the evil sea witch turns them all evil, too, because she gets inside their heads and they can’t think their own thoughts anymore, they can only follow her evil commands.”
    I looked silently at Alex as she slid her arm in and out of the gap between couch cushions. I used to play make-believe games like that when I was her age, with the same hole on this same couch.
    “You shouldn’t play that game, Alex,” I said finally.
    “What? Underwater Capture?” she asked.
    “Yeah. Other kids don’t play games like that.”
    “Yes, they do,” she said, and even her eyes reminded me of myself, gray-blue and too big for her face.
    “They don’t. They play games with other kids. Like School. Or House. Or soccer.”
    “I hate soccer,” Alex said.
    “I know. I hate soccer, too. But you should play it anyway.”
    “Elise?” Neil had lain down on the couch and was resting his head on my lap. It was past his school-night bedtime, but my mom and Steve have never been ones to interrupt a sit-in. “Elise, it’s your turn to say a thing you love about the couch.”
    “I love…” I absentmindedly rubbed my hand across the ragged, stained fabric. I supported young activists, but Mom was right; this couch was a piece of shit. “I love that this couch has never judged me.”
    “Yeah,” Neil agreed sleepily.
    “Yeah,” said Alex. “Good couches don’t do that.”
    I sat there and did my American Lit reading until both of them fell asleep. Then Mom and Steve came in and picked them up to carry them upstairs to their bedrooms.
    “You realize this is a sit-in, right?” I asked. “That means you two are scabs.”
    “It was a sit-in,” Mom said, wrapping her arms around Neil. “Now it’s just a sleep-in.” She kissed me on the top of my head. “Good night, Elise. Don’t stay up too late.”
    I waited for a while after the rest of my family went upstairs. Then, once all was silent and dark, I put on my sneakers and I snuck out of the house.
    This is something that I started to do after I cut myself. Not right away; for the first few months, my parents were so freaked out that they basically kept me under house arrest. But half a year later, we were back to normal. It’s not like they forgot that their daughter had torn up her wrist with an X-Acto knife. I don’t think you can forget something like that. I just don’t think you can think about it every day without driving yourself crazy.
    So in March, as spring was starting to peek through the cold, I began to walk at night. I’d wait until midnight or so, once everyone in the house was asleep, and then I’d put on my shoes, grab my iPod, and head out into the night.
    It’s surprisingly easy to sneak out of my house. It’s an old building, built by some rich merchant family in the 1800s, so it doesn’t have a normal house layout. Mom and Steve’s bedroom is on the third floor, Neil’s and Alex’s are on the second, and I alone live on the first floor, in what had once been the maid’s quarters. If I were a different sort of person, I could have taken advantage of this situation to sneak out to something cool. Like keg parties. (I assumed some kids in my town had keg parties, though maybe I only got that idea from movies.) But, since I was just me, I just snuck out to walk alone.
    I never knew how many miles I traveled. Something about that first day, when I walked five miles home from school, made me realize: five miles is nothing. So now I wandered around town, sometimes just for half an hour, sometimes until the sun was starting to rise, however long it took for me to get tired. No one