Free This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales Page B

over and over, even though I didn’t look at her. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore, so I put on my iPod headphones, but I could still feel her sighing.
    I was prepared to ignore Amelia for the entirety of fourth period, but Amelia, apparently, had other ideas, and eventually she tapped me on the shoulder.
    I took off my headphones and turned around. “Yes, Amelia?”
    “Why are you doing this to me?” she demanded.
    I stared at her. The last conversation that Amelia and I had had was on the phone, the night after the first day of school. Over the past seven and a half months, I had imagined her saying many things to me. All of them started with sorry . Sorry I made you clean up our lunch table and possibly drove you to self-mutilation would have worked. Sorry I freaked out and told 911 that you tried to kill yourself also would have done the trick. Sorry I couldn’t be the friend that you wanted me to be was what I was really holding out for. Why are you doing this to me? was not actually an option.
    “Why am I doing what to you?” I asked.
    “Acting like I’m some sort of criminal ,” Amelia replied.
    “I’m not,” I said.
    Amelia played with the ends of her honey-brown hair and adjusted her glasses on the bridge of her nose. She took a deep breath and went on. “You’ve spent the entire year ignoring me or glaring at me like I’m a serial killer.”
    I thought, for the zillionth time, about what a nice girl Amelia was. She was a nice girl with a nice life, so people were nice to her. In Amelia’s world, nobody ever ignores you or glares at you just for kicks.
    If Amelia had to be me for even one day, I think she would just fall to pieces.
    “And, you know, if that’s how you want to act, well, that’s fine. But now this ?” she said. “Don’t do this to me, Elise.”
    “I don’t know what this is,” I told her honestly.
    “Oh, please.” Her voice cracked. I had no idea what I’d done to hurt her. Part of me felt bad about it, whatever it was, but then another part of me said, very smugly, Good . She cleared her throat and continued, “If you want to give me mean looks all through English class and cross to the other side of the hallway whenever you see me coming, that’s, you know, whatever. But stop spreading rumors about me.”
    “I’m not spreading rumors about you,” I said, as the line moved forward. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. But I don’t actually care. Because you, Amelia … you betrayed me.”
    I thought that this might be it—this might be the moment when Amelia said sorry—but instead she said, “That’s not true. We weren’t even friends; I can’t have betrayed you. I saved your life.”
    I flashed back in time, and all of a sudden it was like I was right back in my bedroom in my dad’s house, “Hallelujah” playing on my computer, my left arm bandaged and pulled in close to my chest as I dialed Amelia’s phone number for the first and only time in my life.
    I saved your life, she had said, and she kept looking at me now, blinking her soft brown eyes nervously.
    “No,” I told her. “You didn’t.”
    Then I went in to get scoliosis-tested, and it turns out I don’t have scoliosis, so that was one success. But also I wasn’t wearing a bra today, which Lizzie Reardon noticed as I was putting my shirt back on after the scoliosis test, so by the end of the day, everyone at school had heard that I was probably a lesbian. Because if there’s one thing we know about lesbians, it’s that none of them wear bras.
    Anyway. I’ve had worse days in my life. But not many.
    I needed Start that night more than I’d ever needed anything. I needed excruciatingly loud music, I needed strangers, I needed darkness.
    It felt like it took my family forever to fall asleep that night. Neil woke up crying from a nightmare, and then right when I was about to leave the house, Steve came all the way downstairs to double-check that he’d remembered to turn off