This Song Will Save Your Life Read Online Free

emptied around me. Amelia hovered for one moment, letting her friends get a head start. “We always do that,” she said to me, her eyebrows pulled together with a little bit of worry. “You know, the last one to put her finger on her nose has to clean up. That’s our rule. So, today that was you.”
    Amelia smiled at me apologetically, and I guess that study was right, because her smile did make me like her more. I could have said, That’s a messed-up rule . Or I could have said, But I didn’t know. Or I could have said, Do you honestly always do that? Or did you just do that to me ? Or I could have said, Why don’t you stay and help me?
    I could have said anything, but instead I said, “Okay.”
    And Amelia walked away, and I started throwing eleven girls’ trash into the garbage can.
    As I scooped up potato chip crumbs, I realized this, this most important truth: there are thousands, millions, countless rules like the one Amelia just told me. You have to touch your finger to your nose at the end of lunch. You have to wear shoes with this sort of heel. You have to do your homework on this sort of paper. You have to listen to this band. You have to sit in this certain way. There are so many rules that you don’t know, and no matter how much you study, you can’t learn them all. Your ignorance will betray you again and again.
    Picking up soggy paper napkins, thick with milk, I realized, too: this year wasn’t going to be any different. I had worked so hard, wished so hard, for things to get better. But it hadn’t happened, and it wasn’t going to happen. I could buy new jeans, I could put on or take off a headband, but this was who I was. You think it’s so easy to change yourself, but it’s impossible.
    So I decided on the next logical step: to kill myself.

 
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    Does this sound ridiculous and dramatic, to decide in the middle of a totally average school day that this life has gone on for long enough? Was I overreacting? Well, I’m sorry, but that is what I decided. You can’t tell me my feelings are overwrought or absurd. You don’t know. They are my feelings.
    I had considered suicide before, but it seemed so played out, so classic angsty teen crying out for attention, that I had never done anything about it. Today I was going to do something about it.
    But I want you to know, it wasn’t because I had to pick up other people’s trash that I decided my life wasn’t worth living anymore. It wasn’t because of that. It was because of everything.
    I left school right then and walked the five miles home, having no other mode of transportation. The weather was warm and breezy, and the sun shone brightly overhead. I listened to my iPod and thought about how there are good things in life, like fresh air and sun and music. Basically anything that doesn’t involve other people. And it would be sad to leave all that behind forever, to never again see a cloud moving across the sky, to never again listen to the Stone Roses on my iPod as I walked in the sunshine. But at this point, having blown off half of my first day of sophomore year, I felt like I had pretty well committed myself to the suicide thing.
    I came home to an empty house. My father works in a music store, and he wouldn’t be home until six p.m. That gave me a few hours to address some logistical questions.
    First, how to die? My dad doesn’t own a gun, and even if he did I wouldn’t know how to shoot it, and even if I did I wouldn’t, since I am staunchly pro–gun control. I wasn’t going to hang myself because that seemed to require a lot of engineering skills that I didn’t have. And maybe I could ask the Internet “how do I make a noose,” but that creeped me out. I figured that if it creeped me out that much, I probably didn’t want to do it.
    I’d once heard a rumor about a girl in New York City who tried to step off the roof of her apartment building and fall to her death. I guess that might work in New York City, but my