“No,” they all groaned.

And I hung on their every word, and I laughed a beat after they laughed, and I rolled my eyes just as soon as they rolled their eyes—but I realized that somehow I hadn’t prepared for this situation. In all my studies of celebrities and fashion and pop stars, it had never occurred to me that my potential friends might just be talking about people I didn’t know and things I hadn’t done. And I couldn’t research that. That was just their lives.

The weight of this truth settled onto me until I felt like I was suffocating from it. How do you suddenly make friends with people? It’s ridiculous. They have years and years of shared memories and experiences. You can’t drop into that midway through and expect to know what’s going on. They wouldn’t have been able to explain it all to me if they had tried. And they weren’t trying.

The girl sitting across from me picked a bean sprout out of her front teeth and said something that sounded like, “We sent rappers to the gallows on Friday.”

I giggled, then stopped when she pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows at me.

“Sorry,” I said. “You just said … I mean, what are the gallows?”

People also like you more when you ask questions about them, by the way. They like it when you smile, and when you ask them to talk about themselves.

“The Gallos Prize for the best student-made documentary film,” the girl explained.

“Oh, I see. Cool. And what’s rappers?”

“Wrappers,” she said. “It’s my film about people who go to mummy conventions.”

The sheer amount of things I didn’t know about these girls, that they were never going to tell me, was overwhelming. It was like the time my mom and I went to Spain on vacation and I’d thought I knew how to communicate in Spanish because I’d studied it in school for three years, but I didn’t know. I didn’t know at all.

But you can see, can’t you, how these are the sorts of girls I would want to be friends with? If that were at all possible? They did things like film documentaries about mummy conventions! I wanted to do that, too!

Well, not that, per se. I didn’t know anything about filmmaking, and the idea of mummy conventions was honestly a little creepy to me. But I wanted to do stuff like that.

I was so caught up in trying to follow the conversation, in trying to look like I belonged, that I didn’t even notice that the lunch period was nearly over until everyone at the table touched her finger to her nose.

“You,” said a girl in a bright flowered scarf, pointing at me.

“Yes?” I said, smiling at her. Remember, smiling makes people like you more.

She looked directly into my eyes, and I felt that same excitement as when Jordan and Chuck had asked me what music I was listening to. Like, Hey, she’s looking at me! She sees me!

When will I learn that this feeling of excitement is not ever a good sign? That no one ever sees me?

“You,” she said again. “Clean up.”

Then the first bell rang, and everyone at the table stood up, together, and walked away, together, leaving all their soda cans and plastic bags and gobs of egg salad littering the table.

I stayed seated as the cafeteria 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.

2

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 dad’s apartment building is only two stories tall, so I discounted that idea as well.

I could overdose on pills, but I remembered, as I went through the bathroom cabinets, that my dad doesn’t keep many pills in the house. Dad is very into holistic remedies, and I don’t think you can overdose on echinacea and neti pots. I could go to the drugstore and buy more pills, but that would take another half hour at least, and I wanted to get cracking. Furthermore, if I tried to overdose but didn’t succeed, then I would run the risk of living, but being severely brain damaged. I am already socially disabled; I don’t need to be mentally disabled on top of that.

So I settled on cutting myself until I bled to death. I wandered around the house, looking for something sharp enough to kill me. I know, I know: razor blades. But do you keep razor blades just lying around your house? Why? Are you doing a lot of woodworking projects?

I found my dad’s X-Acto knife in the kitchen, buried under the front section of yesterday’s newspaper. That’s what my dad uses his X-Acto for: cutting out interesting articles without messing up the rest of the paper in the process. I picked up his X-Acto, and for some reason this overwhelmed me with sadness, but I didn’t know whether I was feeling sad about my father’s pathetic, unnecessary commitment to keeping his newspapers in good condition or whether I felt sad because I knew that, once I was dead, he would never want to cut articles out of the newspaper again.

I took the X-Acto blade upstairs to my room, where I sat down at my computer to make a suicide playlist. I didn’t really want to die to MP3s. I wanted to die to records. The sound quality is better. But each side of a record lasts for only about twenty minutes, and I couldn’t handle the idea of slipping out of consciousness for the very last time to the click … click … click … of a record that had reached the end and needed to be flipped over.

So I made a long playlist of songs that I thought I wouldn’t mind dying to. It wasn’t like making a road-trip playlist or a running playlist—I had never killed myself before, so I had no idea what I would want to listen to when it was too late for me to skip to the next song. Like, maybe when you’re dying, you actually want to hear something really upbeat. Maybe when the moment came, I’d want to die to ABBA.

I spent a long time tweaking the playlist, sometimes listening to songs all the way through because I knew I would never hear them again. My playlist wound up being two hours long because I didn’t know how long this would take, and I didn’t want to run out of music and die in silence.

Again, I knew I could look this up. How long does it take between the time you cut yourself and the time you die? The Internet would know. But I wouldn’t ask, because that made everything seem so clichéd. Another teenage suicide attempt, another cry for attention. It’s all been done before.

Only mine wasn’t going to be a cry for attention. Mine was going to be punishment. Punishment for Jordan DiCecca and Lizzie Reardon and those girls at lunch and everyone who had ever tortured me or turned their backs while I was tortured. And punishment for myself, too, of course. Punishment for being wrong.

But when I started thinking about punishment, I realized that I really wanted to leave a note, explaining why I had done it. What if Dad found me dead, and no one ever knew why, so none of the right people ever blamed themselves? Then what would be the point?

But a note was going to take me a while to write. I couldn’t just scribble off something like, “Goodbye, cruel world,” and stab myself through the heart. I wanted to explain it all, so everyone understood I wasn’t being crazy and melodramatic. I wanted to start from the beginning, so they understood why I did this. I wanted to name names.

And as I thought more about Dad finding my dead body and suicide note, I realized also that this would make things even worse between him and Mom. I knew exactly how she was, and she would blame him for my death, even though it wasn’t his fault. She would blame him because I was at his house, and she blamed him for everything that happened to me at his house, even things he couldn’t control, like the time I was staying with him and got strep throat.

So, okay. Look. This was getting complicated. I wanted to die, but I wanted to make sure Dad didn’t get in trouble for it, and I wanted to make sure all those bitches at school did get in trouble for it, and this was going to require a detailed suicide note and also probably a location that wasn’t Dad’s house. Plus I had spent so long on my playlist that it was already nearly five o’clock. So, realistically, this wasn’t a great day for dying. Which was a disappointment, but also sort of a relief.

Since I already had the X-Acto knife, though, and I already had the playlist, I decided to go into the bathroom to practice a little. To practice cutting myself, I mean. Just a little, so that when the time came to do it for real, it wouldn’t be scary. It would just be the logical next step.

I brought my laptop into the bathroom with me. I set it down on the floor and turned on “Hallelujah,” the Jeff Buckley version. I pulled a bottle of rubbing alcohol out of the cabinet and poured it over the X-Acto, to sterilize the blade. I wanted to hurt myself, yes, but I didn’t want to get an infection, too.