I sat down on the lid of the toilet. I held the X-Acto blade to the inside of my left arm. I stood up, walked out of the bathroom and back to my bedroom, and I picked up my teddy bear from my unmade bed. I carried him back down the hall to the bathroom, locked the door behind me, sat back down on the toilet seat, put my teddy in my lap, and started the song over from the beginning.

I again placed the X-Acto against the inside of my left forearm, but this time I pressed down. I drew a line straight across.

It didn’t hurt. It just felt numb.

So I cut a second line, just a little bit closer to my wrist. That didn’t hurt either. So I pressed down harder the third time, and I held it.

That hurt.

For a moment, I watched the blood bubble out of those thin slits through my arm. In Bio last year, I learned that blood is actually a dark maroon when it’s inside your body. It’s the exposure to oxygen that turns it bright red. And there must have been a lot of oxygen in my bathroom, because that blood was bright, bright red.

I stood up and turned the sink faucet on high. I held my arm under it to wash away the blood, but more blood kept coming out and kept coming out. Every time I tried to take it out from under the faucet, it just started bleeding harder.

You need to apply pressure in this sort of situation. Everyone knows that. So I kept my left arm still under the spray of the faucet while, with my right hand, I rooted around in the medicine cabinet for a bandage that would be big enough to cover my forearm. I finally found one wedged behind the bottles of rose hips and garlic pills.

I took my arm out from the sink and immediately pressed the bandage onto it. So that was good. That looked fine. I would wear long-sleeved shirts for a couple days and no one would ever know.

I grabbed my laptop in my right hand and my teddy in my left, and I unlocked the bathroom door and walked back to my bedroom. “Hallelujah” was just drawing to a close. That hadn’t taken long at all. I felt like I had been in the bathroom forever, but “Hallelujah” isn’t that long of a song.

I sat down at my desk and pulled out the Glendale High directory. It was in pristine condition. Because I never called anyone. Who would I have called?

I looked down at my arms, resting on my desk. Both of my hands were shaking. And blood was starting to seep through the bandage, dyeing it from gauzy white to bruised-apple red.

I stood up from my desk chair and carried my teddy bear and school directory into the corner of my room. I sat on the floor, pressing my back flush against the wall, all the way from my head to the base of my spine.

It turns out that I had been lying. I hadn’t thought I was lying, but I was. When I said that I really wanted to die, that I wasn’t a teen cliché, that I wasn’t doing this for attention, that I, for one, meant it. I hadn’t known it but I was lying, lying, lying. Because the next thing that I did was pick up my phone, with my right hand, and call Amelia Kindl to tell her that I had just cut myself. On purpose.

That’s what I discovered about myself on the first day of my sophomore year of high school: I didn’t really want to die. I never had. All I ever wanted was attention.

3

Here we are now. Here we are, the first Thursday evening in April, a full seven months after I slit my wrist and then called Amelia Kindl to tell her all about it. The sun has just gone down, and it’s dinnertime in the Myers household.

Members of the Myers household include my mom; her husband, Steve; their five-year-old son, Neil; their seven-year-old daughter, Alex; their dogs, Bone and Chew-Toy; and, sometimes, me.

I am part of the Myers household every Saturday to Wednesday, one month out of the summer, Christmas Day, and Thanksgiving evening. The rest of the time I’m at my dad’s, on the other side of town. Except for sometimes, like this particular Thursday, we have to move things around because my dad’s away. This time I believe his band was playing a show at the Six Flags in Florida. When I was a kid, I would have begged and pleaded to skip school to travel with him, but by this point in my life I have been to so many Six Flags and Busch Gardens with my dad and his band that they just don’t excite me like they used to.

My parents’ schedule for me may sound confusing, but it doesn’t feel it. We’ve been doing the joint custody thing since I was six, so we got the hang of it a long time ago. At this point, everyone in my family has a smartphone with a synced-up Elise Calendar, and we just go wherever our phones tell us to.

Dinnertime in the Myers household requires everyone sitting in the dining room together, eating two different meals (mac and cheese or chicken fingers for Alex and Neil, real food for the rest of us), and having Dinnertime Conversation. Mom and Steve are the founders and copresidents of an environmental nonprofit called Bravely Opposing Oil Over International Lines, known to us insiders as BOO OIL. The idea is that if we have Dinnertime Conversation as a family, then the three of us kids will develop a more nuanced understanding of the world around us, so we will grow up to become educated members of a working democracy.

I would say there’s a 15 percent chance that, if I hadn’t been raised to be an educated member of a working democracy, I would have turned out cool. I’m not completely blaming my mother for my social problems or anything. I’m just saying that Lizzie Reardon clearly has no interest in being an educated member of a working democracy, and, so far, that seems to have served her well.

Here is what the Myers household’s Dinnertime Conversation sounded like on this particular Thursday:

Mom: “I have some good news: we’ve finally decided what sofa we’re getting.”

Alex: “WHAT?! We have to get a new sofa?”

Neil: “Whhhhyyyyy?”

You see that? Educated members of a working democracy in action. Everyone participates in the democratic process. All our voices are heard.

Mom: “Because the old sofa is disgusting.”

Steve: “The dogs have thrown up on it so many times, it’s vomit-colored.”

Alex: “I like the color of vomit.”

Neil: “Me, too.”

Mom: “Fine, then we’ll get a new couch that’s the same color, since you like it so much.”

Alex: “But if it’s the same color, then why can’t we just keep the old one?”

Mom: “Because, I told you, it’s 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 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.”