What She Did
It was surreal, to see what she was doing. Just sitting in class, digging into her wrist with a mechanical pencil. Almost like something out of a bad indie film, meant to be disturbing but not quite getting the desired effect. No one else seemed to notice. I couldn't stop her, thugh, as the pencil dug deeper and deeper into her flesh. she was so intent that my words would have passed without notice. I knew why she did it too. She was justified. Besides, I enjoyed it, enjoyed her pain. It was exhilirating.
This was not rhyme without reason. She wasn't doing this without cause. Indeed, her life was horrible. She was one of those pathetic people who gets invited to everything because the host knows she'll pay, or her boyfriend (if he can be called that) is with her because he knows she'll sleep with him just for a sembalance of love or friendship in her dreary life.
It's worse than that, though. She's not stupid. She knows she's being used, knows no one really likes her. She knows she's already dead.
I was with her, the first time she cut. Her father had just left, and her mother was screaming at her worthless daughter, the reason there was no husband in the house anymore. the girl merely retreated to her room, slashing sharp, thin red lines across her wrists. Again, it was surreal, dreamlike as I watched her lick the blood from her wrists. I was looking at her vulnerability, her surrender as if watching from a far away window, or a grainy movie screen. Her mother still hangs her father's old shirts out to dry, desperate to fool the neighbors.
I guess it's just as much of a trance to her, but just as much of a rush at the same time. She doesn't seem to react emotionally. Physically... Well, nerves can die, given constant abuse. I'm not sure if she does it for fun, or distraction, or just from sheer idleness.
She had a true friend, once. Someone much like her. They were almost identical while she was still alive, in spirit at lest. They felt like twins, though none would have taken them for it. Light hair, dark hair. Pale skin, tanned. Tallk and short, fragile and athletic. The yin to her yang, if you will. that friend was no longer around, though. She had cut herself too deeply, The girl didn't attend her funeral; there was a birthday party that day.
After that, everything but the cutting seemed boring. The night she lost her virginity, she thought she had found something to fill her again but it quickly it became just as dull as everything else, so dull that it could have been called rape if she had even cared for her own body. She began asking her partners to bite her, hard, just to feel something.
No one was stopping her, though they probably all knew. The scars were obvious. the pencil finally broke her skin. I gasped with ecstasy as droplets of blood formed on my wrist, staining the tip of my pencil crimson.
~L. W. Smith
