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Chapter
Four: So Cold
“I never really wanted you to see
The screwed up side of me that I keep
Locked inside of me so deep
It always seems to get to me”
“Do you need anything?” My mom opened the door to my
room 10x12 room and poked her head in. “Water? Crackers?” The light from the
hallway shone behind her and framed her face in a sort of halo of
illuminated red hair. It hurt my tired eyes to look at.
“No,” I said wearily. “Thanks.”
“Okay. Well, we’re leaving now. We’ll be back around 8.30.”
“Bye. Have a good time.”
“Thanks. Hope you feel better.” I tried to smile at her, but in the darkness
of my room, I doubt she could see it. As soon as she had appeared, she was
gone, and with her went the only source of light. I was once again engulfed
by the darkness of my room. My Haven. My Prison.
I wasn’t sick, but since I’d been spending so much time alone, mostly with
the lights off, they assumed that I was, which was fine with me. I didn’t
want to go to church, anyway. I just wanted to lie there and rest.
Thoughts crept into my head in random patterns. I ignored them for the most
part, but some just wouldn’t go away. I turned on my radio to distract my
mind. Inside myself I felt empty. Broken. It was as if I wasn’t capable of
feeling any more- except, perhaps, anger or sadness. Maybe I should have
gone to church that night, if just to see the youth minister, Ben. That
always had a way of making things better. Perhaps I would have the nerve to
strike up a conversation, see how his wife was doing and maybe get some
things off my chest.
The hours crept by- or flew- I don’t remember. Time didn’t have much of a
meaning to me back then. Time was the intervals between waking and dreaming.
Sometimes I couldn’t even seperate the two.
***
“Hey.” My sister, Amy, opened the door to my room. “Want me to turn on the
light?”
“Are you going to stay?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“Then sure.” I closed my eyes tightly as she flipped the light switch. I
could feel her sit down at the foot of my bed. After a second I opened my
eyes and let them adjust to the light change.
“How are you feeling?” She asked as she wrapped my blanket around her
shoulders.
“Fine. How was church.”
“Eh..Okay. Those two guys you were talking to Sunday were there.”
“Oh, yeah? Did you say hey?”
“Nah. They looked like they didn’t want to be talked to.”
I laughed, “Yeah, I got that impression too. They’re nice though.” Our cat,
Carlystle hopped onto my bed and curled up in a lump at my feet. Amy reached
down to pet her, but recoiled her hand quickly as the cat scratched her arm.
“Ouch! flesh-cleaving vermin!” She said, and the rediculousness of this
statement made us both laugh. We sat there a few moments in silence, only
broken by the soft purring of Carlystle.
“OH!” said Amy suddenly, as if struck by a thought “You missed it! Haley and
Kristin were crying.”
“Why? What happened?” Haley and Kristin were both a year younger than me.
Haley was tall and thin with dark hair and eyes, and Kristin was shorter
with light colored hair. They were both pretty, and I seem to remember them
modeling for something one time. I didn’t talk to them a lot, but Kristin
would say hey to me in the halls on occasion. I secretly believed them both
to be rather stuck-up.
“Ben quit,” She said, raising her eyebrows for emphasis. Those words seemed
suspended in the air between us, and I looked at her in disbelief.
“What?” I ventured to ask, hoping that I had heard wrong.
“Yeah, he was up on stage when he told everybody, then he started crying.
He’s moving too. Haley and Kristin were really upset.” Her brown eyes took
on a melancholy expression, as if saying all this made her realize it fully.
“It’s actually really sad..”
She talked to me a little while longer, but quickly got bored by my
unresponsiveness. I could do little more than grunt or nod, and pretty soon
she was standing at the door asking me if I wanted anything.
“No.” I said, “I’m just... I think I’m going to take a shower.” As soon as
she had gone, I got to my feet and stared down at the floor, my eyes wide
and unfocused. I was expecting to get angry any second, or cry my eyes out,
but I didn’t. I didn’t feel anything. I was numb and that numbness was worse
than grief.
***
The roar of running water filled the tiny bathroom and it was all I could
hear. I’d turned the water on hot, but the temperature quickly dropped to
lukewarm. In the cottage, hot showers were hard to come by.
I leaned against the wall and let it rain down my back as I thought of Ben.
We weren’t close, really. I rarely thought of him outside of church and it
wasn’t like I thought of him as a father figure. He was just one of the few
good and constant things in my life and now he was leaving. I’d probably
never see him again.
I felt abandoned. Not for the first time in my life, either. My old friends
abandoned me when I moved away, the one person I knew in the foster home
that I had honestly called ‘friend’, had stabbed me in the back when faced
with the peer pressure of my own foster brothers. I felt that my parents had
abandoned to take care of foster children, and now Ben was leaving me too.
Did nobody care about me?
I expected to feel angry or sad. But as it was, I didn’t feel anything. I
couldn’t. My mind was taking all the steps; telling me that Ben was gone,
that my friends were gone, that I was alone, that my parents didn’t have
time for me, but nothing stirred in me. I wanted to feel, to react in some
way, but there was such an emptiness inside of me. I wondered if I had just
melted away my feelings.
It’s truly terrifying when you realize what lengths you’re willing to go
through to just feel ‘normal’ again. A thought crossed my mind, not for the
first time in my life, but the first time I was actually in danger of acting
on it. It scared me, but I reacted to it like I hadn’t reacted to anything
in a week. If just the thought made my heart beat faster surely the act of
actually doing it would make me better. Right?
I stared hard at the wall and tried to think about what I was planning to
do. It wouldn’t be fatal. I wouldn’t cut that deep. Just a little scratch,
it wouldn’t even have to be on my wrist.
I’d read a magazine article about a girl who’d been sent to a boarding
school by her parents and while attending that school, she and the other
students were underfed and mistreated. She and her roomate would rip the
erasers off of pencils and use the jagged metal on the end of the pencil to
make cuts on their stomachs. At the time, I thought they were stupid, and
wondered how they thought injuring themselves could help anything. But right
now, nearly a month after reading that article, it all made sense to me.
That school is closed now, and the girls all went elsewhere, but the damage
that was done couldn’t be undone. And I knew that, if I did this, there was
no taking it back.
I stepped out of the shower, dried myself off, and dressed in pajama bottoms
and an undershirt. In my room I flicked the switch of my bed-side lamp on
and a dim light filled the room. I ran a hand through my dripping wet hair
as the other one rested on my knee. How would I do it? The knife drawer was
always locked and, even if it wasn’t, I couldn’t just wander out into the
kitchen. The alarm would go off and then I’d have to explain what I was
doing out of my room after bedtime, and I wasn’t any good at lying. But I
couldn’t wait until morning, it had to be tonight.
A wreckless abandon had taken hold of me and I was incapable of logical
thought. I needed to do this. It was the only thing that would make me
better, and I had to do it now. A quick search of my room weilded only this;
a small pin. The type of pin my mother would wear on her shirt; a
decorative, pretty thing. The back of it was razor sharp and I rubbed my
finger over it, just to test things. I didn’t bleed, but it hurt.
“Hey.”
I nearly jumped out of my skin as I whipped around to look at the person
addressing me. “I hate it when you do that!” My dad was looking at me, his
brown eyes laughing, though his smile remained firmly in the realm of
‘mildly amused’.
“Well, I did knock.”
“Yeah, but then you walked right in. I didn’t have time to tell you to come
in or not. I could have been naked.”
“But you’re not.” He pointed out.
“But I could have been!” I felt hot all of a sudden, and embarassed. “Just
knock and wait for an answer next time.”
“I’ll try to remember that.” He reached behind him and grasped the door
handle, “Goodnight. Don’t stay up late, okay? You keep waking your mother
and me in the middle of the night with your pacing and banging things
around.”
“Oh,” I said, lamely. “Oh, sorry.” And then he shut the door and it was just
me, the lamplight, the pin and the mad desire racing through me. I crawled
under the light green covers and opened my palm-
“And I hope you feel better.” I jumped again, nearly hitting my head against
the brick wall. My dad had just walked back into the room without knocking.
“Dad!” I admonished.
“What?” I couldn’t tell, but I was pretty sure he was teasing me. He smiled
and closed the door behind him.
“Ouggh.” I murmured. I waited a few moments before moving, half-expecting my
dad to walk in again, but he didn’t. I let out a sigh and closed my eyes,
sinking my head back against the pillow.
Because of the recent excitement, I’d forgotten how tired I was. If I
wanted, I could have fallen asleep right then, comfortably lying on my back,
under the covers, with a pin held loosely in my hand. But no. Not yet. I had
to do it first. I was sick of constantly being tired and I knew that once
I’d done this, I would be better. A soft knock came on my door. Oh for
Christ’s sake! I thought angrily, then yelled out, “WHAT?”
“Just checking on you.” My mother’s soft voice from the other side of the
door. She sounded offended.
I let out a long sigh. “I’m fine,” I heard myself saying. “Just tired.”
“Well, I’ll see you in the morning.” She stood there a few seconds more, in
silence, as if waiting for something. When she spoke again, there was no
mistaking the hollowness of her voice. “Goodnight, then.” She might have
been aggrivated, or hurt, or both. I couldn’t be bothered to care much right
now. I’d been waiting for what seemed like ages to get this over with.
You’ve probably heard the expression, “my money’s burning a hole in my
pocket.” Well, this pin, you could say, was burning a hole in my hand and I
was itching to get on with things- to see how they would turn out.
Everything that followed was a mixture of slow-motion, and high-speed. I
layed back down on the bed and slid my hand underneath my shirt. My hand was
freezing so I tried not to let it touch my stomach. I drug the back of the
pin across my skin in a long stroke, slow and gentle at first, but as I
gained courage and felt the sting in my skin, it became fast and hard. I
drew blood and bit down on my lip. It hurt, and I felt pain. It was like a
drug of some kind- a high, and I didn’t want to stop. Over and over again I
drug the pin across my stomach, criss-crossing the marks and biting down on
my lip, closing my eyes. I focused only on the pain. I was alive again. Now
things were going fast. My heart was beating faster, my eyes were moving
swiftly around the room, observing the shadows on the walls and ceiling. My
fingers shook, and I slowly came back down to earth.
It wasn’t like I had just done anything serious. I hadn’t comitted a crime,
I hadn’t run a mile, I hadn’t just punched my worst enemy in the face, but
it felt like I had done all those things and more. That might not make sense
to you, but it’s the best I can do to describe a feeling that’s wholly
unique. It wasn’t elation really, because it wasn’t exactly a good feeling.
But it was something. And that’s what kept me going.
Chapter 5
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by
Tegan L. Elliott
© Copyright 2006 Tegan L. Elliott (UN: ganlynde at
Writing.Com). All rights reserved.
Tegan L. Elliott has granted Writing.Com, its affiliates and syndicates
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