It was cold outside. That was a good thing for me. I could wear long sleeves, and it would be perfectly normal. My arms were a mess. My mind was a mess. I was a mess.
I spent recess alone. Nobody wanted to talk to me. I didn't blame them, I mean, how could the ugly, sad, fat girl ever be appealing?
As I didn't want to just roam the halls on my own, I decided to go to the fields, to the spot where Brendon and I usually sat. I thought it would make me happy because I'd sit in the place where we spent time together. I was happy for approximately three seconds, until I remembered Brendon hadn't talked to me in a week.
I wouldn't text him first; I refused to. I wasn't going to waste any energy by being a masochist and talking to someone who didn't want to talk to me.
My arm still hurt. I rolled my sleeve so I could see what I'd done to myself, as scabs were starting to form and all the cuts were now visible.
The problem wasn't if the cuts were visible; the problem was that my skin wasn't. Every inch of skin between the inside of my elbow and the start of my hand was hidden behind horizontal red lines.
I didn't do it in the exact same way Cat did. Cat liked feeling like she was putting herself at risk; she liked knowing that if she went too deep, she could die. But I wasn't trying to do that. I was only trying to let it all out in the way Cat taught me, by simply marking my skin with way too many small, superficial cuts.
While I hid my cuts behind the fabric again, I started to remember the reason they were there in the first place. Brendon. We still hadn't talked. So I made a decision: if he didn't text me before 7:30 pm, I'd text him and ask him to tell me what was going on. I was getting kind of tired of being a fool and just waiting for him to decide I was worthy of an explanation.
So I got home that evening, and waited by my phone because I was just that stupid. In my mind, I was begging Brendon to text me, thinking 'please don't make it any harder, just say hello, say anything'.
But he didn't. It was 7:30, so I decided to keep my word and text him.
The conversation went exactly the way I expected. I was trying to talk to him, while he was just pushing me away.
"What's going on with you?" I texted him. And I had to gather all of my courage to do it.
"Nothing." he replied, after seven minutes.
"I'm serious. You've been pushing me away lately, and I don't even know why: it's killing me. If you don't want to talk to me, that's fine, but at least let me know."
Almost immediately, I got a text.
"I don't want to talk to you."
