Right Beside You | Stiles Stilinski | Two

15 - Psychology of the Parts

On Friday morning, I woke up before my alarm clock. I groaned and pushed my head back into my pillow, despite the lingering pain in my skull. I could still feel the place where my head had collided with the floor. Mom had offered me an ice pack, Natalie some pain medication and the anxiety pills she took on occasion, but I'd politely declined. Advil would suffice.

Today I felt better, but there was still something...off...like there was a knot under the surface of the calm. I wasn't sure what it was until I heard the yelling a couple rooms over.

I sprang out of bed, running down the hall and through the open door to Lydia's room. Natalie sat on the edge of her daughter's bed, raving words too fast for me to comprehend so soon after waking up. But it didn't take my eyes long to figure it out.

Lydia was sitting upright, visibly shaking from head to toe, her bloody hands held tight in her mother's grasp. There was blood on her hands, blood on her sheets, and Lydia just sat there staring at her broken skin—not in pain or regret, but horror on confusion, as if she couldn't imagine why there might be blood seeping from her knuckles.

Something on the other side of the room caught my eye: the makeup mirror on Lydia's vanity. The glass was completely shattered, cracks webbing out from the center, where Lydia had evidently punched it. That thought alone was enough to terrify me. Lydia wasn't a violent person. She was forceful, demanding, even vindictive sometimes, and she issued threats like a professional, but she rarely used brute force. I had a hard time even picturing her punching anything. But she'd clearly punched her mirror, and then gone straight back to bed without any recollection of it.

My mother ran into the room behind me, and my brain finally woke up enough to process the English language.

"That's it," Natalie was saying, pulling her daughter close and patting down her hair. "You're not going to school. Absolutely not."

"Mom, I told you, I'm—"

"I know you keep saying you're fine, sweetheart, but look at this! You're very clearly not okay!"

"And what am I going to do in the house, huh? Sit around an think about what I've done?! That is not anymore helpful than going to school and distracting myself. If I don't engage my mind, I am going to go out of my mind!"

"No. You're going to stay home. It will be much less stressful."

"Maybe for you!"

"Nat, maybe she's got a point," my mother sighed, wrapping an arm around my shoulder.

Natalie whipped around with a glare. "Claire!"

"I'm just saying. She's got an appointment with counselor, after all. Maybe it's better if she keeps it."

"There are plenty of private counselors that could help her just as much. Lydia, get dressed. There's an office a couple towns over. They take walk-ins, and—"

"I'm not going to a psychiatrist!" Lydia shouted, shoving her mother away. "I am already back at school, and I am going to keep going to school. I am coping just fine! Right, Scarlett?"

Everyone in the room turned to me. I stood there, shuffling my feet in my pajamas.

"Well?" Lydia pushed. "You took me to school, you breathed down my neck just like they told you to, and I was fine. Right?"

I looked back and forth between our mothers, but eventually crumbled. "Yeah..."

"Thank you! So I got pissed a punched a mirror. So what? I will put on some gloves, I will go to school, and somehow I will still be the most competent person in the building. Now if you could all please get out of my room so I can get dressed, that would be great."