Kathleen is sobbing now, one hand scrabbling at her face as her chest heaves. She’s breathing, gulping in huge gasps of air but there is a hole in her chest just above her heart and no matter how much she struggles and inhales she can’t seem to get enough oxygen into her broken body. She stares at herself in the mirror, watches the last of her eyeliner and mascara run down her cheeks, black dripping into the sink and mixing in with the red. She looks just like a doll, she thinks. It is not the first time she realizes it, but this time she thinks it in a different way to the way her fans think. Just like a doll; perfectly flawless on the outside and completely empty on the inside.
Outside Victoria is sobbing as well, her fist thumping on the door in rhythmic intervals, her pleas a little more sporadic. Kathleen can’t remember how long they have been at this, seconds, minutes, hours, maybe even days. She doesn’t care anymore. Victoria tries her best to protect her from everything, but she can’t protect her from herself. There is a different sound in the distance – a scuffle, hurried whispers and quick footsteps. And then a new thump at the door, desperate and calm at the same time. “Kathleen, please open the door,” a new voice– desperate and calm at the same time – whispers through the wood and the barricade she has put up around herself. All of a sudden her hands are shaking more than ever, and the blade falls to the ground with a silent tinkle that echoes through her ears and feels like roaring in her numb brain. “Don’t do this Kathleen.” There is an earsplitting crack as the door breaks open, and Justin is tearing her away from herself, wrapping his hand tight around her damaged wrist as he wraps himself around her damaged heart. Kathleen wants to stay cold but Justin’s body is warm, so warm, and before she can stop herself she lets him break down the rest of her walls as she buries herself into the thin folds of his t-shirt and screams and screams and screams.
Elizabeth is unsympathetic.
“You’d better fucking get it together, Kathleen, because if you don’t stop yourself no one is going to stop you, and what are you going to do when you’re lying dead on the floor?”
She realizes that she’s only trying to keep herself from caring too much.
Because when she replies that there is nothing left to do because she’d be dead, Elizabeth only screams at her to get out, go back to your home and don’t come back until you’ve fucking pulled yourself together because I can’t take your bullshit anymore. Kathleen is halfway out the door when she hears Elizabeth fall to the floor, hears the dry sob escape her lips.
Kathleen keeps walking. Justin later tells her she’s perfect.
(Kathleen doesn’t tell him that it is the perfection that makes her want to tear out all her hair, scrub at herself until she no longer feels like alive. She doesn’t tell him that it is the perfection that is killing her). When Justin tells her that he loves her, Kathleen doesn’t reply. Kathleen merely cries into his arms.
I’m fine, she tells people when they ask why she looks so tired. They don’t see the scars beneath the layers of makeup and she doesn’t mention them. Really. Look. She can still laugh, she can still smile. She can still do all the things that is required of her, because it is Kathleen who is hurting. Justin is the one who keeps her whole, the one who keeps all her broken pieces in his pocket until he can find an opportune moment to piece her silently back together. He doesn’t begrudge her the tears, the long silences and the incoherency, he simply holds her wordlessly until she feels a little more like herself again.
She doesn’t begrudge him anything but this: he doesn’t understand. No matter how hard he tries, not matter what he says, not matter what he does, he doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand why she hurts, he doesn’t understand how much she hates the thought that he thinks she’s perfect. He doesn’t understand but he tries, and that is all the reason Kathleen needs to keep him around and let him keep her from falling apart.
“Why me?” she asks several months later when they are lying on the floor of his room, staring up at the ceiling as the tips of their fingertips brush against each other’s.
“Because you’re not perfect,” he replies.
Kathleen smiles for the first time in months, because she realizes that he's letting her know that he finally, finally understands. Later, she barges into her dorm and throws all the razors into the bin, leaving a dumb founded Victoria and Elizabeth to stare alternately between her and each other as she laughs and laughs and laughs. For the first time in a long time Kathleen and her soul finally feel at peace.
