Carving Pumpkins (Frank Iero)

Him

Him

I snapped my cell phone shut and walked briskly to the front doors, pushing them open in frustration and worry. 

No sooner than the last bell had rung had I received a call from Mrs. Rappolds. She sounded quite concerned as she insisted that I come over to Pencey Elementary immediately; they couldn't reach my father on his cell.

What a surprise.

I practically ran through the halls of Pencey Elementary, anxious to see Penney. I really hoped that she wasn't talking to herself again, really wished that her imagination, amazing as it was, would just stop pushing itself out into the open world. 

She couldn't help her sudden outbursts of thought, they just happened. Doctors had comfirmed, before we had left Jersey, that Penney wasn't schizophrenic, didn't have Tourettes; there was something mentally wrong with her, but not anything that any tests could show. Only that she had began speaking to herself soon after her second birthday, replicating those thoughts that she had in her head.

Sometimes, if it was really bad, if she got inconsolably anxious, she would begin shouting, arguing with herself over lost pretenses that she insisted no one else could relate to, like not having enough glue to paste together the macaroni shells she used to make a paper plate mask, or not being able to decide what she was going to wear to school. I often would have to help her work out these usually effortless life desicions with little to no co-operation from Penney. It wasn't her fault; I knew that she couldn't help the voices that were screaming at her to voice her thoughts.

She'd tried explaining it to me one day, when she had been incredibly lucid, and she stumbled over her words and ended up crying. She wanted somebody to know, somebody to realize just what she was going through, but the fact of the matter was that there just wasn't anyone to help her, and it pained me to see and hear her screaming with herself so often about things she couldn't change.

Some days, she would be normal, like any other six-year-old little girl; and other days, she would be a complete tyrant, yelling and screaming at herself and knocking over everything and everyone in her path.

There had only been a few occasions when Penney had been subdued enough in her own argument with herself that she would inflict harm on herself.

They had all been 'accidents', some part of her demanding that she didn't want it to happen. The first time was the worst, Penney demanding that her jacket had been stolen by fairies. She was running down the halls of our old house in Jersey, frantically searching for her jacket and screaming at herself that it had been stolen, then demanding that it had not, then that it had. It had been her worst panic attack that far, and I was a little freaked out myself, running through the house, trying to keep up with and subdue Penney long enough to calm her down.

As I searched the house frantically for her, I stopped in the living room to take a breath; I had been running around the house for a few minutes now, trying to help the little girl who wouldn't accept any help. I heard a scream and the sharp, metallic clang of utensils hitting the tile floor in the kitchen and sprinted across the house.

Upon entering the kitchen, I found Penney on the floor, sitting cross-legged, knives and wooden spoons peppered around her as she made haste to slice her shoulders and shins, her hands slick with her own blood, screaming at herself to stop.

I had bandaged her up and rushed her to the hospital; our parents had been out at a party, and weren't due to get back until late.

The whole ride to the emergency room, she sat silently in the back seat, hunched in on herself, hugging her sides like she could curl up into a ball and never come out.