0 comments
IF YOU READ THIS AND YOU ARE FROM SCHOOL, I CAN'T DO ANYTHING. JUST DON'T.
Chapter fourteen.
Dads in serious thinking mode now. You can see his concentration line in between his eyebrows, and his eyes are squinting at the number cubes sitting on the board in front of him. We’re playing rummikub, a game of numbers and logic. Sets of numbers litter the floor in front of me, and more on my board. “Alright Georgia, what song is this?” I ask, as soon as another Taylor Swift song started playing through my iPad.
“Wait wait wait, don’t tell me!” She starts guessing, “Tonight! Uh, forcing smiles!”
“It’s enchanted, learn your songs.” I reply to her utter dismay. I am caught in her smile, so pretty next to her flushed cheeks and freckles. Patrick walks in and sits down beside me on the floor. His fluffy white fur rubs against my bare arms, and I stroke his back with my hand. My left fingers are tapping against the floor again, the chorus of enchanted. 0, 3, 0, 3 - 2, 3 - 4, 3 - 2, 1. This night is sparkling, don’t you let it go. This night was sparkling. There we were, my dad, sister, and I, playing rummikub on the floor of my bedroom. But then, my mum walks in. She lays on my bed and pulls my iPad to her chest. “What’s the password?”
Oh no. Oh no, no, no. What if? What if she sees, everything? The chat with Charlie. Addy swearing in the group chat. “um, 555… Oh, no, now Georgia will know!!” I force out, with fake exaggeration. But I don’t care if Georgia finds out. I do care if mum finds out. If she sees my everything.
She logs on, facing away from me on the floor. Her expression betrays nothing as her fingers scroll through my life. Georgia draws something on a piece of paper and holds it behind dad’s head. It’s a lightbulb. “Lightbulb moment!” She smiles. I don’t know how she does it.
I can hear my laughter ringing in my ears, sounding hollow even to me. Can they all tell? That I’m broken shards of glass? That the scratches on my arm aren’t there by chance? Maybe not. Because dad is telling Georgia to put it away. But mum is still on my iPad.
My heart slides down to my stomach, I can feel it beating. Beat, beat, beat, skip a beat, beat, beat. Oh no. Oh no, no, no. What if she finds it? What if she sees? What if, what if, what if? There are things on there that only I know. Only I. And if she sees word. My story, my life, gone.
Her expression wavers, a mix of I found it and oh. I can picture inside her head, ‘Eureka, Eureka! Why did she write this? What going on? But I found it.’ She saw it. She saw it.
She saw it.
The Padlet with Charlie. All those messages. My story. The one I stay up all night writing, catching up with my life, now she saw my everything. My everything, her nothing. Maybe it’s something, but it’s not. But she knows about Charlie, she knows about Charlie, she knows about Charlie.
I can’t keep playing. I feel sick, like I’m about vomit but I can’t. They fog inside grows, empty and hollow. Words echo around inside the void, stupid, stupid, stupid. And what will she say? Ask for a private conversation and say that I’m too young for this? Tell me to stop, stop pretending I’m not alright? Maybe if I say it enough, I’ll start to believe myself.
She puts it down, watching the game with her eagle eyes, like she’s a bird watching over her nest. I keep playing, lay the numbers down in front of me, but the void still swirls inside of me. It’s like someone is stirring black, black, black, inside, outside, in my world.
My shattered world.
Chapter fifteen.
I need a hug. I need someone to sit down beside me, stoke my back and whisper in my ear that it’s all going to be okay.
But I’m too scared to ask.
So I turn away. Away from Charlie, away from myself. And then, I run. I run across the oval, sidestepping a pole and dodging a kid. And when I reach the other side, bathed in light cast from the sun above, I don’t stop. I’m running all the way down the corridor to my classroom, the wind whistling loud through the trees. Because the glass in my sweaty palm is too heavy, like my shattered heart. All this weight is on me, and I need to get it off, but I can’t talk. I need to write.
I burst into the classroom, empty except for Mrs Trowbridge sitting at her desk. She doesn’t have to look up to know it’s me, reaching for paper and a pencil. Their feel comforts me as I slip back outside. I can’t stay in there, where every time she glances up it feels like a thousand pins are hitting me. No. I have to be out. Where I can see the blue, blue sky.
And it might just see me.
I’m out of the corridor when a yell falls into me out of nowhere. I lift my arms up just in time to see Georgia hugging around my waist, her little arms squeezing around my body. “Agghh! Georgia, get off!”
“Fine,” she says, and turns back to the oval. “Okay, unpause.” She runs back onto the oval to Rory, who dashes after her. For a second I wonder what it’s like to have friends. To play tag and not have to worry about the world collapsing on you, pushing you down with it. I watch her for a moment longer, running around her friends. My heart aches with a sense of longing.
I want to be her, so careless and free, dancing around life with a smile spread wide upon my face. But I shrug it away. I used to be her, before darkness swallowed me whole. Even on sunny days like this, a shadow always surrounds me, blocking out the light. Before the world did come down on me, I was normal. A normal, whole girl
I walk away, my feet heavy against the concrete of my life. Everything is fading, vivid yet distant. Kids whirl around me, like I am invisible girl. And as I round the corner, everything dims. The lights don’t seem as bright, there is no one in sight. I am alone. Me, the paper, my pencil. I sit down at the old blue bench and put my pencil to the paper. This is my story. And I will be the one to write it.
But I can’t. I try to write the words that are piled inside me, but they don’t fall out. They are stuck inside my head, bottled up, but I don’t have a bottle opener. I’m lost. The pencil drops out of my hand and rolls to the floor. I can’t. I can’t.
But I will.
The weight of everything presses down as I reach for my sock. Inside is the glass shard, so jagged and cold against my fingers. I pull it out. Sometimes bearing the pain is too much. Just like it said in Girl in Pieces. “I need release, I need to hurt myself more than the world can hurt me, and then I can comfort myself.”
And then, I can comfort myself.
Without thinking, I drag the shard across my thigh, a thin line of red lighting up after it. It’s a release, drawing my pain on my skin. In this moment, it’s all that matters. Me and the glass, the blood and the cut. I’m sobbing, I can’t help it. A salty tear runs down my face. Just as it started, it’s stopped. All the rush has faded. I promised myself that last time was the last time. But now, I’m hit with the guilt, the shame, of what I’ve done. I stand up, crumpling the piece of paper I tried so hard to fill. My vision blurs, drops of water falling from my eyes. I push them away.
They’ll never see me cry.
I clutch the glass in one hand, the paper and pencil in the other. It’s time to go back, maybe check what book B is reading, ask for the time, trudge back to class. But I don’t rub the tiny drops of blood off my leg. They will stand there, a testimony to what I couldn’t do.
But what I did anyway.
I pull myself through the crowds, my head buzzing with what just happened. I’m lost in myself, like a boat in the middle of the sea. I open the lid of the bin and put in the paper but keep the glass. I keep the story that it holds, its end still stained with a hint of crimson. I won’t ever let go of the things that I hold so close. As I walk down the stairs, I see Charlie standing hesitantly at the side. Maybe he can see the red lines beneath my royal blue skort. Maybe he knows. I know he knows.
I walk past him and sit down, back on the concrete next to B. “Hi. What’s the time?” she glances up from her book and holds up her watch. 1:58; time to go back to class. “Thanks.” I run up the stairs, collect my lunchbox from the plastic tubs. Charlie lingers in the corner, but I pretend not to notice.
Because I can’t talk.
And I can’t write.
So I have to cut.
Chapter sixteen.
There are people around me, pressing in on all sides. The air smells like sweat, hard work that somehow seeped into the gymnastics floor. My back is hunched against the back of the seat, my legs bare beneath black bike pants.
Mum’s voice cuts through the din from beside me. “What are those scratches on your leg?”
My thoughts circle back to that day, when I made those cuts. When I traced them into existence. And I know that she can tell from the searching look in her eye. She might have read my life, but I will never tell her this truth. I will never let her see past my walls.
“Oh, these? I got them ages ago, remember?” Offering a smile she doesn’t accept. I can’t meet her gaze, afraid she will see into my eyes through the cracks in my mask. Instead, I look down, hoping that she won’t press further. I try to think about today, playing violin at Westcent, letting my bow glide over the strings. I’ll be doing that for the rest of the week, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.
But when I play, the notes dance around me like a shield built to protect me from the world, before my walls come down. I can breathe, play the notes and let myself slide out of my body. I need violin, just like I need writing.
Just like I need Charlie.
It lets my emotions out, detangles the wires in my brain. Each melody I play seems to straighten my thoughts, like unravelling a crumpled piece of paper. But it doesn’t last for long. It covers me in cumulus clouds, graceful and fluffy, lingering only before they clear to leave me alone with the sun.
The sun that doesn’t seem so warm anymore.
I’m suddenly aware of everything around me. The kids holding water bottles, noise, laughter, friends. How everyone else here is whole, yet I am the only ghost. The pain in me is too real, too many colours and music notes and words vibrating around inside me. They don’t know. They can’t know. But somehow my mum says okay. She might believe me; she doesn’t press further. Yet there’s an edge to her voice that makes me think she just wants me to tell the truth. I know what will happen if I talk. I don’t need some adult telling me it’s okay not to be okay.
But I am more than not okay.
I am broken, I am shattered, but I can’t let them know that. I have to keep up my façade, the one that’s already crumbling under the pressure of the world. I am in pieces, like the glass that I use to cut myself.
I can imagine Leila, after reading what I shared with her. She would roll her eyes and say that I’m not the only girl in the world, that everyone else struggles too.
But she has never cut.
She doesn’t know what it feels like to focus all my energy into one moment, to feel the pain coming from the sharp end of the glass that I smashed. See the blood, on my skin, lines traced back and forth along my arm. She doesn’t know what it feels like to hide everything, even from my best friend. Because there is a silent battlefield on my body, left beneath my clothes. You will never see it. It is the war I fought with myself, but it is not over.
Not yet.
I still cut, there are still lines on my legs. Lines that I made, that will be the death of me. Everything that Charlie and Paige and Leila and B and everyone else has seen, has known, hasn’t seen, hasn’t known. I’m still trying to hide, to shelter in the shadow of the person I built around myself.
But I can’t hide.
Music might help, but it’s not a cure. Nothing can silence the storm inside, to calm the monster thrashing in my head. I’m trying so hard to stay, no cuts, no thoughts. But the same sentence is stuck in my head, orbiting around my life like the eight planets and Pluto in the solar system. They can’t be intrusive thoughts if they were here all along.
Can they?
I want to be word girl. I am. The documents on my laptop are proof of that, yet I can’t find the words when I need to. When I’m with Charlie, my heart screams my world, but no one can hear me. No one can hear because I’m lost for words, basking in the light of a thousand unshared stories. Those chapters hang in the air between us, and all I want to do is reach out and pick them up, hold them in my hands.
But I can’t.
The silence around me becomes deafening, loud chaos yet dull beneath everything. I wish I have my laptop, to write my story, my emotion, my path. But I don’t, so I am alone in this ever-changing world. Alone with my thoughts, the war underneath, the storm inside. I need, I want, I need. I wish I had Charlie. Here, now. I need someone to hear my story, I need someone to tell me theirs.
But there are no such thing as happy endings.
Chapter seventeen.
My dad is drinking again.
There are three green-tinted beer bottles sitting on the coffee table next to him. His legs are stretched out across the charcoal couch, the tv remote poised in his hand. His YouTube is turned up to its full volume, an unwelcome accompany to my violin practice. But it doesn’t matter, because he is in his own realm, cut off from the world. Him and his too-loud epic fail videos and the beer.
I remember when he used to have six beers an evening, sending Georgia and I to go get them downstairs. We used to fight about who would have to go, make it a game. But now I see that it’s not okay, him sprawled across the couch, alcohol breath and all.
“Hey Scarlett, can you get me another beer?”
Oh no. Oh no, no, no. I want to refuse, say that that’s enough, but I can’t. I can’t because he’ll just say that he’ll get it himself, that he’s the king of the house. How grateful I should be that he lets me live under his roof. How grateful I’m not.
I have to get it for him. If I don’t, he might die. If I do, he might die. I’m torn between stopping him and continuing in this cycle, open, drink, empty, repeat. I wish I never knew. I wish I never read the effects of alcohol, drugs, drinking then stopping, then getting sick then dying. My dad is drinking again.
Drinking,
Again.
My shaking hands are robotic as I pull the bottle from the fridge. Maybe I could put them outside, with a FREE sign stuck to the front. Maybe I could smash it on my way upstairs, apologise like I meant it but not regret a thing. But I can’t. I don’t have the courage.
I am not brave.
I try not to wince as I hand it to him, hearing him asking if I wanted to play a board game. But the words don’t penetrate past me, past my wall. I am coated in layers of paint, the world won’t ever see my face. The rain can’t touch me, the sun can’t guide my path.
Nobody can fix me.
And now, I’m dragging the world down with me. I’m not stopping my dad from drinking. I’m not telling Leila. I’m not helping Charlie.
I’m broken. I’m useless.
You must sign up or log in to submit a comment.
0 comments