Her (23 page)

I looked beside me and saw Daniel’s crumpled-up artwork. I smiled as I grabbed it, remembering our conversation. I opened the paper, and inside was a drawing of a mysterious girl. She didn’t appear to be smiling. Her hair was long, and it went down her shoulders. She had a swoop bang that covered one eye. She was beautiful. She looked like she didn’t smile much. She probably didn’t need to. Her perfectly sculpted, heart-shaped lips made her expressions without moving. I noticed that she actually was smiling, even though her lips weren’t curled up enough at the corners to show it. Her eyes gave a hint that she may have been in love.

A sick feeling came over me. It wasn’t nausea. It was the sickness that came with love. When you loved someone and they didn’t know that you loved them, it was sickening. Who was this girl? Whom did she love? Where was she? Maybe she was gone because she’d loved him. She’d realized that it wasn’t what she thought it would be. Maybe he’d told her that he loved her, and maybe he’d let her down. I leaned back on my pillow.

Dear Kristen,

Are you okay? Why did you do that? You scared me so bad. How could you do something like that? I am mad at you. Didn’t we say that we would always be there for each other? Mom said that we would start over and get better as a family. Why did you mess everything up? Mom is mad. She closed your door and said that no one can go in there. I don’t want you to die. There is hope for you.

Love,

Nick

I folded his letter in two, and closed myself up inside. The pain was deep. I couldn’t do anything locked in Bent Creek. I couldn’t do anything to make him understand. I didn’t want him to understand. Nick was the one who’d gotten the support after Jack had been sent to prison. Everyone had said that Nick was the one who’d needed treatment because he’d been the one hurt. Alison and I hadn’t been hurt. No, we hadn’t been hurt at all. Everyone had listened to Nick because he’d been Jack’s victim. He’d been small and helpless.  He had been heard. Mom had made sure of it. Nick had received treatment. He’d gone through years of psychiatric help and support. And I had begun cutting myself. Mr. Sharp had become my only real friend. He’d showed me how to deal with the pain. I’d tried to kill myself, but I hadn’t succeeded. 
That
was what Nick couldn’t understand.

I balled up his letter in anger. The feeling of sickness and death swelled back up inside of me. If my heart could just stop right now, if it could just go with the rotting feeling that I had inside, if it would just stop on my command, I would be free, I thought.

In anger, I tore the letter into pieces. I couldn’t hold the rage inside of me in any longer. I bit into the shredded pieces of paper and chewed them. While chewing, I grabbed my pillow and repeatedly punched it as hard as I could.

I screamed, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

I screamed until my throat burned. Janine rushed over to my side and tried to grab my arm. I pushed her away, still screaming. She flew back and hit the wall. I wasn’t aware of my own strength. I fell back on my bed and started biting the sheets, having swallowed the paper in my mouth.

Janine ran out of the room. I couldn’t stop her. I was too busy trying to eat my bed sheets in a fit of rage. I tried to focus my mind, but I was too far gone. Mr. Sharp stared at me from across the room. Nodding his head and smiling, he told me to bleed. I bit hard into the sheet, and let it cut my lip. Blood pinched out. It wasn’t satisfying enough, so I tried harder so that the blood would spill. My teeth ground into the sheets, and I heard myself grunting and snarling like an animal. This madness was wonderful, and it made Mr. Sharp excited.

“That’s right,” he said. “Do them all a favor. You’re hopeless. That’s why things are the way they are. It’s because you are hopeless, Kristen. Hopeless.”

I hadn’t always been... hopeless...

Hope had risen out of my fingertips and onto the paper when I used to write. I’d loved writing poems. Dad used to be my biggest fan. He used to ask to read some of my poetry whenever I was writing and he’d knock on my bedroom door and just come in without an answer. He used to hover over me in curiosity. He used to be interested in me.

“Is my girl writing again?” he asked.

“Yes, Daddy, but it’s not ready yet. You can’t read it,” I told him with a shy giggle.

He wouldn’t let up. He kept pressing me until I gave in and read to him what I had written so far.

“Okay, fine. Are you ready?” I gave in.

“Yeah,” he said with a smile. “I don’t think I can wait any longer to hear what future award-winning poet, Kristen Elliott, has written.”

“All right,” I said. I looked into his eyes and my heart fluttered.  “Happiness and Hope, by Kristen Elliott. There are no real words to describe what happens when I look into your eyes. Is it happiness? It makes hope rise. Hope that I always make you smile. Hope that your smile will never disappear. Convincing, charming, sweet, and always there for me. I hope that we will always be.”

“Who was that for?” he asked.

“Dad,” I said, feeling shy.

“Okay. It’s beautiful,” he said. He leaned in and kissed me. He walked over to the door. He winked with one last sweet smile, and he left.

There was no more hope. There were no more smiles.

I didn’t think about what I was doing when I swung as hard as I could. I had to keep them away from me. The counselors were pulling on me. Three of them grabbed me off the bed and carried me from the bedroom. I continued to scream with blood dripping from my mouth. They carried me to a room and laid me down on a bed. I kicked and screamed harder when I saw that the nurse had a needle.

Geoffrey told her to stick me. He was probably angry that I had knocked his glasses off his face while I’d been having the tantrum. The nurse and another counselor locked me down in restraints. The nurse stuck the long needle in my neck and pushed all of the liquid inside that needle into my veins. It burned.

I screamed out to them hoarsely that I hated them and that I needed to die. My throat burned. I felt myself start to move in slow motion. My mouth slowed down. Screaming became hard to do, so I stopped. Exhausted tears fell out of my eyes. I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the bright lights and the dizziness that came over me. My mind stopped racing. Thoughts slowed down. Warmness came over me.

I heard them talking over me. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t open my eyelids to see them. The lids felt too heavy.

“She will be okay. Give her a few hours,” I heard the nurse say.  “Are you all right, Geoffrey?”

The door shut.

“No,” I tried to scream out. It was just a whisper.

I heard my heart pounding in my brain. It was loud, and it made my head hurt. I knew this was prison. I knew it. Where was Dr. Cuvo? He’d said that I could tell him if something terrible happened. Something terrible was happening. I tried one last time to yell out, but my mouth wouldn’t open. My teeth weighed down my jaws. I felt a loss of control over my body. Every part of me was too heavy to move. Even my brain felt weighed down. Exhausted and without hope, I decided to give up. I took a deep breath and let go.

PART 2

The Mirror

By Kristen Elliott

The mirror

Made of shattered glass and full of veins

Disfiguring her maimed beautiful image.

Inside and out

A reflection bears the burden

Of who she is

What she has become

And what will forever be.

One side Her-self

The other side just

Her.

C
HAPTER 22

When you are heavily sedated, it is almost like being awake, but you are so deep in sleep that you don’t even realize it. When I slept, I often dreamed. As I laid in the BCR, I had very vivid dreams of the past that felt real.  

John and I used to sit together after school and read our poetry to each other. I was just a freshman, and he was a junior. He played on the basketball team, swam for the swim team, made Honor Roll Society, and was in our high school's writing club. He was a celebrity in my eyes, and he had many admirers at our school. They were mostly girls. What kind of interest did he have in a loser like me? I wondered every time a pretty girl walked by and smiled, but he looked right through her and continued to talk to me and show me attention.

John’s smile reminded me of my dad’s.  John’s father was my dad’s brother, after all. Did that make us cousins? Well, technically John had no blood relation to me. John’s father and my dad weren’t really close to each other, as most siblings were. Our families were acquainted, and we lived close by, no matter what. In spite of it all, I still could not force myself look at John as a relative. I liked him too much. I loved him less like a relative, and more like what I wanted him to be: a boyfriend.

My dreams carried me into a deep sleep filled with vivid images and heavy thoughts of sadness and nothing.  Suppressed feelings arose in my dreams to haunt me, turning these dreams into the most awful, realistic nightmares. Mr. Sharp always found a way to work himself into my thoughts while I slept. His voice seemed louder in my dreams than it did when I was awake.

“How many times have you been kissed, Kristen?”
he taunted me. “Come on, and tell me how many. Have you ever been kissed?”

I told Mr. Sharp, “He might kiss me. He might, if I look at him in the way those girls do when they want boys to kiss them. He’ll know, and he’ll want to.” Mr. Sharp cut me deep with a knife, so that I wouldn’t feel the pain of what I knew would never be.

“John will never do that,” Mr. Sharp said as my blood dripped down my arms. “John won’t kiss you because he does not love you that way. No one can ever love you like that.”

I wanted to wake from this dream. I didn’t want to be pulled back into the past. I didn’t want to see John smiling as he looked at my writings and read them aloud. This entity pulled me in. I was fourteen years old again, sitting in the room where the writing club met after school. John and I were the only ones in the room. I wasn’t in the writing club. I just wanted to let him read some of my writings, and I wanted to read some of his. I was sincerely interested in his writing as well as spending more time with him. It was nice to know that John was interested in my work. He was interested in something about me. That fact was hard to believe at first, but when he and I sat in the room together, just the two of us, and he smiled at me with genuine affection, I could not deny it. The feeling of being close to him was how I imagined being in love felt. I was nervous, but I was calm and excited all at the same time.  This dream felt as real as when it had actually happened.

The day was warm, and the sun was out in a partly cloudy sky. I felt my skin tingling like it always did when John smiled at me. He looked beautiful as he parted his lips slightly, smiled, and started to pass the sheet of notebook paper back to me that contained a piece of my soul in the form of words. He held the paper out to me and softly said, “Kristen.” It was just simply, “Kristen.” The sound of my name from his lips and the way he said it made me blush.

“What do you think?” I asked nervously.

“I think that you should join our writing club,” he admitted.

As I reached out to grab my paper from his hand, I shook my head and said, “No, thanks. That’s okay.”

His smile disappeared, and what looked like disappointment took its place. He snatched the paper back towards him.

“Oh, you’re scared,” he said.

“Scared of what? I’m not scared,” I defended.

A grin appeared on his face.

He said, “Yes, you are. You’re safe in this little world you’ve created for yourself. You write your poems and you keep them on a shelf. I’m the first person you’ve let actually read something because you’re afraid of letting your work out for other people to see and criticize.”

“
I’m
scared? What about you? You haven’t put any writings of yours in my hands yet. I’ve already shared three of my poems with you, John.”

He laughed, “You know what? You're right.”

He reached into his notebook and, without looking at what he was selecting, ripped out a single sheet of paper. He slid it across the desk to me.

I cleared my throat and began to read aloud. The poem did not have a title, nor did it have many lines. However, the emotion that it made me feel almost crushed me. I felt everything in those few lines that he wrote.

I began, “Disappointment is like grinding your teeth ten times and then ten thousand times over.”

John stopped me by calling out to me. I looked up from the paper, and saw that he was reaching his hand out to me.

“I gave you the wrong one,” he said. “Don’t read that one.”

“Now who’s scared?” I got up from the table and continued reading while pacing around the room.

“I swear that I try to make you proud. I try to make you agree. Why is it that everyone else gets it, but you just cannot see? You said, ‘Fly that kite, son! Fly it, and you will see how high you can get it!’ It was almost like that kite was my life, and if I didn’t make it fly, you would be disappointed in me. Am I flying now? Is it enough? Or do you need more from me? Tell me how it should fly. Tell me which direction to get it into flight. Tell me how high. I don’t want to disappoint you, Dad, because I want to fly this kite. For you.”