17 & Gone(60)
Then I was feeling so much. This rush of pain, all at once, radiating out from that one line below my wrist and coursing through me, pulsing in places the blade of the knife hadn’t even touched.
It shouldn’t have been bleeding so much—it was one little slice. I rinsed it in cold water until it numbed some. I lifted my arm over my head because I heard somewhere that if you get a cut that won’t stop bleeding you should hold it high over your head. Gravity will pull the blood down to your feet and if you hold it up there long enough, it’ll slow the bleeding.
But, this time, gravity didn’t make it stop.
Blood came pooling down my arm, dripping all over the white sink.
The mirror showed me a gruesome image of myself, the way the girls might have seen it, if they were there watching.
I must have been making noise, or else my mom must have woken from her own sleep and needed to visit our shared bathroom at just the exact moment I needed her. Which at first felt like some far-off answer to some unspoken plea buried inside me. And then it flipped and felt like the exact opposite.
Because next thing, my mom was bursting in and there I was, dropping my arm and hiding it behind my back, forgetting there was a pool of blood in the sink.
Don’t let her think— Fiona Burke’s commanding, distinctive voice started to say inside my left ear, but that was drowned out by my mom’s shrieking.
Before she wrestled the arm out from behind my back, and before the blood started coursing out quicker than before and running in thick rivulets to the tiled bathroom floor, before her eyes alighted on the knife and the mess of the sink and then shifted fast to me, growing wide, and wider still, I think I knew what she was thinking. And so I knew just what she’d say:
“Lauren! Honey, what— Oh my God, baby. What did you do to yourself?”
It wasn’t possible to be a girl with a bloody arm and a dirty knife in my mom’s world without having done a sick and twisted thing to myself. To her, this scene she stumbled on starring me and the butterfly knife in the upstairs bathroom could mean only one thing.
She’d read all about this. She’d gone over the case studies in her textbooks and written papers about adolescent depression and done all that research to get an A on the last one, and she was hunting for signs she must have missed.
I would have argued it. I would have explained, even if I couldn’t tell her about the missing girl this knife belonged to.
But when I looked down into the sink, I saw the blood-smeared nail clippers.
That’s the thing: They really were only nail clippers. And then I saw the shards all over the bathroom, on the sink and the floor and the shelf and even the top of the toilet and the bathtub. The sharp, bloody pieces of glass that reminded me of Natalie Montesano, who still wore bits of broken windshield in her face.
Oh.
Oh no. The mirror. It had been shattered. It was beginning to look like I’d broken the mirror and sliced myself up with it. Did I?
One glance at my arm told me I did.
Realizing this, there was a growing sense of heat building up the length of my body from the floor. My skin went feverish with it; my gaze went red. I was all red, inside and outside and everywhere.
My mom was in shock, and so she didn’t stop me when I reached out and did what I needed to do next. I pulled open her nightshirt, bursting the buttons, to expose her chest. I had to see the secret tattoo, the new art she’d had permanently etched onto her body without telling me first. And I didn’t know for sure what I expected to find there: my own Missing poster, done up in crimson Gothic lettering with my measurements and my eye color for the world to see? Or instead, a My Little Pony, a shriek of hot pink like a stove burn? A cartoon heart, the exact size and shape of the true heart my mom carried inside?
It wasn’t any of those things, my mom’s new tattoo. That was what startled me. It wasn’t a tattoo at all.
It was skin. Her bare skin. Blank as a porcelain sink before all my blood messed it up.
She pulled herself away from me, closed her ripped shirt, and then came for me again, arms out, wanting to hug me, I think, or wanting to stop me from doing much worse than I’d already done.
The heat in my head.
How it buzzed, centering in on my brain like I was about to lose my own signal.
An
infestation
of
wasps
expanding up the walls of my mind and burrowing into all my corners where I hadn’t lived enough years to keep any thoughts yet. They dislodged pieces of me. Like how one time I was stung by a wasp in the backyard and my mom cradled me in her arms like she was doing now and pressed a package of frozen peas to the sting, and the peas really did make the pain ease away and now whenever I eat frozen vegetables I feel a sense of deep comfort, of love, because it reminds me of her. But why was I thinking of the frozen peas at that moment? And how come there was so much blood? And why couldn’t I feel my — So dizzy.
Needed to sit down.
When my mom started shaking me, saying, “Stay awake, baby, stay awake,”
the lost girls chose to remain silent and refused to come out.
They kept silent as the room went black.
And I guess they keep silent now, too, because of what came after. Because they’re afraid. Because we all are.
— 48 — WHAT do you do with a girl who’s slit her own wrist with the shards of a mirror? Who’s done it vertical, like she knew what she was doing, and had every intention to die? What do you do with a girl who hears voices whispering secrets in her ears? Who believes she’s chased by shadows? Who has an unnatural, unexplainable connection to a host of missing girls?