Hedge by Jane Delury

Author:Jane Delury [Delury, Jane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

11

Over the first six months that had followed their return from the Hudson Valley, Ella gradually told Maud and Peter about her self-harm. She had first cut her thigh the winter before they went to Montgomery Place. She hadn’t been happy at school since the start of seventh grade, and one afternoon, sitting on her bed, feeling rejected by her friends again, she clenched her leg with her fingers and dug nails into skin, leaving half-moons. Pressing harder, she dragged the moons into comets. Instantly the sick tension in her body released. Two days later, she did it again, this time in the school bathroom. By January, she’d moved from her nails to an X-Acto knife blade from the art room, wrapped in tissue paper in her pocket. Every day, during lunch, she’d wait in a stall for the bathroom to empty, then tug down her jeans.

At home, she sat at the dinner table, her only desire to lock herself in the bathroom with a fresh patch of skin. She didn’t reflect on what she was doing. “I wasn’t thinking about it,” she said. “I just did it.” If that bone-bruising dread came over her—in the lunch line at school, sitting on the couch watching television—if that voice said, You’re ugly, you’re stupid, no one likes you, she’d get up, relief descending before she’d even reached for the blade.

By spring, she became more daring, pushing deeper, harder, teasing out more blood. After stanching the cut with toilet paper, she’d tug up her pants, open the door, and go back to the classroom or the kitchen feeling better than she had when she’d left. There was excitement too. It felt good to get away with it. When she couldn’t fall asleep, she ran her fingertips over the ridges, remembering where she’d been when she’d made this cut near her hip bone, that one by the peach-colored mole.

A few days before the flight to New York, her period came early, and she bled through her jeans at school. Mortified, she went to the nurse for a pad. In the bathroom, she took off one of her hoop earrings, dug it into her thigh, and yanked. The next morning, the cut was infected. “I was mad at myself for not doing it right,” she said. She couldn’t find antibiotic cream in the medicine cupboard so she used rubbing alcohol. The cut wept that night and the redness had spread by morning. On her way down the stairs to the car, she clenched the railing until she felt the bite of a splinter. Later, she showed her hand to Peter, who removed the splinter and got a tube of the antibiotic cream that Ella hadn’t been able to find. That night, she used the cream on her thigh. While she and Louise flew to New York, the wound had only started to heal.

Ella’s treatment began soon after their return to Marin, every pointed object in the house locked in a drawer in Peter’s study. Ella barely left her bed.

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