Sad Perfect by Stephanie Elliot

Author:Stephanie Elliot [Stephanie Elliot]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374303754
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2017-02-28T05:00:00+00:00

34

The next morning you don’t get up for school. You can’t. The monster makes you sleep. Your mom tries to get you up.

“Can’t. Cramps are still bad. And head kills,” you say from under your covers. You make sure your wrists are hidden from her. They are red and raw.

She closes the door and you go back to sleep. You sleep all day.

When you wake up you feel a gnawing in your stomach. You know it’s a deep hunger, you’ve felt this way before. And it’s an odd thing—to feel hunger but not to desire food. You know your body needs fuel but you have no idea what you’d be able to put into your mouth and chew. You don’t know what to feed the monster, what would satiate the emptiness in your stomach, what would fill that hole in you.

You sit up in bed. It’s four p.m.

You haven’t eaten since breakfast yesterday morning.

You pick up your phone to text Jae, knowing she’s got to be pissed at you. At the beginning of the week you’d ditched her by hiding out in the library and you haven’t responded to her texts. You’re sure she’s probably also worried about you.

Hey

Hi

You mad at me?

I’ll get over it. Why weren’t you at school? What’s wrong?

I think Ben and I are over

What? WHY!?

You love Jae so much for this. Because although she may be mad at you, she’s still your best friend and she cares about you.

I screwed everything up. I made him leave my house Saturday night.

Oh

Yeah. I don’t know WTF I’m doing

You OK?

I honestly don’t know

I’m sorry

I’m sorry too. I’m not a very good friend.

I still love you tho

Come over later?

Can’t. Gotta pack for the fam Labor Day trip to the lake. We leave in the morning.

Oh forgot! Text me when you get back

K bye

You turn on some music. It’s thrashing and loud, music you normally wouldn’t choose. It’s angsty music. It’s good to listen to because you feel angsty. You feel unsettled. How could you have turned Ben away like that, told him to leave, when he was becoming more important to you than anyone, more important than the monster. He could have helped you kill the monster. If only you had told him.

You reach for the safety pins on your nightstand. You have two of them—one small one, and one really big one that could pin together a wool winter coat it’s so huge. You take the big one and start scratching at the very center of the inside of your wrist. You scratch and scrape, scrape, scrape. You don’t break the skin right at this spot though, because you know.

You know what’s underneath that flimsy layer.

It’s a blue river vein.

And what’s flowing in that river is too important. Maybe.

You’re not quite ready for that.

You don’t want to give up quite yet.

Sure, you’re unhappy. You’re so unhappy. The monster’s taken everything away from you that you’ve loved. Your family, your joy, your hope. Ben.

Ben.

The skin at your wrist starts to turn pink, and bits of it flake as you scrape it away and your wrist turns angry.

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