The blood drains from her face, the lights in her eyes flash and flare. But in an instance her composure is back, her eyes harden and her face flushes back to its normal color.

No emotion shows on her face as she says, “Ok,” and walks out of the un-used classroom. She walks past classrooms with doors shut, lights off; they’ve been empty for a while now.

Down to the bathroom that is still unlocked. She heaves the heavy wooden door open as she slides her backpack from her shoulder. Bang. The sound of the door shutting echoes around the room. All she sees is red. The color of the blood pumping through her veins.

She closes herself in a stall and rifles through her bag. She sees a flash of metal and knows she’s found what she’d been looking for. She pulls out a plastic bag. Inside is a tube of anti-bacteria ointment, cotton balls, Q-tips, Band-Aids, hydrogen peroxide, and gauze.

Wrapped in the gauze, just barely visible, is her relief, her escape. The thing she can’t wait to un-wrap as eagerly as a present on Christmas morning.



Her razor blade.

Glinting clean, not a speck of the previous uses. Not a speck of blood left from when she last needed to escape. It plops into her hand. Light weight, durable, and unbelievably sharp.

Taking it in her right hand she takes off her jacket and pushes up her sleeve. She slashes into her arm. Taking out her pain and anger on herself. Over and over again, liquid relief pouring out of her. But all to soon the relief is gone.

She sets to her task of cleaning up. Peroxide, ointment, gauze, she has this routine memorized. The blade is washed and carefully replaced. Everything is gone without a trace. There is none of the pain lingering here anymore, though it was surely here a moment ago.

She pulls her sleeve back down and puts on her jacket. Going into the hall she puts in her headphones. Music is her only escape that’s always there, it doesn’t fade away, it doesn’t stop. Its one of the only things keeping her from cutting even deeper.

She wipes the tears from her face with her jacket. When she looks in the mirror, she turns away quickly. She hates looking this way, vulnerable, weak. Her keys jingle as she walks up the stairs and out the front doors.

Sitting in the empty lot, her car waits to take her anywhere she wants to go, or needs to go. The wind stirs up the smell of wet leaves and pine. She smells the forest, she smells home. Combine that with the music coming into her ears and she is in heaven. Faith lives in a small cottage her grandmother left her just a few minutes out of town. It’s a small stone cottage with an iron fence and a rose garden in the back.
No one lives there but Faith, and the occasional Rose, Faith’s friend. Faith turned eighteen two months ago, that’s when she got the cottage. As for Rose, she’s stuck seventeen for two more weeks. They planned a big party, with lights strung out in the garden. But now Rose is moving. Faith and Rose have three weeks to come up with an idea to get Rose to stay here in town.

As Faith pulls into the drive she gets an idea. She pulls into the drive and puts the car in park and dials Rose’s number.

“Yea?” Rose answers

“Where are you?”

“Still at the school, why?”

“Stay there, I’ll be there in ten,”

Fifteen minutes later Rose and Faith are sitting at the City Drug counter drinking milkshakes.

“I have a plan. Why don’t you move in with me? I have a spare room. It’ll be perfect. Even though you have to pay rent,”
“One problem, my parents will never let me,”

“It won’t matter. You’ll be eighteen in two weeks, they can’t say anything then, you’ll be a legal adult. Until then we’ll just paint and you can get a job,” Faith says poking her.