Imagine a new classroom filled with people you don’t know, running and hugging each other after a summer of sleep-away camp and expensive vacations and sleeping until noon.  Imagine you spent your summer packing up your house and moving away from the only home you’ve ever known, from the suburbs to the city. You aren’t wearing what everyone else is wearing, you don’t talk like everyone else is talking. There aren’t even lockers- there’s cubbies.
Now imagine you can’t stop thinking about any of these things, and you can’t stop thinking about where they’ll lead. About how nobody will want to be your friend and you’ll have to be by yourself on partner projects and fail all of them, and then you’ll get held back and have to go through this hellish nightmare all over again.
You’re in fifth grade, and your fingers are bleeding.

Once you’ve made a friend, your life improves. You invite them over to your house, you play hide and seek, they ask you to be their partner during school math projects. But you know, somewhere deep inside yourself, that the other shoe is going to drop. You live in constant fear of something that will send them packing, something wrong with you that will cause them to sit on the other side of the room, to stop walking to lunch with you. It could be the types of books you read, the way you do your hair. But the one that you can’t stop thinking about is dirt.

Your friend will notice that your hands are dirty. She’ll tell everyone that you don’t wash your hands, that you’re spreading your cold and infecting everything you touch. Nobody will come near you, and you’ll be alone, ostracized. You begin to wash your hands any time they come in contact with anything contaminated. You pull a piece of hair out of your mouth and you wash your hands in case you touched any of your own spit. You lay your hand on the desktop for too long and you wash your hands because anybody could have been sitting in that desk last period. You put on your jacket and you wash your hands in case you accidentally sweated in the sleeves and you touched it.
One day, you wipe your hands on a paper towel in the bathroom for the fifth time that hour and it comes away bloody.

Later that year, after your parents have forbidden you from washing your hands unless it’s before a meal, you finish the second book in the Hunger Games Trilogy and you become obsessed with the idea of death. You can’t stop thinking about your sister’s funeral, wondering who would show up and what you would wear and if they would let you say anything about her. You call your mother once ever five minutes she is late getting home. Before you walk away from anyone, the last thing you have to see is their eyes. Sometimes you have to try three times before you get it right, but you can’t end with looking at their mouths, or their foreheads, or their hands. What if you never see them again?

When you lie in bed at night, with your door open so that you can hear the smoke alarm and the carbon monoxide alarm in case they ever go off, you think about all the ways in which you could lose someone. A car crash, a plane crash, a ceiling tile and a pool of blood, a dystopian arena filled with killers, the villains from the crime shows your mom loves so much. You can’t close your eyes until you’ve ruled them all out, and even then you flip through the list again, maybe twice, just to make sure that everyone is safe.

It’s dark, and you want yellow chrysanthemums at your funeral.

When you turn fifteen, you think you’re okay. You know how to french braid, you do all your homework. You don’t cry until you’re lying on your bed with the door closed and your face in your pillow. You don’t wash your hands, and you don’t look anybody in the eye.

You have learned to bite your fingers, the skin on the insides of your cheek, to pick at the skin on your lips and pull out eyelashes and hairs from your eyebrows. You pick at blemishes, you reopen scabs. You do it all silently, and without noticing.

The nurse learns which periods you’re most likely to come get a bandaid to wrap around your nails, your friends watch carefully at the amount of scabs you’ve amassed around your hands to judge whether to ask you to hang out after school, and your mom starts to spout facts about onychophagia and trichtillomenia, and obsessive behavioral anxiety disorder. You type these all into a google search engine and its like you’re seeing yourself on a page, summed up into one neat, handy disorder that can be treated with stress balls and bad tasting nail polish.
But the page didn’t live with you for thirteen years, it didn’t make you cry on the bus ride home in second grade because of your bleeding nails or count the scars from scabs picked time and time again.

You have lived with a disorder your whole life. You’ve had teachers single you out in front of the class, yell at you to take your hands out of your mouth. You’ve given class presentations with blood on your lips, you’ve spent hours awake in your bed with the future winding out in front of you, a path of disaster that you see coming like a freight train and can’t sleep for the noise.

But you don’t tell anyone, because you’re white and you’re upper middle class and you go to a beautiful school with rivers that run through the center, and you can’t tell people that everything makes your heart beat fast, and everything makes you want to curl up into a ball and sleep for a month because then they’ll call you ungrateful, they’ll tell you that you’re lazy and you aren’t working hard enough and you can’t stop yourself thinking so you rip skin off your body and to fill your mind with the pain instead of everything else that the world has to offer.

You’re okay, as long as there’s blood on your fingers. You’re just fine.