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Sometimes she just… hurts. Life sucks like that.
Like right now. She’s sitting in her room, at home, and she hurts for more reasons than the bruises under her shirt and the spot where she chewed the nail on her left thumb down a little too far. Not far enough to bleed, but the specific kind of too-far where it hadn’t hurt in the moment and now, a day later, it aches something fierce. Probably something about how the nail has to grow over skin. She doesn’t know.
She got an F yesterday, and the teacher called her over after class and gently told her that if she just corrected the name at the top to— she doesn’t think it. She doesn’t. It’s not her name, so why would she care. Anyway. He’d said if she changed it to not-her-name and handed it back, he’d grade it properly, because “Illi” wasn’t close enough to not-her-name to let slide as a nickname.
Which, y’know, is nonsense, but it still hurts.
It had felt… transgressive, progressive, mold-breaking or freeing or brilliant or whatever when she’d first gotten the test back with F marked so clearly. Defying the system. Real, for once. Or something.
Almost without her noticing, her hand drifts up to her chest level. She brushes her thumb (aches) across each fingertip— the ring finger seems a good candidate— she brings it to her mouth and runs her lower incisor along the crack between the nail and its bed. There’s enough there, maybe. She starts in the corner of her nail closest to her thumb, eyes closing as she focuses on nibbling at it with her upper and lower right lateral incisors.
Miles told her that her teeth were tiny and weird a while back. She doesn’t really care. They work well enough for this— probably better than they would if they were bigger.
But her chem teacher looked at her so disappointedly today. And he’s been nice, and she hates disappointing (better get used to it, freak) people who’re nice. Everything sucks.
The corner of her nail is not lifting enough to get a good grip on it with her teeth. She wrinkles up her nose, frowning, and tries nibbling the other corner.
And what’s-his-name had punched her in the face yesterday, and her nose kinda itches and kinda feels full and awkward and blocked up and its starting to hurt the inside of her brain. It doesn’t actually hurt at all, she doesn’t think, but it’s niggling at the inside of her head all brownish and wrong. The other corner of her ring-finger nail isn’t lifting much, either— though it does, just a little, and she manages to snip off a tiny slice with her teeth.
Her nose is wrong her nose is wrong her nose is wrong her nose is wrong her nose is wrong and Ray says it’s weird that she thinks like that but it’s WRONG
She was going to try being a little less weird, though, so she pulls her finger out of her mouth and just gently presses at the side of her nose, then pinches at the bridge and slowly pulls down, making her nostrils fold closed and flat until her fingers fall off the tip of her nose.
That, however, quickly turns out to have been a mistake. There’s mucus all over the inside of her nose now, and she can feel it and it’s WRONG but even MORE WRONG now.
She tries rubbing her nose on the back of her hand to get some of the mucus that feels like it’s dripping out, that feels WRONG, off of her. It only works so well, and she still feels WRONG, but it’s a little better.
Whatever. She sends a mental apology to Ray— she doesn’t need to, she knows, he doesn’t actually care that much and he has his own set of terrible habits— and shoves her thumb up her nose, wiggling it around to gather the mucus and bring it out, then sucks it off her thumb-tip. It came from inside her face, it can go back inside her face. It’s fine. Ray doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
There’s a ridge inside her nostril, though. She felt it. It’s not supposed to be there. It always is, nowadays— and she knows she’s only perpetuating the problem, but it makes her all sorts of shaky on the inside, her stomach flipping and her head buzzing. It’s wrong, and bad, and everything sucks, and if she just fixes it—
Her index finger goes up her nostril. She wedges the nail (really, it’s long enough to be chewed off, she just hasn’t gotten around to it yet) carefully under the ridge, prying at it.
Prying it out hurts. Her eyes well up reflexively
It takes a few tries. She has to switch fingers a couple times— once her finger gets slippery with spit, it doesn’t work so well. It eventually comes up, though. She scrapes it out and stares at it.
She can feel the slow creep of something liquid crawling down her nostril as she looks apathetically at the yellow-maroon lump of scab-and-snot under her fingernail. It tastes good— the texture is among the best kinds of mucus her body makes. Whatever.
Her nose itches now. She grabs a tissue and blows it— red speckles the white. She rubs the outside of her nose, opening the little wound on the inside further. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t— but it works now. She tries on a grin in the mirror of a compact-hairbrush-thing she got free from a county fair a while back. The blood trickling down the space between her nose and her lips has picked up its flow, and she has to stick out her tongue and catch it so it doesn’t splatter onto her carpet. Blood doesn’t come out easily, and she’d rather not have to clean it right now.
She dips her finger into the stream and rubs it onto her lips like lipgloss.
It tastes real— her thin lips are crimson now, and they look more real than anything else on her. She smiles, just a little, licking it off and watching how it gathers in the corners of her mouth.
Ray’s gonna knock on her door in just a bit, ask if she’s feeling okay and does she want to go somewhere— anywhere— with them all, and she’ll get up and smile at him and wash the blood off her face, and he’ll make her feel as real as the blood does— but for now she smiles at herself in the little mirror. She’s right there, in the mirror, in the way she only is when there’s blood and bruises on her skin.