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Los Angeles July 23, 2020 Paz

12:00 a.m. (Pacific Daylight Time)

Death-Cast better call to tell me I’m gonna die today.

12:34 a.m.

Death-Cast still hasn’t called.

1:15 a.m.

What’s taking Death-Cast so long to call?

2:30 a.m.

I’m starting to get nervous that Death-Cast won’t call.

2:49 a.m.

Death-Cast isn’t calling tonight, are they?

3:00 a.m.

Death-Cast didn’t call, and it’s so heartbreaking that I have to hurt myself.

I wanna boil in steaming-hot water like I’m cooking myself alive.

I wanna be in so much pain that I bite down on my lip and draw blood.

I wanna get as close to death as possible in this world that hates me but won’t kill me.

I grab my thick journal out of the nightstand, which I’ve hollowed out to hide my knife from my mom and stepdad so they keep

believing I’m doing better. I flip open the tacky cover, thinking about how this book was scarier when it was a 365-day journal

instead of storage for a weapon. The inspirational quotes, the blank entries for my feelings, the hundreds of pages I needed

to live through helped me realize how I don’t wanna live long enough to have to get another journal.

I grab the knife, shaking, but I stop myself.

Fear makes me freeze, ever since childhood. But sometimes the fear gets so big that I unfreeze and do something terrible.

Something life-ruining. So no matter how good it feels to hurt myself, I know it’s not a good feeling.

I keep holding the knife, but I don’t do the terrible thing.

I need to get past this impulse.

There’s a million things I can be doing instead of this one thing that I’m not supposed to do. I could wake up Mom or Rolando and ask for help. I could call my therapist or even the suicide hotline and ask for help. I could return the knife to the kitchen where it belongs. I could throw out all our knives so they never find their way back into my bedroom or on my body. I could force myself to smile and laugh to trick my brain into thinking I’m happy. I could have a dance party by myself. I could reread my favorite book or watch another terrible comedy. Or I could just stay under this weighted blanket like it’s a person holding me back from getting into a fight—a fight with myself. There’s a million things I can do, but I wanna do the one thing I shouldn’t because it’s the closest I can get to doing the thing I can’t do since Death-Cast didn’t call.

I’m done trying to help myself.

Bad things should happen to bad people.

And I’ve been told for half of my life that I am one.

I roll the weighted blanket off me, but it doesn’t put up a big fight to stop me from fighting myself. I guess it’s more of

a corpse than someone who cares about me.

I grab the knife, squeezing the handle so hard that my nails dig into my palm. It hurts, but that’s nothing compared to what

the blade’s serrated edges will feel like. I can’t think about that part. Reliving that pain turns me off; I just have to

do my best to disassociate, that’s the best way to both protect and attack myself.

The first time I self-harmed, I thought about my flashback scene in the movie that shows why Larkin Cano grew up to become Scorpius Hawthorne’s soul-foe, the Draconian Marsh. Larkin had a troubled childhood that pushed him so far that he stopped using the shield spell to protect himself and started using violent spells to attack others. Something I used to go off about in therapy was how people around the world found it in their hearts to forgive a fictional villain who committed terrible crimes against innocent people, but not me, a real boy who killed my violent dad to save my mom’s life. But now I see everything for what it is: Larkin Cano isn’t real and I am, and that’s why I deserve to be attacked by others and myself.

I think about the moment I became a killer, when I aimed the gun at my dad and pulled the trigger, and just as impulsive as

that was, I start cutting myself.

I drag the knife along my inner thigh, where no one will see the damage I’ve done. My body twists as I scratch the scars that

have been scabbing over from when I last hurt myself five nights ago. It’s so unbearable that I squeeze my crying eyes shut,

but I don’t stop digging the knife into my thigh like I’m trying to make it part of my body, not even when blood starts sticking

to my knuckles as I run the knife up and down, up and down. I show myself no mercy as I run the knife farther down my thigh,

farther than I ever have before, carving my way through this untouched flesh instead of tripling down on my scars and scabs.

I bite down on my shirt’s collar to stop myself from screaming because if Mom and Rolando walk in now, then I’ll never be

able to do this again, and as unbearable as it is now, I know I’ll need it again.

As my body fights the next breath I don’t want, I set down the bloody knife.

That’s enough for tonight.

And one day forever when Death-Cast finally fucking calls.