Dysmorphia

On the Edge

"Florence?"

It took a moment to place him, she knew she had seen him before but her swirling thoughts couldn't put a name to the face. And then it came to her, standing in front of her was Chase, Chase Roberts who had disappeared almost without a trace from her school last year leaving people talking about the boy who had charmed many in his first three days there. Her best friend Cooper had proclaimed him the love of her life within seconds of seeing him across the hallway, clutching Florence's arm with barely contained excitement gushing about how Phillipson High finally had one good looking guy attending the school. She hadn't seen the fuss at the time, he was a pretty boy with tightly curled brown hair and a confident stride, someone who would never look her way.

The normalcy of that memory in comparison to now made her speechless at the sight of him, he looked less vibrant was the only word she could think of, before he had seemed to stand out easily from a crowd, now he was paler and looked like he had aged more than a year since she had last seen him.

Seeing him, someone who had been there before it had all happened made it painfully real. She expected him to begin speaking, say something consoling, something nice or even something patronising. But as she watched him his expression changed from shocked to severe, as if he'd decided something hateful about her, an immediate dislike.

Florence became instantly defensive.

She hardly even knew Chase Roberts, he had been at her school for maybe a month before it happened before anything happened, everyone said he'd moved out of town, yet here he was judging her before he even knew her story.

"Florence...what happened?" he finally asked.

She didn't think he actually expected an answer, Florence was good at being able to place people usually to figure them out but when she searched his face for any hint of how this was going to go she only saw blankness, the anger that had clouded his features had disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

"Mitch told me they had taken in a girl around my age but I didn't think it was someone I actually knew, they said you were on SW?"

She sniffed "What's SW?"

He looked at her strangely, like she was being deliberately obtuse.

"Suicide Watch."

Suicide watch.

Two words that carried so much meaning, she wouldn't have described herself as suicidal, but they'd given her that label just like they had all labelled her at the very beginning. For something that was meant to be such a personal decision she wasn't even allowed a say in her own mental health status. She looked down guiltily at her thighs, the concoction of medicine they had put her on seemed to have dulled the pain from the blades, or then again it could just have been the dullness she had felt on the inside for so long making a reappearance.

"What time is it?" she blurted out.

When he didn't respond she grew more desperate.

"Please you have to tell me! The time?"

Chase blinked, obviously shocked at her seemingly irrational behaviour, but glanced at his watch nevertheless.

"Seven p.m." his brow furrowed "Why?"

Relief washed over her, and the terror started to subside, she couldn't have been in here for more than four hours, they couldn't have fed her anything to bloat her already bloated body in four hours. She sunk back onto the cushion gripping onto the metal bars around the bed to stabilise herself.

Chase went back to the end of her bed and picked up a folder, a blue folder with 'Oakwood Clinic' emblazoned on the front. He flipped through the pages, reading quickly and totally ignoring her existence. He paused at one section before coming back over to her side.

Chase regarded her with a searching look though she didn't know why, he had simply read her folder. She wanted to see what exactly her folder had said about her, what she felt and what she'd been through didn't make sense typed out harshly on a piece of paper.

Then it hit her, the folder would tell him what she'd done to herself, and what exactly she was.

"It's not like that." she said, feeling a desperate need to explain herself.

"It says they think you may have broken your own arm."

He looked ill at the suggestion.

She shook her head again, she wanted to shout that she would never do something like that but for some reason her lips were tightly sealed.

"No. No, I didn't. I... I fell –"

He cut her off.

"Down the school steps." he finished.

Florence closed her eyes. She didn't want to really remember how she had broken her arm the laughter that had followed as she had lay on the gravel, the altercation at her house, squeezing behind the tiny space between her wardrobe and her bed but knowing she was trapped.

She had been so preoccupied with the past that she didn't make a move to stop Chase when he pulled down her blanket.

"Wait. What are you doing?'"

Unfortunately, she knew exactly what he was doing.

He glanced at her, determination in his eyes. She wondered why this seemed to mean so much, they barely knew one another. He lifted the sleeve of her hospital gown, revealing her makeshift bandages.

It had been more of an experiment, a way to see how her pain could be dealt with on the outside rather than keeping it inside. Once she had begun she'd realised the only thing she would be getting from the small cuts was an infection, she'd panicked and went to the department store to buy as much cotton bandages as she could.

"And these happened, how?" he muttered.

"I don't have to tell you anything," she said sharply, it was a lost effort really because he knew everything that was deemed to be medically important.

He ignored her and started unwrapping the bandage until he got down to the plasters. He was shaking his head, not looking at her.

She tried to squirm away. "Don't touch me."

"Trust me, I'd prefer I didn't have to. But these need to be cleaned properly. Did you even bother to wash them, or were you hoping you'd die from an infection?"

His eyes darted from her arm to her face, daring her to argue. Carefully, he began removing the bandages.

She bit the inside of her cheek and refused to show any reaction when the last plaster, which had dried to the wound, was eased off. Chase was breathing heavily through his nose, shaking his head every few minutes. She felt like a two-year old being admonished for something she hadn't done.

He disappeared and came back with a tray of ointments and fresh bandages.

"I don't need this from you," she said, after one too many disappointed head shakes.

He paused, mouth half open like he was about to say something, but then just went back to playing the role of a nurse. She didn't think she'd ever met anyone so frustratingly obnoxious.

She felt her face heat up. "If you just undo these straps I can do it myself"

"That's not going to happen."

Now it was her turn to shake her head.

"You don't know me. You don't know the first thing about me"

"Let me guess. There's more than one of these harmless not self-inflicted little cuts on your body?"

She didn't answer.