Page 23 of Lessons In Grey

I didn’t go back to the East Wing today, not after yesterday. I didn’t even lift my eyes this morning, despite him writing paragraphs on the board, and now it was eighth hour, and I found myself in the regular courtyard, talking to my former therapist about something I couldn’t stop thinking about.

Something that had sunk its teeth into my mind and wouldn’t let go.

“You don’t need to know how, you just need to trust that you are.” Rachel went quiet for a moment before she released a breath, and I knew why. I wasn’t paying her anymore. She was probably home already. She had odd hours, and it was just past 4 in the afternoon, she had to be home. I was bothering her while she was with her family. I should just hang up. “Why do you believe that there is nothing good in you?”

I ripped my numb fingers through my hair, the tears freezing on my cheeks. Fall was coming early this year, and it had a score to settle. “There just can’t be.” I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t reveal what I had done. She would agree with me. She would confirm that I was nothing. That nobodysanemutilated themselves like this. She would up my dosages, tell me I needed to start seeing her again. She would want me to talk more.

But I didn’t want to talk. I wanted to feel something other than thisdreadthat had taken up root inside my bones.

“Why? You have to tell me why, Emily. If you believe it so thoroughly, you need to explain why so we can talk about it.”

“If I tell you why, you’re just going to lie and tell me that those reasons aren’t good enough,” I sobbed. “That everyone has good in them no matter the person, and that I just have to keep digging, but I’ve dug, Rachel,” I cracked, looking to my left wrist. “There is nothing there, I promise. I swear.”

“Tell me why you think that I would believe it’s a lie.”

I sighed, exasperated, my voice thick with tears, my nose dripping. “Because Charlie was the good, Rachel!” I cried. “When she died, everything that was good and right inside of me was taken. Everything that madesensedied with her.” Why couldn’t she hear me? Why couldn’t she understand?

“Emily, Charlie loved you and you loved her, and her death was a tragedy, but it doesn’t mean that you stopped being good when she left.”

I snarled, tears pouring down my face. “She didn’tleave, she fuckingdied!” I was gasping for air. “I was sick long before she died,” I explained carefully, “she was the only reason I even stayed, but nobody seems to believe that.”

“Emily,” Rachel said in that voice of calm and peace that all therapists thought people needed to hear, “you are a good person. Just because bad things happened to you doesn’t mean you are a bad person, it just means the world has some bad things in it.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and shook my head, my hand clenching painfully into the roots of my hair. “I don’t want to live in a bad place. I amtiredof living in a bad place. I just want to live in a world I can fucking breathe in. I want to not wake up every single goddamn day wanting to not be here anymore. I want tobegood.”

My head was nothing but an empty cavern filled with freezing bats constantly scratching at the inside of my skull trying to get out. It was filled with fire ants pinching and biting. Filled with gorillas pounding on the thin membranes trying to get me to listen. It was filled with numbing pain and endless emptiness.

Fuck, I just wanted it to stop, but no matter how many pills I took or how hard Jordan hit me or how much I tried to drown myself in words, nothing ever worked. It was all just…justpointless.

“You are go—”

I slammed my hand down, crying out in pain as my frozen fingers throbbed. “Fuck! You can’t just keep saying it over and over again and expect anything to change! The literal definition of insanity is what you’re doing, Rachel, you should know that!” I clenched my hand and hit my head, grinding my teeth together. “I should go.”

“Emily, tell me you won’t do anything s—”

I hung up and dropped my phone to the table, pushing my shaking hands against my head and up into my hair just to warm them a little.

How could there be any good left in me? I couldn’t understand how. Didn’t I deserve this? The bruises, the beatings, the cruel words. I deserved all of it. Serial killers were put in prison because of what they had done, this was my prison. Jordan was my prison. My penance for the awful thing I had done the night they died—

“Snowflake?”

I immediately angled my head away from him, pulling on my hood to make sure my hair covered my face before I quickly wiped my cheeks and my nose.Fuck!I was really starting to hate fate.

“Are you crying?”

“No,” I stated cooly, my hoarse voice and thick tone betraying me.

His steps slowed. “You were.”

I sniffed and cleared my throat, running my sleeve under my nose again. “My eyes were watering at the inevitability of you,” I muttered. “I can’t escape you.”

“And you never will,” he hummed, appearing in my peripheralvision through the waves of black. I watched as he sat down and folded his hands together over the cold stone table.

I frowned, sliding my hands between my thighs. God, I hated this. What was he trying to prove following me around the school? Was I never going to be left alone again?

Although, I couldn’t deny that small, sinister part of me that felt a slight twinge of comfort seeing him again. It felt certain now. Wherever I was, there he would be. He had become my ghost, despite the fighting, but he was real, tangible. I could touch him if I wanted.

My ghosts had yet to disappear, I wondered if he would be the same.