Stupid. This whole thing was stupid.
Wallflower lay on her bed, twisting around in the sheets. She buried her face in her pillow, only to flip back over and pull the sheet over her head. A second later, she groaned and tossed the sheet away, turning onto her side. She stared at the undecorated walls, at the dirty laundry on the floor, at the creaking ceiling fan, at anything other than the cartridge on her bedside table.
Eighteen days. She had made it eighteen days without hurting herself. Every single one of them was doomed to fail from the start, and yet there were eighteen of them all the same. How had she managed that? Wallflower stared at her forearm, her gaze tracing along each and every fading scar.
She only managed it because she promised Sunset she would. Why did Sunset have to ask her? Why had Wallflower been stupid enough to agree?
It was her own fault, she knew. Sunset wasn’t an idiot. Of course she had figured out what Wallflower was doing to herself, what with her wearing the same gross sweater every day through the summer. Wallflower wondered who else knew but just hadn’t said anything to her about it.
Eighteen days. Eighteen tally marks on the dusty chalkboard hanging by her bedroom door. Healthier tally marks, Sunset had joked. At the time, Wallflower had laughed along with her, even if it wasn’t all that funny. Keeping Sunset happy was a good enough reason for her, though. She was her only friend, after all. Was that the only reason she had made it these eighteen days? To keep Sunset happy? It definitely wasn’t making Wallflower happy, that was certain enough.
It had been a full eighteen days since she promised Sunset that she wouldn’t hurt herself, and Wallflower knew there was no way she could make it to day nineteen.
Sitting up in bed, she at last turned to look at the little orange box on the bedside table. Inside were five razors, sterile and wrapped in paper. If she wasn’t such an idiot, she would have at least bothered to do a better job of hiding them in case her parents happened to come home from their business trip—the second one this month—earlier than scheduled. Then again, if she wasn’t such an idiot, she wouldn’t have bought them in the first place.
With a slow, steady hand, Wallflower pulled a razor blade from the cartridge. She stared at it through the thin paper wrapping, her eyes following the strange pattern in the center. She was pretty sure that it was used to secure it to an actual shaving razor, but she couldn’t tell for sure—she’d never used it for anything like that before. Thinking about it only made her frustrated.
A sudden surge of disgust crawled forth from the back of her mind, and she immediately put the razor and cartridge back down. What the hell was she doing? She told Sunset she would stop. She looked her best and only friend in her begging blue eyes and promised that she wouldn’t cut herself anymore. Was she really going to break that promise, all because she was too pathetic to push back against a few urges?
Wallflower’s eyes flicked to the razor. Try as she might, she couldn’t look away. She made a promise to Sunset eighteen days ago, and yet she still couldn’t look away from that stupid little blade.
Now that she thought about it though, the wording of the promise hadn’t been so direct. Sunset had made her promise to stay safe, which, well... If she cleaned the blades and took care of the her wounds after and made sure not to cut too deep...
No, that was wrong. The intention behind her promise had been crystal clear—Sunset didn’t want her to hurt herself anymore. There was no way to lie or cheat her way out of this. No wonder it was so difficult, then. All Wallflower was good at was lying.
If that were true, then what was one more lie added to the pile? All she had to do was cut in a place Sunset wouldn’t see, and she could go on acting like it was still day eighteen. Could she live with herself if she did that, though? Blatantly lying to her best friend’s face? Wallflower already knew herself to be an awful person, but that was pushing it, even for her.
A second later, Wallflower reached for the razor again. She really was hopeless, wasn’t she?
She unwrapped the blade, dropping the thin folded paper back on the table. Without so much as a thought, she pressed its edge down against the fat of her thigh—and stopped.
All it would take was a single shift in either direction, and it would be day zero. No matter what she told Sunset afterwards, Wallflower herself would know. She would know she was a horrible liar twice over, the worst friend Sunset ever had, an irredeemable piece of trash who deserved to be abandoned and shunned and... And...
Pressure built up behind her eyes as she pulled the blade away from her unharmed skin. It would be so easy. It would be so, so easy to go back to day zero. It would be so easy to tell Sunset, to out herself as a liar, to lose her one and only friend over something as stupid as a momentary impulse.
She wanted to cut. She wanted to cut so badly and she didn’t even know why.
There was no use fighting the inevitable.
In a single, swift motion, Wallflower leveled the razor against her thigh and slashed it across as quickly as she could, thankfully fast enough to not give herself time to think about it. As soon as the stinging sensation reached her, she felt like she was going to throw up.
It was day zero. She broke her promise to Sunset, just like she always knew she would. She wouldn’t be able to lie to Sunset about it later, and Sunset would hate her, just as she always should have from the beginning.
As Wallflower watched the redness of her own blood seep into the cut, her gaze hardened, and she held the blade against her skin again. If she was going to break her promise, she may as well be thorough about it.