Kelly

Jerome A. White
6/28/07

She always uses a brand new straight razor blade, and cleans it with rubbing alcohol as a measure against infection. She chooses an inconspicuous location on her body, such as her upper thighs, hips, or torso. She wipes down the area with alcohol. During any one session, she typically makes one to three incisions. She cuts in short, straight lines. The sound of skin and flesh fibers tearing with each stroke is inexplicably soothing to her. She cuts along the wound again and again, sometimes over 100 times, gritting her teeth and challenging her pain threshold with each slice. The thin groove in her flesh reddens during the initial slices. She stretches the skin around the incision tightly with her thumb and forefinger to open the gap, and continues to run the blade along it. The widening gauge fills with crimson and overflows. She closes her eyes and slowly exhales. Red rivers of anguish trickle down her skin, branching off into intertwining streams before dripping onto the plastic tarp she’s laid on the floor. She covers the wound with a paper towel, folded in half two or three times. She pounds the wound mercilessly with her fist or the wooden heel of a shoe. The paper towel reduces splattering, and keeps dirt from infecting the wound. The process usually lasts about a half hour. Bruising and swelling start to appear under the coagulated layers of blood. A mellow tranquility overtakes her. Almost in a trance, she slowly walks to the bathroom to rinse away the blood and reveal her naked creation. She smiles peacefully upon seeing the diluted red streams pour through the bathtub drain. Over the next two or three weeks, she refuses to let the scabs heal, picking away at them every night with sharp-nosed tweezers. Eventually the surrounding flesh turns brownish-purple, and the wound refuses to release any more blood. Skin cells die, flake off, and regenerate. The bruises gradually shift from black and blue to red and yellow before fading away, while the scab slowly decays into a dark, permanent reminder of her suffering.

* * *

“Kelly, how could you want to do that to yourself?”

I guess in hindsight, there was no rational answer Kelly could have succinctly provided. She silently lifted her eyes, only to offer a blank momentary stare. I had asked her to pull up one of the plastic student chairs aside my desk. All the other kids from my last-period class had already cleared out.

Usually silence is not an acceptable response in my classroom, but this time I let it go. Kelly’s confused downward gaze and the perplexed tone in her voice suggested that she was almost as baffled by her own behavior as I was.

Kelly is a fair-complected sophomore with short, straight, brown hair and shimmering green eyes. Typically clad in a slogan-emblazoned t-shirt and loose-fitting jeans, she prefers the “cute” look rather than the competitive fashion adorning the “pretty” girls at school. She seems adequately sociable, and appears to enjoy a healthy number of friendships. Her academic effort and achievement is a bit spotty, but she never dips below a C in my class.

As a high school math teacher, my subject doesn’t naturally lend itself to discovering the personal lives of my students. Numbers and equations don’t offer kids an inviting forum for sharing personal details. The process of getting to know one of my students usually occurs outside of class hours.

* * *

“Watch me bleed… This makes me want to open my skin… The pain inside me needs to escape…”

A few weeks ago, such messages began to appear in tiny print along the edges of Kelly’s homework pages. She always crossed out the disturbing sentences with a single line, perhaps intentionally not taking much care to completely obscure the words. Around that same time, I once noticed her writing a poem at her desk when she was supposed to be doing classwork. I caught a glimpse of the words “sharp blade” and “bloody release” before she yanked the paper out of my sight.

At first I said nothing to Kelly. My role as a teacher obliged me to report what I had seen to the school social worker, although doing so made me feel like I was somehow betraying Kelly’s confidence. It turns out that Ms. Becker already knew quite a bit about her. For years Kelly had been sexually abused by her older brother, who died last year in a car accident. Stunned, I couldn’t even pretend to relate.

Ms. Becker confirmed that Kelly sees a therapist weekly. Kelly cooperates with her counselor, acknowledging that she’s a nice, caring person. However, Kelly doesn’t feel the sessions are of much value.

Part of me wanted to steer clear of Kelly’s personal grief and leave it in the hands of the experts. However, as someone who spends an hour with Kelly five days a week, I couldn’t turn a blind eye.

So, on this particular day, I had requested that Kelly stay after class to talk. She didn’t ask why or protest – She simply said “okay” with a sullen look on her face. She seemed to know what we would be discussing.

“Kelly, I’m not just a math teacher who wants to see you succeed in my class. I’m a caring adult who wants to see you succeed and find happiness in life. I’m aware that you’ve been cutting yourself, and I want to know how I can help you.”

“Thank you Mr. White, but you can’t help me. I need to figure some things out for myself.”

I opened the hanging folder drawer of my desk, and pulled out photocopies of the homework that included the disturbing messages.

“Kelly, I don’t mean to pry into your business, but I think part of you wants me to know what’s going on with you. There are some issues in life that are just too heavy for a person to tackle on her own.”

Kelly took the copies from my hand, studied what she had written, and passed them back to me without saying a word.

“So Kelly, I’m not claiming that I can fix all your problems for you. I just think you’re a wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent girl. If you’d like to talk to me, I’m more than willing to listen.”

She paused, and released a somber sigh. “Well, Mr. White, sometimes my problems become just too much for me to deal with.”

That’s when Kelly opened up to me and described her ritualistic coping process.

And that’s when I asked my question that had no rational answer. Kelly had clearly spent plenty of time trying to figure out why she wounds herself. After about a minute of silence, she finally muttered, “I can’t put it into words, Mr. White. All I can tell you is that I feel better after doing it.”

* * *

Kelly hates the term “cutting.”

“I started doing this about four years ago, before I had even heard of anyone else doing it,” she stated firmly. She was upset upon discovering that the behavior was common enough amongst teen and pre-teen girls to earn its own simplistic mainstream label. She had thought this coping method was all her own.

“The term ‘cutter’ just lumps me into a group of screwed up kids, and it provides shock value to misinformed people. Calling me a ‘cutter’ invites everyone to assume all kinds of incorrect judgments about me.”

I couldn’t help but wonder whether I had been guilty of jumping to conclusions about Kelly. Sometimes in my class, she seems excessively tired, or out of it. I had always figured that it was a lack-of-sleep issue, but ever since my discovery about Kelly, I’d started wondering whether she had also succumbed to illicit drugs. She vehemently denied using any mind-altering substances.

“People think that what I do to deal with my stress is so shocking and destructive,” she exclaimed, locking her eyes with mine and allowing her voice to rise. “All the other kids at this school drink, smoke, use drugs, and fuck each other to deal with their problems. I don’t do any of that stuff. They put their lives and health at risk. I don’t. But you adults think I’m the crazy fucked-up one.”

Kelly flashed a sheepish grin, as if to apologize for her outburst. She returned to her usual soft tone. She seemed to anticipate the question on my mind.

“Mr. White, I’m not suicidal. I want to live.

Kelly had always struck me as very gentle and mild-tempered, and I still struggled to envision her ever exhibiting violent behavior, even to, or especially to herself.

“Kelly, do you hate yourself?”

“No, not most of the time. I know I’m smart, responsible, and attractive enough, I guess. I’m a good person and I have lots of friends who love me. Most of the time, I’m pretty happy.”

Kelly appeared to genuinely recognize her own goodness and beauty, yet certain aspects of her life fueled an insufferable fury. She shared some of her frustrations with me.

Disloyal friends, academic shortcomings, relationships with boys, typical teenage angst.

Her brother’s betrayal. Her brother’s death. Her parents’ denial. Her own denial.

I noticed that Kelly doesn’t seem to release her anger outward. I’ve never seen her fight or act in a hostile manner towards other students. Likewise, she claimed not to argue much with her mom and dad. Hurting herself, it appears, is a form of turning her anger inward rather than subjecting others to her rage. She feels to blame for the troubles in her life, and justice can only be served through punishing herself. During these dark and desperate moments, no friends, family, or teachers can keep her from feeling alone and defeated.

Still, Kelly insisted that she never has any desire to injure herself to the point of needing medical attention.

“This is my pain. This is my disappointment. These are my very personal issues. When I’m at my lowest point, I don’t want anyone else getting involved. I need to work this out for myself.” She took a deep breath. “But thank you for caring about me, Mr. White.”

* * *

Kelly and I talk after school almost every week now. I’m glad that I got to know her for the beautiful girl that she is before learning about her unusual method for dealing with stress. I wonder if my empathy for her would have been different had I identified her early on as a “cutter.”

I refrain from telling Kelly not to hurt herself. The razor blade is not the source of her pain – something else is. And she’s right: There are many kids who resort to far more destructive ways of coping with pain. I’ve started making more of an effort to reach out to some of my other troubled students during lunchtime or after school.

Meanwhile, Kelly remains very open with me about how she’s doing, and I believe that incidences of her wounding herself have become less frequent. I recently asked Kelly whether the physical healing process serves as a metaphor for her emotions. No matter how much she picks at the scabs and reopens the sores, her body always seals them back up. Maybe through witnessing the recovery of her physical wounds, she holds on to some hope that someday she’ll also recover from her emotional pain.

“Something like that. A lot of times when I’m sad, I just look at my scars and they remind me that I’ve been through tough times before. And I’ve survived. Mr. White, I want to keep on living.”