Chipped Black Nail Varnish.

She lay on her back on her bedroom floor, thinking. She stared at the ceiling, and the purple stared back at her. Her grey eyes would have looked cold and empty, but no one was here to see. A few tears tracked down the side of her face, and made her hair soggy. A few tears had run into her ears as well. A few minutes ago the sobs had racked her body, her breaths coming out in jerks as she let it all out. She’d heard it wasn’t good to hold back.

But now she’d stopped crying, and the numb feeling had returned. After the moment of weakness, she was back, like a robot of some kind, devoid of emotion, the tears still on her face the only giveaway. Instead of emotions, she now concentrated on thoughts.

She’d finally left school, and left behind the bullying. There had always been bullying. She was so glad to be free of it. School had too many rules, and not all of them were made by teachers. There was a social hierarchy, and you had to stay in your clique and level.

Every now and then, it was systematic. The same person; constantly getting at her and breaking up her friendships and messing with her stuff. Sometimes it was a group of people. She’d been surrounded in corridors. She’d been beaten up. Taunted and teased. She’d come back to get her bag to find her stuff all over the floor. Sandwiches had been thrown at her.

That was the kind of bullying that, if you pushed aside the fear of ‘grassing’ and put your trust in a shaky system, could be stopped. As useless as teachers were at punishing bullies, the bullies do get bored of bullying someone who stays inside every lunchtime.

Inbetween that, there had been the kind of bullying that nothing can stop. What can you do when you have no friends, when there’s no crime to pin down? So no one sat next to you at lunch. So no one wanted to pick you in PE. So people stared and laughed as you walked down the corridor. Who can you blame and what can you do?

There wasn’t much you could do when it was offhand, either. One person calls you a lesbian one lesson, someone else throws paper at you next lesson. All unconnected, it’s not even malicious. It weighs down on you. Makes you wonder why it’s always you. And she had wondered. She’d wondered a lot.

She’d lived her life for five years hated the face in the mirror, cutting and punching herself. It’s only Body Image Disorder if you’re seeing yourself distorted, and she knew, she knew deep down that she wasn’t a pretty girl. She’d always hung on to the fact that she was skinny, because then at least she wasn’t a fat ugly cow. So when she put on weight, she starved it off. She kept herself down at a size eight.

Still lying motionless on the floor, she thought about her family. The tears on her face were drying up now. She thought about when she was little, and her parents had shown that they loved her. She was a middle child.

Her big sister was in university, training to be a doctor. Her parents were proud. It was always news from the oldest and wasn’t it just great news. She knew she’d never make her parents proud like that. She was planning on starting a band. No university, no important job.

When it was the two of them, it had been similar, with A grades to match up to, but at least then she was the youngest, and every cut knee and snotty nose was fussed over. Every school plays were she was a sheep in the nativity was recorded. But now she had a little sister, and was no longer cute. Every cut knee and snotty nose was a nuisance and she should deal with it herself.

She’d run away once. There was a note, but it turned out her little sister ate it. She got an angry phone call at nine from her dad, not asking where she was, but complaining that she needed to be home to baby-sit her sister, as her parents were going out. She’d left the house at nine in the morning, twelve hours before. She didn’t bother again; she had nowhere to go anyway.

So now, here she was. She’d been in love, but that flopped. It had been so perfect, two social outcasts, ignored children, not the beautiful, academic or athletic ones. They’d had so much fun, she’d felt so wanted and loved, and she’d never been so happy. They were My Chemical Romance’s Our Lady Of Sorrows; they were two people fighting the world and its injustice towards them.

But he’d moved away, and she’d never seen him again. They’d phoned, but long distance was no way to love. It was better to have loved and lost, or something like that. It was fun while it lasted. That fitted better, perhaps. They still stayed in contact, but just as friends.

Now that the numb had taken over again, she got up from the bedroom floor. She wrote a note to him in her notebook and ripped it out, posted it. She wrote another note to her parents. The note to him said a lot more than the one to the parents. She kept the one for her parents, just for a while.

Maybe they didn’t deserve to know.

The next day, when some parents were at work and a little sister was at school, she got the note, rewrote it and left the second draft on the table. It said she’d run away. She packed her bag with everything she needed. Her diary, her song lyrics, her poems, a couple of her stories, her notebook and a pen. Oh, and her dads gun. He wouldn’t even notice it was gone, he never used it.

She went up on to the field that seemed so far away from the streets. It was just two blocks from her house. There was a tree house where she had hung out with him. She hoped the letter she’d sent him made sense. Once inside the hidden hang out, she pulled the ladder up. She didn’t want to be found, not for a very long time. She didn’t want anyone to have to find it.

She put the diary, the lyrics, poems and stories on the table. She put some stones on them as paperweights. They would explain it all better than any note she could write. She ripped a page from her diary and wrote the note, the last note she’d ever need to write, anyway, and pinned it to the wall. Then she got the gun, and did what she’d never had the guts to do before.