Heal All Her Wounds

Ithil Winters is not like anyone at her school has ever seen. Even though they’ve seen this girl walk through their halls for a month now, they still don’t know what kind of girl she is besides one that likes to spend her time alone drawing and listening to music. People talk behind her back, calling her a weirdo and a freak, but she never hears their vocal judgments. She barely even feels their eyes judging her, but she knows that they are when she gets out of her little world every once in a while and notices someone giving her a strange look before talking to whoever is near.

Eyes look at her as she walks to the cafeteria wearing a home-made black surgical mask, a black Bring Me The Horizon hoodie, grey skinny jeans and black combat boots. Her black hair isn’t down like usual, but in a messy side bun. Some heckle her about her fall style, but she doesn’t listen to them thanks to the sounds of the newest All Time Low album that she bought yesterday after school.

“Attention whore,” a girl says as she walks next to Ithil, but Ithil doesn’t hear too immersed in Alex Gaskarth’s voice sing “Six Feet Under The Stars”.

No one else decides to speak to her as she walks over to her usual spot at the farthest table in the cafeteria at the end of the table. No body sat there because they often wanted to get out of the cafeteria in time to not deal with the rush, but Ithil didn’t mind being the last one out even if it made her a few minutes late to her world history class.

Pulling out her lunch from her My Chemical Romance messenger bag, she doesn’t notice a boy staring at her from the table across from her looking between his friends until she looks ahead and their eyes connect. Ithil looks at the grey-blue eyes knowing the boy from her graphics design class. Ever since she first saw him in class, Ithil was interested in the boy because he didn’t look at her with judgmental eyes. Instead his eyes were welcoming and happy, as if he’s happy to see her around.

He looks away and continues to talk to his friends causing Ithil to sigh. She wants to talk to him, but she doesn’t have the courage to go up to a complete stranger, even if he is in one of her classes, and just talk to him out of nowhere.

“Maybe one day, I’ll be brave enough to talk to Matt.” Ithil thinks to herself while taking her grilled turkey and cheese sandwich out of its plastic bag.

She takes a bite and opens her bottle of water before witnessing someone steal her surgical mask from the table and run off with it. “Wow, that’s really mature of you. And I thought Canadians were really nice,” she thought to herself while eating the first half of her sandwich.

It was one of the jocks, the same one that has been stealing whatever he can get from her in order to evoke a reaction as she figured, but she just shrugged and continued to eat her food. Even after doing this for a month, it still shocks the six foot seven, blonde haired jock that she wouldn’t yell at him, or chase after him or cry and beg for him to give it back. It irritated him.

He began to call her names, but she didn’t listen and couldn’t hear the sound of the bully. Alex Gaskarth’s voice still filled her ears with lyrics that she wished were meant for her. Ithil is one of those girls who love musicians and wishes that they would love her too, or at least be attracted to her.

“I wish I could have Alex to myself. If not Alex, maybe Brendon, or Patrick, or maybe even Vic. Hmm, or there’s Oli too. God, they’re all so hot,” Ithil thinks to herself before having her headphones pulled from her head and finally being able to hear the jock downgrade her.

“You’re such a freak, why don’t you listen to people when they’re downgrading you?” His deep voice shouts irritation by her not being at all affected by his words and ignoring him; however, he’s not the first person to downgrade her. She’s been downgraded by her family which she absolutely dislikes, except for her sister and brother.

“Oh, cool story, bro.” she states nonchalant while grabbing her water, but that was smacked from her hand and spilled all over the table. People began to watch and observe what was happening to the shy and quiet girl.

Ithil sighs and grabs napkins from her backpack, “What do you want from me?”

“You’re a fucking freak,” he simply answers while she’s cleaning up the mess.

Ithil stops, looks at him and nods, not quite sure what that had to do with anything. Unlike other people, she didn’t mind being considered a freak because some of her favorite musicians were, like Marilyn Manson. She didn’t want to conform and has always been supported by her guardians of the last seven years to find herself and what kind of person she is no matter how strange it may be.

“Hey! Leave that girl alone!” Ithil looks up to see Matt standing, looking extremely irritated by her bully.

“Hey, fuck off! This is none of your business!” he yells back.

“Oh God, there’s going to be a fight,” Ithil thinks to herself while hearing one of her crush’s friends jump in.

She quickly packs up her belongings and pulls her iPod away from the headphones before leaving the cafeteria while eyes followed her. She didn’t care if she didn’t have her headphones or her surgical mask. Ithil wasn’t one who liked witnessing conflict, especially if it revolved around her. She’d rather not witness someone getting hurt on her behalf, and she didn’t want to fuel it more with her presence.

Just as she was about to enter the library, the bell rings and she sighs happily. There were only two more blocks left in her school day before she could leave and forget about today.

“Hey!” Ithil hears the voice that defended her say behind her.

Turning around, she sees him walking towards her with her headphones and one of his many tall friends walking with him holding her surgical mask. They were quite opposite of each other and it made her smile. Ithil has always had an obsession with opposites and seeing Matt walk with his tall, black friend who’s wearing torn jeans, a Black Delilah Murder shirt and with shaggy long hair that contrasted with his milk white skin, shorter, dark-blonde side swept hair, regular green shirt and denim shorts.

She walks over to them to meet half way as she notices the halls begin to crowd.

“I can’t believe you just left without your headphones,” Matt stated, truly shocked that she would let the bully have what looked like to be fifty dollar headphones.

“They’re dying anyways,” Ithil lied while taking the headphones, “but thank you.”

“Oh and here,” his friend said while handing her the surgical mask.

“Thanks,” she says shyly while looking down and putting it on her face. “Thank you for defending me, but I need to go to class. I’ll make it up to you, I promise.”

Before they could say anything, Ithil quickly scurried away to her next class. The two boys just watched the strange girl walk away and shrug before going to their own class.



The end of a school day meant the beginning of an hour long session for Ithil with her therapist, Natalie. She’s been attending therapy since she arrived to Canada, but it has been helping despite Ithil’s dislike for talking about her emotions and having people listen to her problems.

“She’s getting paid to listen to my problems, so it’s okay.” Ithil tells herself mentally while she sits on the couch with her legs crossed comfortably.

Natalie walks in, closing the door and setting her notebook on the desk before greeting Ithil. Natalie Hawthorne is the therapist’s name and she just graduated receiving her masters in psychology and she was a young looking woman. With short, dark brown hair that hugged her face, golden brown eyes and dressing semi-casual in a pair of black flats, white button up and navy pencil skirt, she looked welcoming to Ithil.

“You look lovely today, Natalie.” Ithil says with a smile. She wasn’t lying when she said that though. Ithil was always good at putting outfits together since she was two and her guardians, Jane and Jim, have always called her a fashionista.

“Thank you, Ithil. So how was your day?” Natalie asks while taking her seat across from Ithil and grabbing her notepad.

“It went well, except for this jerk that was really trying to get me mad or something.” Ithil explained to her therapist about the event that occurred during the half hour of lunch and what happened afterwards.

“Well, it’s a good thing that you have classmates that stood up for you, quite literally,” Natalie says smiling. Ithil smiles at her lame joke, and wonders what she’ll have to say about her being more outgoing.

“Well, I’m glad that you at least had a small conversation with them, but how did you feel when Matt and his friend were standing in front of you? How did you feel when that guy acted violent?”

Ithil thought about it and smiled at her great progress. She remembered not being afraid of the bully when he slapped the water out of her hand or when he was yelling at her. In fact she began to feel as if he was no threat at all anymore, but he also wasn’t Cuban.

“I didn’t really want to stay long to talk to Matt and his friend, but I did tell them that I would do something nice for them. I plan on baking them cookies tonight and bringing them tomorrow since Matt is in my graphics design class,” Ithil explains. “And the bully, he didn’t scare me at all.”

Natalie smiled, happy with Ithil’s progress and knew that she was ready for the next step.

“Well, are you ready to befriend Matt and his friends?” Ithil’s smile dropped and a thoughtful look began to replace it. Ithil was really unsure whether or not she wanted to have friends, recalling that she was backstabbed by some of them and others just left her life.

“I-I don’t know.” Ithil looks down at her covered hands and her lap. She didn’t like being emotionally hurt, and often suffers physical injury to make the emotional pain go away.

“I know it’s hard to want to have friends after what happened, but you don’t have to put your trust in them right away, dear.”

Ithil looked up at her therapist and sighed. “I suppose she is right.” Ithil thinks to herself.

“I guess I can give it a shot. Matt is in my graphics design class, so I guess it’ll be easy to become friends with him.”

Natalie smiles happily before dropping her smile and looking at her patients covered wrists. Ithil knows that she wants to see her wrists so she looks down and shamefully pushes up her sleeves showing the scars and a bandaged up wound that she made two days prior.

“Here,” Natalie hands her a small sketchbook and a red pen, “I want you to use this instead of using a razor on your skin. It’s not good to cut yourself.”

Ithil doesn’t say a word and grabs the sketchbook and pen as Natalie continues to explain the reason for the sketchbook.

“I know you enjoy art, so I thought that having a red pen and sketchbook at hand can help you pick a healthier and better alternative to getting rid of the emotional pain. I also advise you to keep yourself distracted from you negative thoughts, like listen to some classical music or those nature CDs that Jane has. Okay?”

Ithil nodded and said “Okay” before getting up hearing a knock on the door. They’d often spend more than an hour in session due to them both losing track of time and it became a new routine to have someone knock on the door when the hour is up.

“I’ll see you next week, Ithil.” Natalie says warmingly while setting her notes aside.

“Okay, bye, Natalie.” Ithil waves good-bye as she leaves the room and walks over to Jane. The tan, fifty-nine year old woman looked up at her from the nature magazine she was reading and Ithil placed the sketchbook and pen in her bag.

“How was the session, sweetie?” Jane asks, putting the magazine down and putting away her glasses.

“It was good. Can we go to the store and get some cookie dough. I’m going to make cookies for a couple friends.” Ithil smiles weakly while saying the word “friends”, but Jane didn’t notice.

“Oh, of course! I have to get groceries anyways.” Jane grabs her purse and Ithil puts her bag over her shoulder as they leave the office.

Ithil was nervous about walking up to the kid that she finds herself attracted to and handing him cookies, but she wanted to show how thankful she was for having him stand up for her.

“I hope he doesn’t think I’m hitting on him.” Ithil thinks to herself as they walk into the parking garage to their car.