Page 23 of In This Iron Ground
He looked up and his reflection stared back at him, bloodless and lost. He was trying to wash away the dots of blood all over his arms, but instead stood numbly, rubbing incessantly at the lines of red. The colour looked alien within the relentless white of the school bathroom.
“Damien, I’m going to come in if you don’t come out,” a voice was saying. He turned his head. There was a kid beside him looking worried, but the voice had been a woman’s.
“What?” Damien said. The boy frowned.
“She’s waiting outside,” he replied.
“Who?”
“The school nurse? I called her, remember? You’ve hurt yourself, dude. Are you okay?” he asked, nodding at Damien’s arms. Damien stared at them.
“Yeah,” his own voice said. “I’m fine.”
He was following a woman, then. She had her hand on his shoulder and he wished she would stop. She took him to a little room attached to an office. She had an expression on her face—soft, penetrating—and Damien wanted to turn, or hide, or run away. Her gaze landed on the bandages he had put on himself that morning, from the rope burns, and he shrunk away from her, curling his arms against his chest.
“It’s okay, Damien,” she said softly. “Can I take a look at your arms?”
Damien folded in on himself a little more. “It’s nothing,” he muttered.
“Still, it’d make me feel better if I could just take a quick peak, okay?” she said. Her voice was irritating, like she was talking to a scared animal or a child.
Damien knew, however, that refusing would just make things harder. He extended his arms and she took one gently, rolling up the long sleeve of his shirt. She examined the red marks on his skin. There were a lot of them but they weren’t deep, only a few of them bleeding.
“It was a rash,” Damien blurted defensively. “It was really itchy, I didn’t mean to scratch so hard. I’m sorry.” Damien watched her turn his arm this way and that.
“On both arms?” She sounded doubtful.
“I was playing outside this morning, I think it was the plant I was carrying.”
“What’d it look like?”
“Green…the leaves had, like, spiky bits.”
“Oh! Poison ivy, probably. That would definitely make you itch.” She paused. “What about these?” She pointed at the bandages.
“I was playing with some fireworks and one exploded in my hands. I didn’t mean to,” Damien said, amazed at himself, a spectator in his own lies. The nurse was still frowning but seemed to capitulate with a sigh.
“Alright, well, let me grab your file and something for your arms,” she said, getting up and walking to the attached room.
As soon as she disappeared, Damien lunged for the small, metal cupboard that was usually locked, judging by the key hanging from the door. Damien watched his hands as they grabbed whatever pill packets he could find, stuffing them into the waistband of his trousers. A filing cabinet shut in the other room and Damien scuttled back, making sure that the cupboard door was shut and his baggy shirt hid any sign of the packets digging into his skin. His heart was racing, the only thing he could hear as the nurse disinfected and bandaged him up. For the first time since the day started, he felt oddly centred.
The nurse put gauze over the worst of his arm and Damien surprised himself by how flat and steady his voice sounded as he asked for a bottle of water.
The numbness had returned, but he’d never felt it like this. He moved across the school like a golem, the hollow inside him rattling with loose dirt, with an old and defective magic. He was only pieces put together by somebody else’s will.
His hands weren’t even trembling as he crouched in a darkened corner outside, hiding behind a covered trash can. He watched them pull the sleeves of pills out of the boxes and then pop the pills out, leaving rows of empty graves in the aluminium. He broke the seal on the water bottle. It made a soft sound of protest before cracking open.
He didn’t know what the pills were, but he took them methodically. There was nothing but the shape of the pills, the way it was getting harder to swallow as his tummy filled with water, and suddenly—the bell. He jumped, upsetting the collection of pills nested on his legs, and it was as if the sound jerked him online. He stared at the remaining pills, at the packets, at the darkened bit of tarmac where some of the water had been squeezed out of the bottle when he startled.
There was a feeling creeping up on him, slow and panting, and Damien couldn’t, hecouldn’t—
He picked up the remaining pills, the boxes, and stuffed them in the trash along with the water bottle, not bothering to cap it as it spilled inside the can.
He didn’t know what he’d just done, how many pills he’d taken, but he knew it’d make him disappear. His own superpower.
He went to class. There were only two more lessons before the end of the school day. He waited. He felt like there was a ticking time bomb in his stomach, but nothing happened. He expected it to be like the movies, to drop dead suddenly, seizing and frothing from the mouth, but he just sat there, unable to concentrate, trying to ignore Koko glancing at him from the other side of the room. His mind was flooded with dark, stagnant water that did nothing but weigh him down.
The nausea started in a rolling wave during last period. He didn’t know if it was the wait or the pills, but the small sound that escaped him made Koko look at him for a moment, a frown on her face. Suddenly, he remembered that he was supposed to go to Mia’s after school and a bolt of panic sliced through him. He raised a hand, trying to keep it from trembling, and asked the teacher to be excused. He must have looked pretty bad because she excused him at once, offering to send someone with him. Damien shook his head vigorously, practically running out.
