I was the shadow presence he always felt behind his back, the lingering gaze to haunt him late at night, the darkness filling his room and his life. I was the one to guide that pocket knife across his wrist, who filled him with rage and fury. I watched him hold the same blade he used to harm himself in an attempt to harm another. I drove him to strike out at that student, to draw blood, to nearly kill. And oh, how glorious it was.
His mind was all too open to me as his parents yelled, their anger matched only by his own. "Nothing but trouble," they'd called him. “A problem child.” They finally followed through on those countless threats of military camp. I was all too eager to whisper to him. They don’t care about you. They want to get rid of you. They don’t love you. No one does. And he was all too eager to believe. Within the first week of camp, I’d been able to make him even more miserable than before. I followed him. Every act of kindness meant nothing. Every smile and laugh was forced. Nobody cared about him, and he cared about nobody else.
I kept him up one night, taunting him with memories. He wanted to cut. Wanted to die. He scratched at his wrist, driving his fingernails in as deep as he could manage. I smiled. The time was coming to end it all. As he marched to the dining hall the next morning, I directed him to a glinting shape in the grass. I watched as he stepped out of line, bending down as if to retie his shoe. A guard yelled at him, opening the floodgates of hatred and anger my boy kept stored up in his mind. He didn’t speak. I watched my boy slide the shiny object into his uniform jacket sleeve. A large piece of mirrored glass. He thought again of cutting. Finally, he could do it properly. He carried the glass around all day and I listened to his thoughts, interjecting my own when Hope began to appear. This camp sucks. I hate it. I hate everything about it. Nobody cares, nobody even sees me. I just want to leave. I want to die.
He tripped in the barracks that night on a loose floorboard. As another guard screamed in his face, he noticed something silver in the space beneath. I heard him make a note of it in his thoughts, reminded him of it later. At night, we waited until the guard wasn’t watching, distracted by some noise outside. My boy crept over as quickly and quietly as he could, pushing the floorboard away. Beneath it, a small silver flask. He opened it, smelled the contents. Vodka. I listened to him wonder how it came to be there. He imagined another camper sneaking it in, stealing sips whenever they could. Poor boy. He couldn’t possibly know the truth. He’d had alcohol before, thinking it could drown out my voice, but it only allowed me to shout louder. He snuck back into his bed just as the guard returned. He turned the flask over in his hands. I stood beside his bed, watched as he opened the top and filled his mouth with the liquid. It burned in his throat and in his stomach. He took another drink.
“You wanted to die, didn’t you?” Only he could hear my voice. “You’re a failure. You can’t do anything right. Nobody would miss you if you were gone. The world would be better that way.”
His thoughts were silent, his gaze fixed on that flask.
“It’s not poisoned. You wish it were, but it’s not.”
I just want to get it over with. I want to die.
“You have that glass in your pocket. Take it out.” He followed my orders. “Set it against your arm and pull. You know how to do it.”
He hesitated. I don’t have to stop at cutting this time.
I smiled. “No, child. This is what you’ve been looking for.” I tilted the flask against his lips again. He gulped down the burning substance.
I don’t…. I can’t die here…
His thoughts were beginning to blur together. I laughed to myself. “Think of it. All the wrong your parents have done you. All the terror and pain you’ve caused. All the people who walked by without so much as a glance.”
Anger began to swell up in him. His thoughts became rage. He set the glass to his arm.
“Just pull it. Keep going until you feel dizzy, lightheaded. You’ll fade out of consciousness. Slowly and easily. All of this will be gone.”
I took his hand, guiding it vertically across his arm. “Like this.”
He took the glass in his other hand, crossed the other arm on his own. The anger and pain continued to flood his mind, blocking out the sounds of the guard coming over. He panicked as he saw just how much blood spilled onto the bed. I sat down beside him and stroked his hair, coaxing him into a deep, a final sleep. The glass lay on the bed beside him. I picked it up, looked at its surface. The face of a demon stared back, crooked grin spread across his face. The guard had called for medical assistance, but they couldn’t come in time. My smile widened. If only he’d looked. He might have seen our reflections.
