My stomach settled somewhere into my lower intestines as we neared my house. It took the cops a few tries before they got me to admit which address was my own. They'd called ahead to let my parents know they'd found me, and as we pulled into the driveway, the front door opened, and Mum and Dad stepped out to watch. I didn't move when the cruiser stopped, and the officers had to physically remove me from the backseat. I couldn't lift my eyes from the ground as they dragged me towards my parents. My heart was pounding�how could I face my parents after all this?

My parents welcomed the cops into our kitchen, and for a split second I glanced at them. My parents' faces were pallid and weary, and their eyes were bloodshot and red. They looked ancient. Dad's face was dirty and bristly. I was surprised to see Arik standing on the steps behind them. He was even more disheveled and unshaven than Dad, which looked strange, as I rarely saw him when he wasn't tidy and flawlessly dressed. His eyes were red with tears, and when he saw me looking at him, he burst into tears anew and cried quiet torrents into his palm.

My father put his hand on my shoulder as he and Mum talked briefly with the cops. Mum gave them coffee, and she thanked them ferociously, because weren't they just a couple of fuckin' heroes?

Once the two cops left, Mum erupted into sobs and seized me in a bone-shattering embrace. "Harry, we were so worried!" she cried. "We were so worried!"

I had nothing to say. I'd made my mother cry, but I wished I were still gone.

Mum pulled away, but her hands held my face. Dad came up behind her. He looked old. "Where the hell did you go? You were gone for almost eleven hours! How could you do that to us?!"

Mum's shaking fingers left my face, and I let my chin drop to my chest. Dad stepped closer.

"Harrison, are you listening to me?!" he barked.

I stared listlessly at the floor. What could I say? I wasn't sorry�I'd had one of the best nights of my life! 'How could I do that to them?' Easily! Look what they'd done to me!

Dad clasped my arms my arms with his hands. "Answer me!"

No reply. Dad tightened his grip on my arms and throttled me, shaking me back and forth as if I were a doll.

"Do you have any idea how worried we were?! Did you even stop to consider how selfish that stupid little jaunt was, and how frightening it was for all of us?! While you were off being smug with yourself, we were scared out of our wits! Did you ever stop to think about that? Do you even care?! GODDAMMIT, HARRISON�ELEVEN HOURS!" He was shaking me hard, and my head was snapping back and forth�my vision was darkening�his fingers felt like knives in my arms�I wanted to scream�it hurt!

"Dad, stop!" I cried, but he only shook me harder.

"YOUR MOTHER CRIED ALL NIGHT, AND YOU DON'T EVEN CARE! YOU DIDN'T EVEN CONSIDER HOW SCARED WE WOULD BE! ALL YOU THOUGHT ABOUT WAS YOURSELF!"

"Dad, you're hurting me!"

"YOU DESERVE IT! ALL YOU EVER THINK ABOUT IS YOURSELF!"

"Dad, please!"

"Addison, stop!" Mum wailed.

Dad dropped my arms, and I collapsed backwards against the floor, tears running down my cheek.

"How could you do that to us, Harry?" Mum sobbed, a hand on Dad's arm to restrain him. "Where did you go? We had Arik and the police out looking for you for hours! When Mr. Lin ever called us and said you'd run away�! Harry, why did you run away?"

My arms were throbbing with pain, and I rubbed at them fiercely as I sniffled.

"Why won't you say something?!" Mum demanded, agonized. "Please, Harry!"

"Do you think you're funny?" Dad bellowed, his arms waving. "Do you think you're being cool, running off when you don't get your way?!"

Now his fists were balled. "I can't believe how selfish you are! You are a spoiled brat! You've got an easy life, a family, a home! You don't even do your own fucking laundry! You have it made! Where you get off thinking that you're some poor deprived bastard, I really don't know! You make me sick, you know that? I can't stand to be around you, because it just reminds me how much I've failed as a father!"

"Addison�" Mum murmured cautiously, but it was too late: the hurtful words had been said.

Dad whirled. "No, Molly, the boy is a problem, and he needs to figure that out! I will not raise a son who has to be brought home in a fucking police cruiser! He needs to get that through his head!"

"SHUT UP!" I yelled, my voice cracking with the tears. "Just stop it! I do understand�I know you don't want me!�you've made it fucking obvious enough! But if you hate me that much, why didn't you just let me run away?!"

And I leapt off the floor and dashed for the doorway�Dad yelled, "Arik, grab him!"�a strong grip seized my wrist as I flung the door open�I whirled around and punched Arik hard in the jaw with my free hand. He fell back with a yelp, and I ran outside. I cleared the steps with one leap and took off as fast as I could. Arik was right on my tail�before I reached the road, he tackled me around the waist like a football player, and we both hit the ground hard. I rolled to my back and kicked him as he reached for me, and I flung my fists at his face, but he was infinitely stronger than I, and he seized my arms and pulled me to my feet. I clawed at his face, and he grabbed my armpits and hurled me over his shoulder. I flailed my arms against his back, sputtering the nastiest gay slurs I had ever been called, but I was caught, and he carried me back to the house and dropped me in the living room.

I ran to my room, screamed, cried, and passed out.

I woke a few hours later, extremely confused. I was sprawled on my floor, fully dressed but covered in dirt, and my body felt like it had been mauled by a truck. I dragged myself off the sharp shag carpet, feeling wearier than before I'd fallen asleep. I picked my glasses off the floor and stared blearily at my watch. 10:45 a.m. Why wasn't I at school?

Like a two-by-four to the skull, the events of the night and morning flooded back to me. For the second time in 4 hours, my mind shot the events at me, each one more shocking than the previous. Holy shit, I'd actually run away from home. I'd run away, fallen asleep in some kid's tree house, been caught by the police, returned home, been hollered at worse than I ever had before, had punched Arik�

I kneeled on the floor, running my hands through my grungy hair and trying to breathe. My life would never be the same. Oh, Christ, my parents were never going to forgive me for this�how would they punish me this time?

�I felt really sick.

I stripped to my T-shirt and jeans and limped to the bathroom, but maybe my sickness was only in my chest, because I didn't throw up. Instead I stood, leaning feebly in front of the bathroom mirror. I shivered without my sweatshirt, and my skin prickled into a mountainside of bumps. I breathed on my hands, for they were so cold, they may as well have been nothing but thin slivers of bone.

I didn't recognize the face in the mirror. I had a dark shiner under my visible eye and a few red scratches on my cheeks, but other than that, I was as pale as flour. I looked dead.

Dead, with acne. I had ugly, splotchy pimples all over my nose and forehead.

I poked one, and marveled at the white gunk and blood that appeared on my finger, and the bleeding crater it left on my face. I poked another above my eyebrow, but got a different result�it simply bled. Fascinated, I tore at my face, systematically breaking each bump on my face in a bizarre form of compulsive, domestic self-mutilation. I pulled my eyepatch off and ran the sharp edge of my nails along the red flesh beneath it. People don't realize that sweat and oil builds up around the edges of the eyepatch and create a line of uncomfortable red bumps along its perimeter. The greasy red skin beneath the eyepatch, coupled with my hideous, disfigured eye, made me look like a monster. I stared at myself, amazed by the sheer repulsiveness. My entire face was red, and blood leaked from pores and scratches across my cheeks and nose. My eyes looked overlarge and bulging in my thin face, and I was reminded again why I wear that horrible eyepatch�my bad eye is so gross, it would make little kids stare and cry, and none of the girls would come near me.

My hair looked hideous, horribly disheveled and grimy. It was ugly to begin with, I realized, nearly shoulder-length all around, like some flyaway black helmet enveloping my narrow face. It made me look even punier than I already did with my toothpick arms and flat chest. I grimaced, baring my chicken-wired teeth.

I was the ugliest person I knew.

No wonder I couldn't get a girlfriend! I was hideous! Who wanted to date a physically disfigured loser who would be blind in a few years? Hell, my family didn't even want a disgusting fuck-up like me, so what girl would?

Who could love a selfish spoiled stupid scrawny ugly arrogant bastard worthless piece of shit faggot brat?

I was so overcome with self-loathing, I could barely look at the reflection in the mirror. More than I ever had before, I felt an incredible desire to hurt myself.

My hands slithered across the smooth white surface of the bathroom counter to the drawer on the side. I scrounged around amid toothpastes, hair gels, combs, and hair elastics until I found what I was looking for. A pair of scissors.

They were metal, rusty and old.

I looked at my bare arm and at the blades of the scissors. I put the blade against my arm, but did nothing. The desire had passed. Who was I kidding? I was no cutter. I'd known a guy who really did that stuff, and he'd really messed himself up. He'd had legitimate problems. I wasn't in his league�and I didn't believe in trying to solve problems this way. Besides, if I used these scissors, I'd probably get fricken' tetanus.

I needed to cut something, though; needed to destroy something.

A lock of hair fell in my good eye. I raised the scissors and snipped it off.

Snip, snip. The scissors traversed my head. I randomly selected chunks of hair and snipped it at varying lengths. Unevenly. I gave myself bangs, cutting it short over my good eye, but long enough on the other side to cover my bad eye. I cut various locks into hundreds of asymmetrical layers, cutting it short on the left side but leaving it longish on the right. Symmetry is for the feeble-minded. Clip, snip, chop. Hair wafted around me and lay lightly on the stark white sink like thin black feathers. The scissors glinted in the light of the mirror.

I was not in my right mind, and not thinking clearly, but I enjoyed it. Let's see how ugly I can possibly make myself.

Self-destructive, and loving it.

The scissors clapped on the surface of the sink as I dropped them. They bounced and slid down the bowl into the sink, coming to a stop when the nose had slid down the drain but couldn't go any further because the handle was too wide. I didn't move them. The scissors were upright in the drain, handle up, sharp end down, in the center of a stark white bowl. Dark hair littered it. There were two bloody fingerprints on the side of the bowl. How lovely.

I stepped back and looked at myself. My face was thin, with low cheekbones, a spattering of freckles, a big clouded eye I'm told is dark blue, a disfigured and blind eye, bleeding pores, and an expression void of all emotion except utter dejected apathy. My black hair was now about six inches shorter and thinner, but with about five hundred different layers. My left bangs were eyebrow-length, while my right bangs were nose-length. It was sticking out in confused cowlicks all over. My neck was so thin, my Adam's apple bulged from it. It was circled in its usual adornment: my necklace of round metal beads. My shoulders were narrow, my arms were bony, and my torso was shapeless. Finger-shaped bruises ringed my nonexistent biceps. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5�10 dark bruises from where Dad had held me while he tried to shake sense into me.

This was me?

A knock came at the door. It was faint, timid. Dad peeked in, about to say something, but he stopped when he saw me standing in front of the mirror, looking disheveled, red-faced, haunted�like more of a specter than a boy.

"You cut your hair!" he exclaimed.

Would you rather I cut my wrists? I wondered.

He looked at me, his face contorted with horror. "Are you all right?"

I didn't reply right away. I slid a few fingers through my hair and watched the misshapen locks slip through them in the mirror's reflection. "I'm fine."

Dad stood there for a few more minutes, too stricken to draw words to describe what he wanted to say.

"Harrison�your mother, she wants to take you somewhere."

Shit. Juvy? A psychiatrist? A mental institution?

"I don't want to go," I whispered.

"Please, Harry. It's�It's only a check-up. Standard. Don't upset your mother any more."

I slowly turned my head and looked at him with my sullen, crazy-eyed stare. I guess I must have made him nervous, because he stepped back out into the hallway and closed the door after him.

Sickness struck me out of nowhere, and I yanked the scissors out of the sink and dry-heaved into the white bowl. Nothing came up but a mouthful of bile, so I just coughed and shuddered over the white bowl. Tears came again�why did I cry so much?�and I wept messily over the sink until my nose ran into my mouth and I was shaking so hard I felt sick again. I dragged myself into the shower, and the water calmed me down. Dirt and hair washed off my thin frame and swirled down the drain. I dried myself off�my hair dried more quickly now, and it felt much lighter�and I dressed myself in a simple T-shirt and jeans. I put the scissors back in the drain hole before I went downstairs.

Mum's eyes widened when she saw my hair. "Harry, you�!" she began, but bit her tongue, and turned away. I took out a bag of tortilla chips and sullenly munched on a few at the kitchen table. Dad came into the kitchen, and he and Mum exchanged glances but said nothing to me or to each other.

"You need to be ready to go in twenty minutes," Mum said. "You have a check-up."

No comment.

"�Ironic, really," Mum said, mumbling to herself to break the awkward silence. "I would have had to take you out of school for the check-up anyway. When I scheduled it a year ago, I never imagined�" But her voice trailed off.

No comment.

"Harry, you don't look so good," Mum remarked, a few tortilla chips later, once again to break the silence. I would have laughed at the irony if I'd been in a laughing mood. Which I wasn't. She put her palm on my forehead. "Hm! You're warm, honey. I hope you're not coming down with something."

"Running around in the cold and not getting any sleep can do that to you," Dad remarked evenly from behind the newspaper.

I put my head down on the table and stared at the health information on the side of the carton of orange juice.

"Harry�" Mum said, her voice tiny and desperate by this third attempt. "Do you�do you think you'd like to start seeing a therapist?"

I jolted back upright with a start. "You said it was just a check-up!"

"It is just a check-up. But you�you don't seem right. I thought that maybe, if you wanted it, you could talk to a psychiatrist."

"I'm not crazy," I hissed.

"He doesn't need a shrink," Dad said firmly, eying my mother over the paper.

"Well, I just thought�" Mum murmured.

"Molly, do you have any idea what those quacks cost?"

Mum lowered her eyes and went back to the sink.

I wondered if my dad would still be too cheap to get me therapy even if I was a schizophrenic anorexic cutter. I imagined that he would be. I scowled at him, irritated that any money spent on me would be such a waste, and left the table. I went upstairs and brushed my teeth, leaving the scissors there once I was done. I didn't put my eyepatch on. When I came back down several minutes later, Mum asked, delicately, if I was going to wear it. I shrugged. It was in my pocket.

The ride to the doctor's was long and dull. We have to drive a long way to get to the doctor who examines my fucked-up eyes. Mum didn't talk to me, and she didn't put any music on. I sat in the way back, watching the houses and trees and cars fly by outside and wondering what kind of lives the people in them had.

We waited for a long time once we got to the doctor's office, as is normal. A little kid stared at me the whole time. He asked his mommy what was wrong with my eyes, and his mommy told him it wasn't polite to stare.

The examination was no fun. They weighed and measured me and said I'd only gained two pounds since last year and grown a quarter of an inch. They assured me I'd hit a growth spurt soon and mature 'like all the other boys.' I caught some nurses staring at my disfigured eye, their own eyes wide.

The doctor's hands were cold. He questioned my bruises. He had seen finger-shaped bruises and black eyes before. He asked me about my parents, and how we got along, and whether I was happy.

It would be more suspicious if I lied. "My father and I had a fight, and he grabbed me."

"Has he done that before?"

"No."

"Do you fight a lot?"

"Sometimes."

He asked me some more questions, but I managed to answer them honestly and deflect suspicion at the same time. I wondered why the term 'problems at home' covered being punched but not being told daily that you were a worthless piece of shit.

The doctor also asked me a lot of questions about drugs. Had I ever tried them? Did my friends do them? Did I? Apparently he didn't believe me, because he had me piss in a cup before I could go see my eye doctor. It infuriated me that Mum had actually asked the doctor to test me for drugs even after I'd told her I'd never done them.

"I told you I'm no pothead," I said to Mum on the drive home. "Maybe next time you'll believe me. Oh, and tell Dad to stop hitting me. The bruises are suspicious."

She didn't reply.

next chapter...