She hates herself. Her skin clings to her bones, ensnaring her within her own body. She cannot escape. Flat chested, hips protruding like guns, every vertebra on her back sticking out like knives, her arms, legs and neck frail and trembling, her head too large for the rest of her miniature body. It’s as if at any moment she could collapse and shatter into a million small pieces that would be blown away like dust, never to be seen or heard of again, forgotten and alone in all the corners of the universe. She is pale, but the large, dark blue and purple bruises that cover her body conceal this. Then there are the cuts across her arms, on the inside of her thighs, still raw and crusty with dried blood, pus seeping out of the criss-cross patterns across her skin.

She hates her family. She can hear her father, blinded by alcohol, yelling at her mother who tries to stop him from coming upstairs to beat his only daughter for the second time that night. She hears the familiar screams of pain as he turns on her mother instead, and there is nothing she can do. She knows it. Tears slice pathways down her gaunt, hollow cheeks.

She hates her school. She can imagine all her classmates enjoying themselves by a pool, in a Jacuzzi, drinking, eating, laughing…without her. She is a freak. She knows it. They know it. Her stomach twists mercilessly with hunger, but she must resist for the sake of beauty. For the sake of pain.

Will it ever end?

No.

She fingers a bottle of pills anxiously. Will it hurt?

Not for long.

The glass of water is waiting by her bedside table, ready for her. Should she do it?

Yes.

She unscrews the lid of the bottle, its ridged lid scraping against her bony fingers. Out the pills pour, one by one, until they all lie in the palm of her hand. She has stopped crying. Tipping her head back, she puts them in her mouth. They are bitter against her dry tongue. The water fills her mouth and forces the pills down her throat. She gags, chokes, but keeps going, determined.

She lies down, finally free, and closes her eyes for the last time.

When they find her, her phone has received a text message from the new girl in school, asking her to go shopping sometime, sent only ten minutes after her time of death.

When they find her, her father has been arrested, her mother sent to hospital, and a social worker sits by her side, crying for the poor girl whose life would have been different if she had waited just that little bit longer.