Who was Shae?
She started off life as an average kid but once she started kindergarten her teachers noticed that she was a little different. She was smart, funny and gentle most of the time but occasionally she was distant and withdrawn. Her parent waved it off as childhood eccentricities. "Kids can be weird sometimes" was their usual response to any voiced concerned. In grade school she showed signs of being highly intelligent learning to read at a level at least two grades above her peers. She stood out a little too much which made it difficult to bond with her class mates. She had a few friends but never really felt close to them. She was lonely even when surrounded by many people. She felt different, somehow wrong and this feeling carried on all the way through to high school.
"There is a link between genius and madness" she had read that in a book and it made sense to her, she was probably born defective. By now she had learned to hide just how smart she was. Making friends was easier when you smiled and said what people wanted to hear. Shae had crafted the perfect façade, no-one would know how sad and pathetic she was if all she did was smile and laugh on cue. How long would she have to do this? It was tiring to keep up appearances and she was getting more tired by the day.
Her parent's divorce came as a shock to everyone they knew but not to her. Her father hadn't shared a bedroom with her mother for months and he was rarely around in the evenings or on weekends. She heard them fighting about money, about her and her weird behaviour. Her birth wasn't exactly planned and resulted in a "shot-gun" wedding between her parents. Her mother's aspirations as a travel journalist were pretty much scuppered by a crying baby and a reluctant husband. Shae felt like it was her fault that they were trapped in a loveless marriage making each other miserable. She loved them both deeply and thought she could fix things. Without her they could go back to the way they were, she was what was wrong and she needed to go away for good.
She was 14yrs old when she attempted suicide unsuccessfully. Her family kept it quiet and she returned to school after a brief absence due to a mysterious health issue. She went to a psychologist for assessment and was suspected of having Borderline personality disorder. She wasn't paying attention to the doctor or her parents anymore. She just wanted to be left alone and to do that she needed to convince everyone she was fine now. And for that she needed to keep up the façade of being normal.
Normal was a relative term in her high school. It was better blend in and keep your head down then to stand out. Outsiders had it rough and once you'd been labelled as one it pretty much stuck for the rest of you school career. One such outsider was Saeran. He was different from the get go. Dark and moody was a good description for him although Shae had heard the term "Goth/Emo freak" thrown around to when referring to him. The bigger guys pushed around a bit during breaks but he never got angry and usually just pretended like it never bothered him. He didn't have many friends just one guy named Tom. He had a reputation as a stoner but they liked the same music and Tom liked to say that outsiders should stick together. Shae was grouped together with Saeran and Tom for a biology assignment. She did her section and included a bit of their sections too. When they submitted the assignment the average make was decent with her section getting top marks even though the other two sections was severely lacking in many respects. Saeran learned that Shae was cool to be around she was friendly but not intrusive and like a lot of different bands, some of which he like too. Occasional he would catch her making a strange facial expression while staring out of the window, like she was zoning out. It was out of character for her upbeat personality but maybe she was just tired. A week or so later she stopped coming to class completely and disappeared for about a month. No-one had heard from her not even her group of friends. A rumour was going around that she might be knocked up but no-one believed that for a moment. The Shae they knew and loved was far too straight laced for that kind of thing. Everyone laughed and the topic quickly changed. Then one day she just showed up again apparently cured of the mysterious illness that had plagued her. She looked the same but something was different. Saeran thought she might just be depressed about being back at school, heck he hated school too but she was never like that. Shae looked like she had lost the light in her eyes, like a shell of her former self. It wasn't until the night of the end of exams party that he truly realised how that small change was just the tip of the iceberg.
Shae then vs. now
It had been a good 10 years since Shae's teenage suicide attempt but the events of that year remained fresh in her mind always. Overdosing on painkillers seemed easy enough. She just wanted to sleep. No more pain, no more crushing sadness just the sweet embrace of eternal rest. She was so tired of living, it was just too hard. But like most things it was easier said than done. Her parents found her on the floor of her bedroom in a pool of vomit and rushed her off to the hospital. One stomach pump later and she was fine. The story they told the school and anyone interested enough to ask was that she had had an allergic reaction to some medication. They all seemed to buy the explanation but she knew the truth, her doctor knew the truth and her parents knew the truth. The shame was unbearable and retreated away from the world.
Eventually she was prescribed anti-depressants by a doctor that was swayed by her mother's impassioned pleas. She was underage. Technically too young for this course of treatment but the doctor put her on the lowest possible dose of the medication and hope that it would do the trick. The funny thing about anti-depressants is that they don't stop you from being sad by making you happy, they make you numb. Feeling nothing was great at first for Shae but after a while she started to crave the sensation of feeling something. This resulted in escalating risky behaviour. She was looking for a rush, a thrill and maybe a little bit of trouble. And trouble wasn't hard to find while attending a public school in a middle income neighbourhood populated by latchkey kids with money and too much free time. Parental supervision was minimal as her mother had gone back to work after the divorce as a journalist for a small local paper and as long as she kept her grades up no-one would bat an eyelash.