Chapter Seventeen: Make Me Lose Control
Sitting outside on her roof, the cool night air basking around her, Manny stared up at the moon and wished she could escape. She wished she could shed her skin and be the old Manny. She didn't like this new girl, and she didn't know how to stop her from overwhelming who she had always been.
Manny had always been sweet. She was naïve, she was annoying, she was hyper, but most of all she was sweet. She didn't allow others to push her around when the time came to stand up for herself, but she wasn't cruel. This new Manny felt cruel. She took that sweetness and murdered it, twisted its charred corpse into something harder, colder, meaner.
She lit a cigarette, her second one ever, and hoped that by doing this, she could forget. Maybe if she started other habits, she could release the ones that had been forming. The old Manny may have confronted Craig, but she never would have been so cruel. But then, the old Manny wouldn't have gone after him, sought him out even when she knew he had a girlfriend, and slept with him. No, the old Manny would have respected the boundaries Craig formed when he started dating Ashley Kerwin.
The new Manny was nothing but a cold, cruel slut.
But she didn't want to be this way. She didn't want to be the girl no one wanted for more than an hour. She didn't want to hurt people, be intentionally cruel. She just wanted to retain that which made her who she was, and never grow up. She wanted to grow down.
The tears were rolling, Manny's quick sobs choking in her throat. She still held the cigarette, but no longer smoked it. She was crying too hard. As she was about to flick it away, Manny looked up. She stared down on it, her quiet tears making her eyes glisten.
Manny stuck out her left arm, and smashed the cigarette into it.
The pain raced up, burns hurting so much more than cuts. It didn't go out, and so she kept burning, kept feeling the pain, kept gasping. It was a new pain, something to take away what she felt inside by making herself feel on the outside.
When she was burning, she never felt a thing she didn't want to. She didn't mourn her loss of childhood, she didn't mourn Craig or Emma or JT or Toby or Sully or Paige or anyone. She was free to do what she wanted, but only when she was hurting. When the pain stopped, the world would come flooding back, however gradually.
The cigarette went out, save one little spark on her arm. Manny looked at it, and crushed it with her fingertip.
Her life wasn't hers anymore. She understood that. Everything was spinning out of control, spinning away from her. She wasn't Manny, she wasn't Manuela, she wasn't Emma's little lackey, she wasn't anything. She recognized nothing of herself, nothing of her past, nothing of her future. She didn't know where life was going, she only knew she didn't like it.
All the world was against her, and she needed the world back. She needed the world that was comforting. The world that cared. She needed the world that thought of her as its future, and loved her for it. She needed to feel that she wasn't just a dirty little tramp the world wanted to shut out.
When she was younger, it felt like she was the star. The world loved her and promised to take care of her. Strangers would turn into friends; all the people would look at her with love.
But the world shut her out.
It locked her out in the cold, dead of winter.
It gave up on her.
She was no longer the future, she was the enemy.
No more did people look at her and smile. They frowned, they grimaced, they looked at her in disgust. They wanted her to go away, desperately wanted her to disappear.
When she was little, the world loved her.
When she became a teenager, the world wanted her dead.
And maybe that's why she became so overwhelmed. The world became a scary place, a place no one wants to live in. No one wanted to hear good news, so everyone was so overwhelmed with negativity they were too afraid to go outside at night. Too afraid of the man in the house next door. They made the world lose its innocence as Manny lost hers, and they grew more and more damaged by the day.
She never thought she would be the type to hurt herself. Cutting, burning, scarification…it was all an alien concept to her. She would wonder how, why, anyone would or even could do that to themselves. How could someone sink so deeply into their own abyss, the only road they saw out was to cause themselves pain?
But she had lost control over her life. She had lost control over her emotions, her fears, her thoughts, her friends, her everything. Everything went haywire, everything she touched was ruined.
And she understood it now, at least a little. She understood it wasn't just about pain. It was about release. It was about control. She couldn't control her life, but she could control her pain. She couldn't release everything she felt inside, all her guilt and turmoil and horror welling up all the time. But now she could. Now she could find a way to release the pain.
It no longer had a hold on her.
She was free to waste away.
She was free to skip through a field of happy pink bunnies.
She was free to do whatever she wanted.
She was free.