It'd been the last straw. Simple and final, it was the final one. Rubbing her eyes with one hand she ran up the stairs, sobs racking her entire body. She tripped up the last few stairs but got up and continued on quickly, barely even noticing the pain. She ran into her bedroom and collapsed upon her bed. Slowly, her breathing started to come back to normal. She took deep breathes. In, out, in out. Repetitive, deep and calming breathes.

She lay on her bed for a few seconds, trying to resist this terrible urge that was tugging from both her stomach and her left arm. She gave in, rather quickly to this urge and stood. She reached under her mattress, as if searching for something, and soon drew her arm back, with what she had been looking for in hand. It was a small silver piece of metal with a hole in the very center of it. It was, in fact, a pencil sharpener blade. The girl sat down on her bed and uncovered her left arm.

With the dull side of the blade, she traced over a couple of light scars that were nearer her wrist and then moved along down. The scars became more prominent the closer you moved to the elbow with an actual cut that was still in the process of healing closest to the elbow. There were eight cuts, starting about two inches down the wrist (just past that vein cluster) going till about half an inch before the crook in the elbow.

After lightly tracing over all the scars (and cut), the young girl held the corner of where dullness met sharpness. She held it so the blade part faced her skin. Lightly she made a horizontal line through the two most centered scars on her arm. She always made this "practice mark" as a guideline for the real cut. It gave her more confidence, for some strange and twisted reason.

Without missing a beat, the girl tore the skin right along the practice mark. Red blood started to flow out. It wasn't a deep cut. The girl was too afraid to cut any deeper. She didn't wish death, only to make her self feel better. The euphoria that she was sent into every time she cut was addicting. The adrenaline that rushed through her veins was breathtaking. She loved it. She just didn't love what led up to it.

Her sister, nine of ten times, was the reason this young girl was forced to such drastic measures to make herself feel better. Her sister had been jealous from the very moment of her younger sister's birth. Even when they were younger, the elder sister had a habit of shoving her down, tickling her younger sister till she couldn't breathe. Simple things like that. When the younger had been in second grade, things got worse. Terrible bruises started appearing all over the younger girl. Unexplainable scrapes and cuts.

Their mother attributed it mostly to sibling rivalry and tried to spend equal time with both, if not a little bit more with her elder daughter. But things only seemed to get worse. The mother chose to ignore it, for it was quickly hidden from her as they continued to get older. When the younger sister had been in fourth grade, she ended up in the hospital with a broken wrist from, yep, you guessed it, her older sister. The two had been biking together and the older sister caused an "accident" to happen.

So, the younger sister took it upon herself to make herself feel better. All by some strange accident on the computer, she found out about self-injury. Of course she'd read about how bad it was. But she was young and figured out cut wouldn't matter. Oh how wrong she'd been. She'd been hooked. At first they had been small things, most just "additions" to cuts she already had from her sister. She had a few circles and squares and even a still faint heart shaped scar from fifth grade on her left ankle.

She was young, much too young to be resorting to such things. But in today's world, nothing seems impossible. Kids are having sex younger and younger, drinking younger and younger. So, logically, why shouldn't self-injury start younger and younger? It only makes sense, you see. Now back to this young girl.

She let the cut bleed for a few seconds and then stood up. She darted out of her bedroom, pencil sharpener blade hidden in a fist and darted straight into the bathroom, unluckily placed at the other end of the hallway. As soon as she was safely in, she shut the door and locked it. She opened the medicine cabinet and pulled some rubbing alcohol and cotton balls from the drawer below. She cleaned the cut and quickly bandaged it. She cleaned the blade as well.

Quickly she returned to her bedroom and hid the pencil sharpener blade from where she had got it.

"Lizzie!" a women's voice ran out. "Dinner!"

Lizzie thought, 'My name is Lizzie. And I'm a cutter.' She had come to terms with herself during this period of cutting. Before she'd always been hesitant. Now, it didn't bother her. Quickly she ran down the stairs to get dinner.

A/N: Well, I was reading through the reviews for this story and figured that you guys deserved this as a Christmas present. It's not very good and I've actually been meaning to write this for a while. So voila, here it is.