Her by Felicia Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

me.  “What happened?”
    I shrugged my shoulders.
    “You don’t know what happened to your wrists?”
    I stayed quiet and stared down at the floor.  I just wanted to go home.  Getting frustrated, the nurse gave up on me and told me to get dressed.  She left the room. 
    I started putting my clothes back on.  I bent over to put on my shoes, and something fell out of my pocket.  It was something shiny.  As I looked closer, I realized what it was.  It was my sterling silver butterfly pendant.  I picked it up off the floor, and stared at it closely. If I had been caught with this, they would have definitely taken it away. I used to have a lace string that looped through one of its sharp wings so I could wear it around my neck. I’d just started carrying it in my pocket so that no one could see how sharp I had kept its wings. It was easy to sharpen on any hard rock.  The wings were so sharp that I could run the pendant across my skin without pressing, and a line of blood would break through.  I loved it. I could always keep Mr. Sharp near me.
    “Who’s Mr. Sharp?” Lexus had asked once, when we were kids.  Lexus had been my best friend for a long time.
    We had been sitting in my bedroom for hours, trying to figure out what we wanted to do with ourselves until Lexus’ parents came to get us.  They were letting me come over to Lexus’ house for the weekend.  I was so excited.  I loved going over to Lexus’ house.
    Lexus and I became friends when I was in the sixth grade.  She was in eighth grade. We both didn’t really like each other at first because she used to be popular in middle school, and I was more like a social reject.  She was two years older than I was, and at that age, we thought that two years was too big of a gap for us to have anything in common.
    Lexus was beautiful. She had long, flowing hair that she always wore out, and her mom let her wear make-up.  I kept my shorter hair in a ponytail, and Mom didn’t let me wear make-up in middle school.  Not many boys paid attention to me, and the girls made fun of me for not looking like them.  It just so happened that one day, at a company picnic for the advertising company that Mom worked for, Lexus and I spotted our parents greeting each other.  It turned out that Lexus’ dad was on the same work team as my mom.  They found out that Lexus and I went to the same school. Days after the picnic, our parents used Lexus and me as a good excuse to meet up and have play dates. 
    It was a forced, play date thing at first.  For about the first year or so, Lexus pretended that she didn’t know me at school, but she was nice to me when our parents were around.  I didn’t care.  We didn’t have anything in common.  She was too boy-crazy, and I was too tomboyish.
    When Lexus’ dad got promoted to team leader and her family moved uptown, our families still remained close, but Lexus started to warm up to me after we didn’t go to the same school anymore. She started private school.  She said she hated going to private school, and that some kids were mean to her.  I told her I knew how that felt.  She said that she was sorry for being mean to me in school, and from then on, we were best friends.
    “Who’s who?”  I asked Lexus, as I walked back into my room with two sodas. 
     
    “Mr. Sharp,” she said.
    “Where did you get that from?”  I asked her.
    She held out a sheet of paper.  “I read it in one of your notebooks.  See?” Lexus held out my notebook. I had often written poetry and stories in it.
    She continued, “It says, ‘crimson seeps out of wounds as Mr. Sharp can remind me again of my doom.’ Ha! Ha! That rhymes.  Is this one of your poems that you wrote?  What is this?”
    I snatched my notebook from her and gave her the soda that I had brought for her.  I ripped the poem out of the notebook and into pieces of confetti.
    “It’s nothing,” I said.  “It’s just mumble-jumble that doesn’t mean anything.