Everyone underestimated her suffering.

“She’s insane,” her classmates whispered when they thought she wasn’t listening. “She hears voices. She worships Satan. She has no friends. She never leaves home.”

Yet she knew that only two of the four were true. She knew that no matter how many times she hissed at them to shut the hell up, they never would. She knew that rumors and gossip spread like fatal diseases in her small town high school.

“She can fix this,” her shrink murmured to her guardians as she left the room. “It’s up to her. Only she can make it all okay.”

And she knew that he spoke the truth. She knew that the only person who could possibly change her outlook on life was herself. She knew that if she never put effort into healing herself, and if she never tried to amend her cruel reality, it would never change.
“It’s just a phase,” her parents said to each other over and over again. “She’ll be fine. She is fine.”

But she knew they were wrong. She knew they couldn’t accept the truth. She knew how much it pained them to hear her sobbing at three in the morning and muttering to herself about the life she wished she had at five in the afternoon.
She also knew where they hid the knives.