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You weren't exactly sure what brought on the scratching. It wasn't like Neil, who did it out of sadness and you would wake up in the middle of the night to see that pin, that dreadful pin digging into Neil's thumb (you tried to talk about it once but Neil's face had gone blank and numb - you didn't say anything after that). You also knew it wasn't like Charlie who did it out of anger, who you had seen banging her head against trees and tripping over rocks on purpose just to make her arms and legs bleed. You didn't know why it happened.
It always started with feeling fine. You would be doing okay, doing homework or getting back from dinner before the others and you would feel fine. Then, before you could stop yourself, your hands flew to your head and yanked at your hair and pulled. Four seconds, hold. Release and get frustrated. Continue getting frustrated. Think about your brother. Your hands fly down to your legs and scratch. Two minutes, continue. Stop and become disgusted with yourself. Your teeth dig into your lip as it trembles, hold for four seconds. Release. Yank at the skin of your chapped lip, pull and claw at the indents left from a life of continuous biting (Pitts had told you once that your lip was gonna fall off one day, and they laughed. You didn't laugh). You touch your lip and you see red. You smile a little. You're disgusting but this is what you wanted.
You can't stab yourself with the pins you never had and you can't trip and stumble over jagged rocks until your legs ooze red, but you can do this. A brief second of pain and pin pricks of blood dotting your leg, cracks in your lips as you accidentally lick it and its gone, your effort was wasted and you're clawing to make it bleed again. You'll never pull hard enough to pull out hair, but sometimes you can yank hard enough and you can close your eyes and picture red flowing from your scalp. You scramble under your blanket and hide yourself, dig your hands under pillows because you know this is bad, this is wrong, you're wrong, you're awful. You scratch your arms and thank god your uniform has long sleeves. You'll never stop but at least you'll never feel too bad about it. You coward.