Carrie was a picker. She had been for many years
and it was a habit severe enough in its manifestation to
be considered self harm. She was not particular as to
what or where she picked, unlike some people. It was a
whole body system of self scrutiny and removal. If she
noticed a hangnail, a tiny thread of skin flapping loose
on her finger, she would peel it back and rip it off.
Then, the edges left behind would be peeled back, until there was nothing but smooth - though raw, shiny
and bleeding - skin. If Carrie had a pimple on her
chin, a blackhead on her nose, an ingrown hair on her
groin, it would have to be removed. She prodded and
squeezed and scraped until any trace of it was gone.
This would almost always leave a scab, which would
be the subject of the same violence. Carrie picked her
ears, scouring them first with cotton swabs, then with
pencil tips, bobby pins, tweezers, even the dull tip of
her pocket knife, trying to expunge the thick yellow
wax that built up in them. She scraped the inside of
her nose until it bled, then
until it was infected, then
until it was scarred and her
septum was at risk of collapse.
Carrie picked at home, at
school, at work. She sat in the
back of every class, making a
point of arriving early so she
could get a seat where nobody
was behind her. University
was certainly better than high
school had been, and it was
rare that anyone tormented
her, but she still found it impossible to sit still with people
behind her. She knew what
they thought, what they wanted to do and say, staring at
her. Besides, she didn’t want
them watching her as she
scratched and scraped her
scalp, pulling the scabs from
under her stringy black hair.
She was working towards an
internship at a funeral home. Her mother thought it
was a tragic decision, but Carrie thought it was kind of
funny.
Her marks were low-average. She spent her time
listening to music, mostly French death metal, and
reading pulp horror that always disappointed her. She
was vaguely interested in the occult, particularly demonology, but had no belief in any of it. She doodled
obsessively, but never developed the talent or enthusiasm to consider herself artistic. Some of her classmates
would say she was preoccupied with death, but in truth
she was just more comfortable with the idea than most
people. Her social life was limited to intermittent spurts
of online chatting with strangers and weekly phone calls
with her mother.
Carrie wore mostly black, but She was not what
anybody would mistake for goth or emo. She was utterly without glamour, void of style. She wore black because she didn’t understand color and she felt it attract-
ed attention. She wore no makeup, no jewelry, no accessories. Her hair was long, but plain, greasy and limp.
Her body was forgettable, the curves to shallow to be
voluptuous, too droopy to be slender. Her skin was pale
and littered with scars from her constant digging, raking
and poking. She gave off a barely perceptible but always
present oily smell.
Carrie had tried cutting once. She’d been sixteen.
The familiar revulsion was rising inside her like a black
tide. She felt a desperate, suffocating need to escape the
nauseating loathing she felt. The overwhelming disgust
was like being held under rancid sewer water, unable
to breath. She was disgusted with herself, by the world
around her, by the things she had done. The feeling
was like having something cold and wet and writhing
pressed into her naked back and trying not to pull away.
She could feel it along her spine, between her shoulders, in her hips and throat and crotch: revulsion. So
she’d tried cutting, a narrow slice along the inside of her
leg. Watching the blood bead up and then drip down
had helped a little, but it wasn’t
enough. It felt artificial. It felt
pretend.
Carrie had even tried therapy. That had been a laugh. It
had been when she was much
younger, twelve or thirteen. Her
parents had set it up after things
had come out about what “uncle” Bill had been doing. But the
therapist had only wanted to talk
about what had happened, to
dig into things head on. It had
been like burying herself in the
disgust she felt, drowning herself in shame and self loathing.
When they’d talked about it, it
was as bad as if it had been happening all over again. She felt the
revulsion as strongly as if Bill’s
sour little dick was stabbing at
the back of her throat again. It
hadn’t helped.
The picking had started slowly, naturally. She’d
gradually realized that the satisfaction of squeezing a
zit, the sweet pain of peeling a hangnail or the sickening mental clarity that came after pulling off a toenail,
all of them helped to calm the boiling sea of anger and
disgust she felt. It was like the peaceful tired feeling she
had after violently vomiting. It pulled her mind away
from the revulsion, gave her something to focus on that
was under her control; something she could manage.
One day, Carrie discovered, entirely by accident,
a new and satisfying facet to the picking while sitting
in the back of a crowded lecture hall. The proof was
delivering a particularly dry lecture that only repeated what she had learned in the prerequisite course.
Carrie had been scribbling little ex-eyed skulls in her
notebook when she felt a slight tickle in her throat and
she coughed quietly. Something spewed up into her
mouth, almost gently, but it wasn’t phlegm. She spit it
into her hand: a small, hard, pale green nugget.