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doesn’t even hurt, just feels like I scratched myself on something sharp. I guess I can’t expect too much from a thumb-sucking eleven-year-old.
    The blood fills the slit and I wait to see if it’ll drip. I move my arm a bit to guide a trickle, but it just stays put. I’m tempted to squeeze it, but when I glance up at Sadie, she looks like she’s gonna hurl. She’s staring at her finger. It’s got the tiniest bit of blood on it and she’s all sick about it.
    “Just wipe it,” I tell her.
    She does, on my bed, but it doesn’t help one bit. Her mouth is all hangy and her tongue is sticking out over her teeth. I’ll have to wait to squeeze.
    Sadie lifts her shirt to blot at her eyes with Tinker Bell’s wings, exposing a roll of fat over her skirt. Like pizza dough.
    I pluck the bloody safety pin from her fingers and lean across the bed to grab my lunch box. I pull out Sadie’s name tag; I’ve already written her name across it. The name tags are really price tags, the tiny square ones with the string attached where the salespeople tie it to stuff—I managed to collect a bunch of them from the thrift shop before I quit. I blow a bit on the point, to dry the blood, and then tie her name tag to the pin.
    There’s a bunch more like it in my box, safety pins with their owners’ names attached, those who’ve cut me. I like to carry them around so I always know who my real friends are. Not that Sadie will ever be one.
    “Now you have to leave,” I say. “Nicole will be here any minute.”
    “What about Scoops?”
    “I don’t have time. Maybe later. Maybe tomorrow, okay? I promise.”
    “No,” she whines. “Now. You said—”
    “Well, now I’m saying tomorrow!’
    “Can’t I come with you and Nicole?”
    “No.”
    Sadie folds her arms and stares straight ahead toward my poster of Cryptic Slaughter during their Injurious Harmony tour. She really doesn’t want to go home.
    “Okay,” I cave. “You can stay. But I’m padlocking the door so you can’t leave my room unless it’s through the window, and you can’t make any noise, and you can’t use any of my stuff. Got it?”
    She nods.
    I’ve let her stay here before when I’ve gone out; with the door locked, she’s safe. It’s not like anyone here notices anyway. Plus, I feel bad sending her home—somehow, her house seems even more screwed up than mine.
    Sadie takes her Game Boy out of her skirt pocket and camps out on the beanbag chair in the corner.
    “You still have that old thing?” I ask her.
    Sadie shrugs, whining something about how it was her sister’s, how her mother won’t buy her any of the new game stuff. Meanwhile, I grab my lunch box and count up all the pins, all my cuts. Eleven of them. Not bad, even if a couple were done by the same person twice.
    I’ve written all of my friends’ names on tags, even names of people I don’t hang around with that much. Slowly, each of these tags gets attached to a pin, like Kelly’s. She finally cut me after I lied and said that Derik LaPointe was spreading rumors about her—that she was a slut, and a bad one at that. Personally, I don’t know why she even cares what he thinks. Who’d want to date someone their mother fixed them up with anyway? Still, she cut me in exchange for the information—for some bogus stories that I made up. I guess everybody has a price.
    I wonder where I’ll have Nicole cut me. All last night and most of this morning I’ve psyched myself up, thinking how today she’ll finally do it. I guess listening to my mother’s Tony Robbins tapes is making me believe I can have whatever I want. Like everyone else, one of these days Nicole has to give, and when she finally does, I hope it’s a cut to my inner thigh, or my belly, or someplace like that. Though it seems easier for people to do it on my arm, like that makes a difference, like my arm is separate from the rest of me.
    It’s a little after one o’clock. I wonder where Nicole is. It’s kind of weird