Categories > Original > Drama > The Happiest Day
Chapter 1: Bleeding Out
0 reviewsWritten for self harmers by a former self harmer. Jasmine attempted suicide on Valentine's Day 2002, after her absentee mother seemingly deserts her, and her bullies go one step too far. When she...
1Insightful
Valentine’s Day, 2002
Jasmine Hanson was an obligation—an inconvenient one, it seemed—to her mother. The woman had taken off when Jasmine was just two, and saw her sparsely throughout the year, when she felt she was obligated to.
“Some birthday outing. You couldn’t even be bothered to be on time, Andrea, let alone call and let me know you were going to be late. And it’s Thursday, I can’t be out late, I have school tomorrow, unfortunately,” she griped, glaring at the woman’s framed portrait, before turning it face down.
It was the just the perfect icing on what had been another horrible day. Jessica Tanner, the most popular girl in the freshman class at Jasmine’s high school, had publicly ridiculed her again for the birthday party her father had insisted she have a month ago, when it was actually relevant to Jasmine’s life.
“Like I can help that nobody showed up except Allison. She’s my only friend, and I tried to tell Dad that, but he wouldn’t hear it. I knew this is what would happen,” Jasmine sighed, flopping down on her bed.
Jessica and her crew made a habit of making Jasmine’s school life hell; she’d been laughed at by the entire student body a week ago because she was not only a social pariah, but because her clothing had violated the dress code. Jasmine wrinkled her nose in memory of the incident, biting back a snarl.
“I wouldn’t have violated the dress code if someone hadn’t taken the shirt I had layered over my tank top. My shirt was missing, they stacked my gym locker, and then they rigged my real locker to spray me down with that nasty perfume Mrs. Delbecchio uses,” she recounted, as glanced over at her desk.
Her poetry notebooks, the full ones, lay at the top right corner in a neat stack. They were full of terrible rhyming schemes and dark lines, but they were her salvation. It was the only way she could vent her frustrations privately. The one she was currently filling had taken up residence in her backpack, inside her Civics book, waiting on tonight’s entry. The last one was one she’d written today, after she’d finished the Civics assignment—Civics was her class, the one thing she felt like she excelled at—and it was an uncharacteristically sappy one, about her crush, Trent Risika.
Trent was the epitome of what Jasmine considered her dream guy; with raven locks that fell just past his shoulders, intense blue eyes, and the brooding, mysterious, devil may care attitude, he seemed like he might know exactly what it felt like to be in her shoes. Jasmine had met Trent on her first day in Civics, when he’d been assigned the seat in front of hers. He was the only sophomore in the class, having opted for a geography course during his own Freshman year. Despite being an obvious loner, everyone seemed to like Trent. It was almost as though he fancied himself too good to hang with the rest of the school, unlike Jasmine, who was lucky that the one person who had befriended her upon her entrance into Savant High still wanted to associate with her.
It hadn’t always been this way; during the first months of her high school career, Jasmine had been happy, she’d had friends, she’d been normal. She had no idea what she’d done to slight Jessica, but Jessica had gotten her revenge, by paying a popular senior boy to ask Jasmine out. Not knowing what was about to happen, she’d accepted his offer, and they had caught a movie before going to get coffee after. Jasmine thought the date had went well, and was surprised that she’d been so at ease on her very first outing with a boy; the next day, however, by the time she arrived at school, the halls had been wallpapered with posters bearing her eighth grade yearbook picture, along with the words “Jasmine Hanson puts out on the first date”. And, of course, since Jessica’s father was Dr. Tanner, the superintendent of their school district, nothing had been done about it. Naturally, Jasmine’s friends, what few she had, were afraid of suffering the same fate by proxy. All of them, except Allison, had put plenty of distance between themselves and her.
Allison had suggested that maybe Jessica thought of her as a rival, though, for the life of her, Jasmine couldn’t see why; her mousy brown hair fell in limp pieces around her shoulders, unlike Jessica’s thick, honey blonde locks which seemed to curl perfectly around her face no matter what. And her hazel eyes didn’t stand out at all, because she didn’t wear makeup. Jessica, however, knew every trick in the book to make her own pale blue eyes pop, and accentuated them with eyeliner and mascara, both in the perfect shade of black. Jessica was memorable, whereas Jasmine felt that she was utterly forgettable in every sense of the word. This thinking, to Jasmine, explained why Andrea had forgotten their plans today.
“Suddenly,” she mused sarcastically, “I find myself inspired.”
Her poetry had been the only way she’d been able to deal with the incident, and in her mind, it was no coincidence that Jessica’s campaign for student council had started hanging her campaign posters that very morning.
Jasmine glanced at the clock; Andrea was supposed to pick her up at 3:30 that afternoon. It was now 5:00, and still no call, or no appearance.
“If she’s not here by six, I’m not going,” Jasmine decided, before padding over to where her backpack sat, to dig out her poetry notebook.
Pulling out her Civics book, she flipped it open to the halfway point, where she had stowed her notebook after Civics, before going downstairs to Health class. The notebook was gone. Panicking, Jasmine began to furiously dig through her backpack, hoping against hope that it had just slipped out and was amongst the rest of her things. Unfortunately, it hadn’t, and there was no trace of it left.
No wonder Sarah Hawthorne had been pointing at her and sneering when she made a stop at her locker before English. She knew Jasmine’s combination, and she’d made that clear after the perfume incident. Sarah had helped Jessica steal Jasmine’s poetry notebook.
And now the whole school would know about her feelings for Trent, about her deepest, darkest thoughts. They would know everything. Of everything she’d had to endure this year, this had to be the worst, and on top of it all, her own mother didn’t care enough to call ahead before she too bailed on her.
“Fuck this, I’m done. I am done with all of this. What’s the point in trying to go on? They hate me. Every single day that I’m there, they’re going to do this, they’ll humiliate me. I bet they’re on their iBook clamshells right now, e-mailing my poems out, and printing them to put up before school tomorrow,” she cried, furiously swiping away the tears before they could fall.
Jasmine dashed to her father’s bathroom, which was just down the hall from her own bedroom and bathroom. She jerked open the door the medicine cabinet, furiously searching for the antique straight edge razor blade that he used to tame his beard and mustache. Jacob Hanson sharpened his razor every week, to make sure it was as sharp as possible, so Jasmine knew she’d have no trouble pulling off what she was about to do.
Her fingers closed around it, and without a second’s hesitation, Jasmine flipped it open, before laying it down on the edge of the sink long enough to shed her hooded sweatshirt; seconds later, Jasmine placed the razor’s blade parallel to the inside of her left wrist, and pulled it down quickly, slicing the vein open. She repeated the process on her right arm, before allowing the handle of the razor to slip from her bloody fingers.
Downstairs, Andrea Harris waited on the front step, knocking loudly, as she had for the past five minutes. Finally, she tried turning the knob, and to her surprise, the front door was left unlocked.
Andrea walked in slowly, cautiously, and glanced around the kitchen and living room, before stepping up onto the bottom step of the stairs.
“Jasmine? It’s Mom, sorry I’m late, but if we’re going to shop we need to get a move on!”
Andrea paused for a moment, waiting for a response from her daughter; instead, she was greeted by a loud crash. Without a second thought, Andrea rushed up the stairs, and sprinted down the hall. She found Jasmine lying in a pool of blood, her complexion a ghostly shade of white.
Andrea knelt next to her daughter’s bleeding form, punching in the numbers for 911 as best she could, because her hands were shaking so badly.
“Baby, hang on, Mom’s got help coming. Please, please hang on.”
Jasmine lay in the bathroom floor, half conscious, and barely registering her mother’s words as the older woman spoke frantically with the 911 operator.
“No, I can’t stay on the line, she’s bleeding to death! What do I do, how do I stop it?!”
The operator must have told her to apply pressure with something absorbent, because seconds later, Jasmine felt the fleecy lining of her hoodie being pressed firmly against both her arms, in an attempt to stem the flow of blood. She would’ve told Andrea not to bother, but she couldn’t seem to make her mouth or her voice work.
Moments later, way too fast for Jasmine’s liking, the paramedics arrived; they applied gauze to her wrists, wrapping tape around them as tightly as they could without cutting off her circulation completely, before loading her onto a stretcher, and rolling her into the waiting ambulance. She drifted in and out of consciousness on the ride over, while the paramedics worked to try and stabilize her vital signs; her head throbbed where it had banged against the floor, hard, when she fell.
The first tendrils of unconsciousness began to creep across her mind, as the ambulance slowed to a stop, and her stretcher was wheeled into the emergency room. Jasmine stared up at the bright, florescent lights as she was moved down a hallway, and briefly, she allowed her mind to wonder.
Is this the last thing I’ll ever see?
Jasmine Hanson was an obligation—an inconvenient one, it seemed—to her mother. The woman had taken off when Jasmine was just two, and saw her sparsely throughout the year, when she felt she was obligated to.
“Some birthday outing. You couldn’t even be bothered to be on time, Andrea, let alone call and let me know you were going to be late. And it’s Thursday, I can’t be out late, I have school tomorrow, unfortunately,” she griped, glaring at the woman’s framed portrait, before turning it face down.
It was the just the perfect icing on what had been another horrible day. Jessica Tanner, the most popular girl in the freshman class at Jasmine’s high school, had publicly ridiculed her again for the birthday party her father had insisted she have a month ago, when it was actually relevant to Jasmine’s life.
“Like I can help that nobody showed up except Allison. She’s my only friend, and I tried to tell Dad that, but he wouldn’t hear it. I knew this is what would happen,” Jasmine sighed, flopping down on her bed.
Jessica and her crew made a habit of making Jasmine’s school life hell; she’d been laughed at by the entire student body a week ago because she was not only a social pariah, but because her clothing had violated the dress code. Jasmine wrinkled her nose in memory of the incident, biting back a snarl.
“I wouldn’t have violated the dress code if someone hadn’t taken the shirt I had layered over my tank top. My shirt was missing, they stacked my gym locker, and then they rigged my real locker to spray me down with that nasty perfume Mrs. Delbecchio uses,” she recounted, as glanced over at her desk.
Her poetry notebooks, the full ones, lay at the top right corner in a neat stack. They were full of terrible rhyming schemes and dark lines, but they were her salvation. It was the only way she could vent her frustrations privately. The one she was currently filling had taken up residence in her backpack, inside her Civics book, waiting on tonight’s entry. The last one was one she’d written today, after she’d finished the Civics assignment—Civics was her class, the one thing she felt like she excelled at—and it was an uncharacteristically sappy one, about her crush, Trent Risika.
Trent was the epitome of what Jasmine considered her dream guy; with raven locks that fell just past his shoulders, intense blue eyes, and the brooding, mysterious, devil may care attitude, he seemed like he might know exactly what it felt like to be in her shoes. Jasmine had met Trent on her first day in Civics, when he’d been assigned the seat in front of hers. He was the only sophomore in the class, having opted for a geography course during his own Freshman year. Despite being an obvious loner, everyone seemed to like Trent. It was almost as though he fancied himself too good to hang with the rest of the school, unlike Jasmine, who was lucky that the one person who had befriended her upon her entrance into Savant High still wanted to associate with her.
It hadn’t always been this way; during the first months of her high school career, Jasmine had been happy, she’d had friends, she’d been normal. She had no idea what she’d done to slight Jessica, but Jessica had gotten her revenge, by paying a popular senior boy to ask Jasmine out. Not knowing what was about to happen, she’d accepted his offer, and they had caught a movie before going to get coffee after. Jasmine thought the date had went well, and was surprised that she’d been so at ease on her very first outing with a boy; the next day, however, by the time she arrived at school, the halls had been wallpapered with posters bearing her eighth grade yearbook picture, along with the words “Jasmine Hanson puts out on the first date”. And, of course, since Jessica’s father was Dr. Tanner, the superintendent of their school district, nothing had been done about it. Naturally, Jasmine’s friends, what few she had, were afraid of suffering the same fate by proxy. All of them, except Allison, had put plenty of distance between themselves and her.
Allison had suggested that maybe Jessica thought of her as a rival, though, for the life of her, Jasmine couldn’t see why; her mousy brown hair fell in limp pieces around her shoulders, unlike Jessica’s thick, honey blonde locks which seemed to curl perfectly around her face no matter what. And her hazel eyes didn’t stand out at all, because she didn’t wear makeup. Jessica, however, knew every trick in the book to make her own pale blue eyes pop, and accentuated them with eyeliner and mascara, both in the perfect shade of black. Jessica was memorable, whereas Jasmine felt that she was utterly forgettable in every sense of the word. This thinking, to Jasmine, explained why Andrea had forgotten their plans today.
“Suddenly,” she mused sarcastically, “I find myself inspired.”
Her poetry had been the only way she’d been able to deal with the incident, and in her mind, it was no coincidence that Jessica’s campaign for student council had started hanging her campaign posters that very morning.
Jasmine glanced at the clock; Andrea was supposed to pick her up at 3:30 that afternoon. It was now 5:00, and still no call, or no appearance.
“If she’s not here by six, I’m not going,” Jasmine decided, before padding over to where her backpack sat, to dig out her poetry notebook.
Pulling out her Civics book, she flipped it open to the halfway point, where she had stowed her notebook after Civics, before going downstairs to Health class. The notebook was gone. Panicking, Jasmine began to furiously dig through her backpack, hoping against hope that it had just slipped out and was amongst the rest of her things. Unfortunately, it hadn’t, and there was no trace of it left.
No wonder Sarah Hawthorne had been pointing at her and sneering when she made a stop at her locker before English. She knew Jasmine’s combination, and she’d made that clear after the perfume incident. Sarah had helped Jessica steal Jasmine’s poetry notebook.
And now the whole school would know about her feelings for Trent, about her deepest, darkest thoughts. They would know everything. Of everything she’d had to endure this year, this had to be the worst, and on top of it all, her own mother didn’t care enough to call ahead before she too bailed on her.
“Fuck this, I’m done. I am done with all of this. What’s the point in trying to go on? They hate me. Every single day that I’m there, they’re going to do this, they’ll humiliate me. I bet they’re on their iBook clamshells right now, e-mailing my poems out, and printing them to put up before school tomorrow,” she cried, furiously swiping away the tears before they could fall.
Jasmine dashed to her father’s bathroom, which was just down the hall from her own bedroom and bathroom. She jerked open the door the medicine cabinet, furiously searching for the antique straight edge razor blade that he used to tame his beard and mustache. Jacob Hanson sharpened his razor every week, to make sure it was as sharp as possible, so Jasmine knew she’d have no trouble pulling off what she was about to do.
Her fingers closed around it, and without a second’s hesitation, Jasmine flipped it open, before laying it down on the edge of the sink long enough to shed her hooded sweatshirt; seconds later, Jasmine placed the razor’s blade parallel to the inside of her left wrist, and pulled it down quickly, slicing the vein open. She repeated the process on her right arm, before allowing the handle of the razor to slip from her bloody fingers.
Downstairs, Andrea Harris waited on the front step, knocking loudly, as she had for the past five minutes. Finally, she tried turning the knob, and to her surprise, the front door was left unlocked.
Andrea walked in slowly, cautiously, and glanced around the kitchen and living room, before stepping up onto the bottom step of the stairs.
“Jasmine? It’s Mom, sorry I’m late, but if we’re going to shop we need to get a move on!”
Andrea paused for a moment, waiting for a response from her daughter; instead, she was greeted by a loud crash. Without a second thought, Andrea rushed up the stairs, and sprinted down the hall. She found Jasmine lying in a pool of blood, her complexion a ghostly shade of white.
Andrea knelt next to her daughter’s bleeding form, punching in the numbers for 911 as best she could, because her hands were shaking so badly.
“Baby, hang on, Mom’s got help coming. Please, please hang on.”
Jasmine lay in the bathroom floor, half conscious, and barely registering her mother’s words as the older woman spoke frantically with the 911 operator.
“No, I can’t stay on the line, she’s bleeding to death! What do I do, how do I stop it?!”
The operator must have told her to apply pressure with something absorbent, because seconds later, Jasmine felt the fleecy lining of her hoodie being pressed firmly against both her arms, in an attempt to stem the flow of blood. She would’ve told Andrea not to bother, but she couldn’t seem to make her mouth or her voice work.
Moments later, way too fast for Jasmine’s liking, the paramedics arrived; they applied gauze to her wrists, wrapping tape around them as tightly as they could without cutting off her circulation completely, before loading her onto a stretcher, and rolling her into the waiting ambulance. She drifted in and out of consciousness on the ride over, while the paramedics worked to try and stabilize her vital signs; her head throbbed where it had banged against the floor, hard, when she fell.
The first tendrils of unconsciousness began to creep across her mind, as the ambulance slowed to a stop, and her stretcher was wheeled into the emergency room. Jasmine stared up at the bright, florescent lights as she was moved down a hallway, and briefly, she allowed her mind to wonder.
Is this the last thing I’ll ever see?
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