Ellie lay on her bed scrunched up into the foetal position; her long curly brown hair lay across her face hiding her from the world like a velvet curtain. The sheer volume of her CD player drowned all sound from the outside world out. If she couldn't live in a world where things were right, she wouldn't live it in at all. She'd simply stay up in her room, surrounded by her music until she faded away into the background, faded into nothingness. She always wondered how that would work, could she really die like that? Could she really sit there and will herself to die, would the repeated thought of it be enough to convince her body to stop working?

Her mother walked in and calmly went over to the desk pausing Ellie's music. Not even bothering to comment on the eardrum splitting volume of the sound.

"There's someone on the phone for you," she said in a voice almost devoid of all emotion, clearly this was something she'd seen from Ellie regularly and it was obvious she was growing tired of it. Ellie didn't move from where she lay, she only held her arm out to be handed the phone, for a second she said nothing and her mother taking the hint left the room closing the door behind her.

"Hello?" said Ellie softly.

"Hey, its Emma, said the voice on the other end. "Are you coming out tonight?"

"No, I think I'd rather stay home tonight," replied Ellie in a voice that seemed almost silenced by tears.

"But it'll be fun, besides David'll be there. It'll do you good to get out of the house. Just come out this one time, and have a bit of fun. Please," begged Emma.

"I don't want to, I'm sick of having to pretend to be something I'm not," said Ellie sounding almost as devoid of emotion as her mother.

Ellie hung up the phone and placed it beside her. She uncurled herself to reveal a pair of beautiful big brown eyes, beautiful apart from the reddish tinge to them where her eyes were still sore from crying, a tear stained face, and long slender pale limbs marked with scars scratches and scabs from where she'd been "picking away" at herself as her doctors put it.

She unsteadily got up off the bed and slowly, like a child taking its first steps made her way wobbling to her desk to turn her music back on. The sound of Placebo filled the room.

"Come on Balthazar
I refuse to let you die
Come of fallen star
I refuse to let you die

Cause it's wrong
And I've been waiting far too long
And it's wrong
I've been waiting far too long
For you to be
Be
Be
Be

Be mine
For you to be mine
Be mine
For you to be mine

And it's wrong
I've been waiting far too long
It's wrong
I've been waiting far too long
For you to be
Be
Be
Be

All the centrefolds
That you can't afford
Have long since waved their last goodbyes
All the centrefolds
That you can't afford
You've long since faded from their eyes

So be
Be mine
So be
Be mine"

Ellie fell back into a heap on the floor and resumed her crying. It'd been over a month and a half since she stopped taking her anti depressants and she was returning to her now normal erratic state, the drugs were making their way out of her system, it felt like a curtain was being lifted from Ellie's face, a curtain of false happiness that her drugs had created for her. And now there was only blackness, the cold hard bitter black truth. It felt like a slap in the face, the realisation that she was going to die, that everyone was eventually. And no matter what she did to stop it, it would happen. Why should she bother to brush her hair in the mornings, she was only going to die after all. Why go to college, she wouldn't need it once she was dead, what good was knowledge when you weren't around to use it.

What good was any of it anymore? Everything's eventual after all, you can't stop a speeding train before it hurtles off a cliff, brutally killing everyone inside.
Ellie didn't want to move, in fact she didn't know that she had the strength, she struggled even to lift her arm, in fact she was only crying because she was scared of what might happen when she stopped. She could hear her mum coming up the stairs again, probably disturbed by the noise coming from Ellie's room, the walls were so thin in that house that it was next to impossible even to sneeze without being heard next door.

"Ellie," called her mum softly. "I know you're in there, don't you want to come out and talk?"

Ellie just lay there, she was sick of her mum cooing at her like this, like she was still a little baby. Within a few minutes her mum got sick of there being no answer and went back downstairs.

Ellie somehow managed to lift her arm and slide it underneath the dresser, fumbling for her former best friend, she found it, the kitchen knife her mum thought had got lost in the move up from Folkestone. She clutched the handle of the knife as tightly as she could, and tracing the blade along her veins just hard enough leave a faint mark on the skin, she played like this for a second or two before gripping the knife firmly in her right hand again and pushing down, she watched the blood drip out of her arm, the vivid scarlet river a stark contrast to the paper white of Ellie's skin, she watched this for a minute before moving onto her other wrist. To speed up the bleeding process she cut at herself some more, taking the knife and slashing at any other veins she could find, wincing in pain each time she slid the knife across her skin. When she'd done Ellie lay back and smiled, she smiled the smile of a girl who'd just got what she wanted, and didn't regret any of it, or did she?

"I don't want to die," whispered Ellie to herself. The look of her face at the realisation of what she'd just said was one of shock, even more so when she realised what she'd just said was true.

"I don't want to die," she said again this time taking in what she'd said word by word.

"I DON'T WANT TO DIE!" she screamed with every once of strength she possessed, but by the time her mother made it up the stairs and into Ellie's room after several minutes of wrestling with herself over whether this was another one of Ellie's screaming moments for no particular reason Ellie was lying in a pool of her own blood, clutching her knife, her body still warm but paler than death itself. She still retained every bit of her beauty, but none of her madness; she'd finally killed the monsters in her head. Ellie's mother sat weeping over the body of her daughter, clutching Ellie's hand to her face as the warmth began to fade.