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DEAR SAWYER,
I may not know much about magic school or whatever it is you magical people do, but I believe you've been under a lot of stress lately, mostly due to those exams your mother keeps talking about. OWLs, wasn't it? I hope you're working hard! Inside this package is your Walkman and the shoebox of cassettes you've asked for in your letter.
If you've got any questions for Astronomy class, feel free to ask! I may not know much about the magical aspects of whatever you're studying, but I do know tons about the practical, scientific stuff. Tell Wyatt I love him, would you? And please write back to your mother.
Go ace those papers, buddy.
Love, Dad
* * *
SCAR TISSUE HAS NO CHARACTER. It's not quite skin—though it may resemble a plastic replica of dermis—but the main component of scar tissue is that it's meant to cover up destruction. A slipcover that shields and disguises the irreparable damage underneath from sight, yet remaining the most unsightly thing. It's a mark, essentially. It singles out those who have something to hide. That's why people grow it.
As Sawyer stares at the burn marks on her hands, the mottled tissue stretching and wrinkling with each flex of her fingers. Spread out into a web so stiff the bones in the back of her hand strained against her scarred skin, then clenched so tight into a fist that her knuckles blanched and her arms trembled. By theory, scar tissue should be the easiest to break. Weaker than ligaments, more brittle than her smiles, but even as she rubs and slices with the nail of her thumb at the thick, ridges, alternating pink and white and brick-red from different severities of burns she'd given to herself, it doesn't split.
Nobody's stopped her from burning herself. Nobody's looked close enough to her hands before to see the scars. Nobody's confiscated the lighter in her pocket that she never leaves her room without. So she'd kept on going. Kept on burning and burning and burning, hoping, secretly, that one day she'd be able to keep burning through her skin, watch the flesh blister and melt away to reveal bone. See what she's really made of. What if she was all rot and ectoplasm?
What if there was something darker inhibiting her skin? Perhaps that'd explain why she'd felt like an alien for the most part of her life. If her insides weren't her own, and her actions were powered by some diabolic entity taking control of her own brain, would people be more forgiving?
What if—
The door to the dorm room clicks shut. Sawyer looks up from her hands—now clenched into fists with the scar tissue stretched thin and straining at their edges clinging to her knuckles—to the Astronomy textbook and parchment and quills laid out on her bed for an essay that hadn't been written, and will never be written at this rate. Too wired to sleep, Sawyer had taken to attempting to do some homework while the mid-October rain fell in light sheets outside the window beside her bunk bed. It'd been over three hours with her wand lit up by a Lumos charm since it was too dark to see, and everyone else in the room had been fast asleep, and nothing had been put to ink and paper.
