Penance

by Eliza Clark

They were Americans. They didn’t seem terribly interested in the broader socio-economic context of the crime

I was a girl on her own in a corner, injecting horror right into her veins. I was isolated, and I was becoming increasingly warped, and I was grotesquely lonely.

Sometimes she wondered if she was a psychopath. She googled it all the time and tried to make the diagnosis fit. But she was too sad, and too fearful and too well behaved to qualify. She was another lightly depressed, middle-class-ish teen. A poster girl for the ‘Teen Mental Health Crisis Plaguing Our Youth’ – a girl among a million other somewhat sad girls, with no real problems beyond a vague existential angst.