Wendy wants to cry. But she can’t. She knows tears won’t get her anywhere. They are a pointless waste of energy.

A wave of exhaustion so thick hits her that she thinks about crumpling to the floor, wishing the ground would break into half, and swallow her whole. Coldness saturates her, soaking through her muscles, through her bones, like alcohol has been rubbed on her skin. Her eyelids feel so heavy that she closes her eyes, and thinks about falling to sleep for a thousand years.

When Wendy stirs from her sleep, her eyes travel to the window. The moon, she notices, is theatrically bright. Enchanting, she might add. She had dreamt of becoming an astronaut when she was younger, but as she grew up, she didn’t quite fancy the thought of taking a rocket to reach the moon. She thinks rockets are dangerous. What if the rocket explodes while it’s on its way to the moon?

Wendy would rather admire the moon from where she is- earth, for some things are worth admiring from afar, than up close. She doesn’t want the image of the rocky surface of the moon to taint her perfect notion of such magnificent beauty.

Slowly, she slides a glance in Irene’s direction. The psychiatrist is silently writing something in her notebook again. What’s new. The brunette bites the corner of her lips, guilt tugging at the corner of her heart as images of her aggressive behaviour towards Irene sear themselves on to the back of her eyelids like the lightning bursts of a camera flash.

She wants to call out to the psychiatrist, to say sorry, but it stalls on her lips. So she observes the psychiatrist instead. And waits until the psychiatrist realises that her patient, Son Seungwan, who has disaster DNA imprinted on every cell in her body, is awake.

The graveyard silence begins to bother Wendy, so the brunette rolls up the sleeves of her jacket, and traces her finger lightly over the red marks on her right forearm. Her left forearm has six lines of cuts. Old scars. Her right forearm has six too. She made them equal two days ago after the session of dead silence between her and Irene ended.

Now they’re equal.

The faint trace of a smile ghosts across her lips before fading completely as she rolls down the sleeves again. She glances up at Irene, and discovers the psychiatrist has been staring at her.

Crap. Did she notice the new cuts?

A grim expression flits over Irene’s face, and Wendy feels herself shrinking in her seat. Panic rears up, gripping hold of her insides with talon claws. She holds her breath, hands clutching the armrests tightly, and shoulders tensing up, as if she has gone into a catatonic state.

“Wendy,” Irene begins, as her eyes slice over to the brunette’s covered right arm, “why?”

And the air Wendy’s been holding eventually hisses out of her as if she has been punctured. opens, then closes like she’s a deranged goldfish.

“It’s art,” Wendy finally blurts, after gaining some confidence from an unknown source to lie to Irene. But she knows that Irene isn’t stupid, so she wears an aloof expression almost immediately afterwards.

“Wendy, if you face an issue that needs to be resolved, you sort it out in an appropriate and healthy manner. You promised me, remember?”

Wendy shrugs. “I don’t.”

“You do know that I can see through your lies, don’t you?”

A flare of defiance lights up the brunette’s eyes, and she presses her lips together. Her head hangs low, as she fiddles with the hem of her skirt.

“I told you, if you ever feel like cutting yourself, grab a pen and draw something on the area you want to harm yourself.”

“It slipped off my mind,” Wendy confesses. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologise to me, Wendy. I’m not the one who’s harmed.”

The brunette shakes her head. “No,” she utters, “I’m sorry about what I did to you just now.”

A smile starts to curve Irene’s bottom lip. “Wendy, I’m alright,” she reassures the brunette. “Will you be returning to school tomorrow?” she asks, diverting the subject because she doesn’t want Wendy to keep brooding over the incident.

“Am I physically fit to attend school tomorrow?”

“You are, Wendy. You’ve missed two days worth of lessons. And I’m sure Joy misses you.”

Wendy purses her lips. She doesn’t like Irene’s advice. She’ll consider the advice again before she goes to sleep. Or after she wakes up from her sleep tomorrow. “Why are you so pretty, Irene?” she suddenly asks.

That caught the psychiatrist off guard. Wendy is random, Irene is fully aware of that. But Wendy has never complimented Irene in terms of her appearance. And neither has she ever called Irene by her name. It has always been ‘doctor’.

“I’m sorry?” Irene asks, wondering if her addled brain misheard.

The brunette chuckles, her eyes drifting up to the window. She points to the jet-black sky with twinkling stars cutting across it and speaks, “Would you rather touch the moon or the stars?”

“Which would you rather have in the palm of your hand, Wendy?”

Wendy’s brows bent inward as she mulls over Irene’s question. “I’d rather have the world in the palm of my hand.”

“Why?”

“So I can keep it my pocket.”

Irene’s eyebrow raises a half inch. “Why would you want to keep it in your pocket, Wendy?”

“Because someone once took hold of my heart and gave it an awful twist. I don’t want that to happen to our Earth,” Wendy mumbles. She looks at her watch. It’s half past eight. “Doctor, can I go home now?”

Irene nods. “I’ll be sending you home, Wendy.”

“You are?” Wendy arches an eyebrow at Irene. “Why can’t I go home by myself?”

“Because I told your dad I’ll be sending you home,” Irene responds. “Let’s go Wendy, you need to get home safely.”

“Are they going to pay you for your car fuel?”

Irene only laughs in response, and a split second later, Wendy joins her.

“You don’t want to come in and have dinner?” Wendy asks as she stands outside her house’s porch.

“It’s okay,” Irene states, “I’ll whip up some quick dish for dinner once I reach home.”

“But that would be too troublesome for you. Are you sure you don’t want to come in? There’s free food, you know.”

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