The next few weeks passed pretty much in the same manner. Sometimes I felt that I had finally reached a turning point in my life and was well on my way to becoming Cat (those were the days where I managed to stick to my new strict diet regimen, which ironically looked much like my mother's usual nutritional guidelines for me), but more often than not I felt that I was a total loser, well beyond redemption, and that my life was pointless. On top of everything else, I was still battling frequent abdominal pain and insomnia.

A few years before, when I was about 14 years old, I woke up one morning with serious back pain. My mother, in what I thought was an unusual fit of empathy, decided that I couldn't go to school that day and drove me straight to the doctor where she proceeded to inform the staff and the entire waiting room full of people that her daughter needed to see a doctor asap because she was suffering from unbearable pain in her lower back, "most likely due to her obesity issues." The receptionist looked at me and said, "Your daughter isn't that fat, Mrs Shelley!" And this was just the most public announcement of my obesity-related health issues that I can remember. So, you can probably understand that I would have rather had my feet turn black and fall off before asking my mother or any doctors for help.

In a way, and yes, I do find it a little shameful to admit it, I even enjoyed the fact that the pain wouldn't go away. Every time I felt it, my brain would automatically start to conjure up scenarios in which I would die and my mother would find me and feel sorry for the rest of her life that she had treated me in this way. Not very mature, I know. But it made me feel better. 

Over the course of a few days, the focus of my fantasies shifted, though, from revelling in guilt-tripping my mother even in death to creating various detailed scenes about a now self-inflicted demise. I went through pretty bloody stages, involving trains or skyscrapers to the pop-the-pills stage, which I found I favoured in the end. What can I say? I'm a girl. We don't do messy. I mean, I wasn't that far gone that I would have wished cleaning up my big, fat strawberry toast on anyone. Ugh! And if the whole thing went tits up... Jesus, I didn't want to add mangled limbs and scrambled brains to my list of Why my life sucks. Knowing my luck, I would still be alive long enough to see my bones splintering, blood splatter all over the place....

Ugh, my life felt like a Steven King horror novel most of the time anyway. I figured at least in death I could do with some tranquillity. You know, pop a serious amount of sleeping pills and then sit somewhere nice, on a bench in the woods maybe, and just wait to fall asleep.

This scenario became a little obsession with me. Instead of spending my time in my room, I now spent most of my time in the nearby woods, seeking out the perfect bench. Eventually I found a nice secluded spot at the edge of the woods. When the sun was out, the old bench there was bathed in sunlight. Perfect spot for such an occasion. 

I also started to nick my mother's sleeping pills, which she took because her highly-paid job - which she always told everyone she needed like she needed air to breathe because dealing with all that responsibility gave her a sense of self-worth and self-satisfaction that nothing else in her life could give her – stressed her out so much that she often found it difficult to find sleep. Well, if it didn't give her a great work-life-balance and a healthy round of sleep every night, it did give her a Mercedes and a sense of superiority because she earned considerably more money than my dad. And he already earned enough for all of us to get by, to tell you the truth. But not enough for my mother's brand-new Mercs and her precious Fendi handbag, obviously. What's a little sleep loss compared to shopping at Tiffany's with her Kate Moss lookalike friends every so often? And my mother tried to tell me that I was not well-adjusted. Yeah!

Contrary to all appearances, I would have vehemently denied that I was suicidal if anyone had asked me at that time. And I wouldn't have been lying, at least not intentionally. My actions didn't seem so out of place to me at all. In fact, every little thing I accomplished on the way to creating a perfect suicide scenario made me feel good, if only for a little while. A little bit of chocolate, a little bit of sleeping pill pinching, and I was the closest thing to being happy that I had been in a long time.

Even my mother got off my case a little. She was quite happy that I had stopped spending my time secluded in my room "like some sort of juvenile hermit", as she liked to put it. My grades, which had started to slip a little, were back to form, and I had started to reconnect with Trish and her new mate Sue. On the surface, I was the most "normal" I had ever been. Everybody seemed to agree, with the exception of Mrs Keating, whose worried glances kept creeping into my peripheral vision.

It was a very weird time. The world seemed a million miles away, and struggling to wade through the thick fog to connect with reality in any shape or form left me physically and mentally completely drained most of the time. Just getting out of bed in the morning required some sort of superhuman strength on many days.

I saw Henry every day at school, but he still ignored me. More and more often he would turn up with injuries that seemed to become more and more serious. No one did anything about it, at least as far as I knew. I registered all this, but it left me strangely unaffected – not because of some sort of hurt pride, but because reality had started to feel unreal.

One afternoon, I was on my way to what I had started to refer to as "my secret bench" (or was it sacred?), when I bumped into Henry.

"Katherine, I've called you five times! Are you going deaf or are you ignoring me on purpose?"

"Like you are ignoring me?" I responded with just a little venom in my voice. What was the point in this conversation anyway?

"Are you okay? I've been following you for five minutes and you haven't even noticed. You seem... well, you seem a little off somehow."

I laughed, then looked up. When my gaze landed on his face, my laughter faded and I couldn't help but wince. One of his eyes was nearly swollen shut, his lip split again, and there was a cut just above his left eyebrow. He looked like he had gone a few rounds with the Klitschko brothers. His battered face somehow managed to penetrate my mental fog.

"Jesus, Henry, are you alright?" I asked. "You look more than a little off."

I wasn't sure, but for a moment I thought I saw shame in Henry's eyes. But then he just smiled.

"I'm good. Just the usual. What about you, though? Even in school you seem different. What's going on?"

Just then, so many conflicting emotions were threatening to bubble over, anger, a sense of betrayal, shame, hopelessness and a real craving for solitude, that my whole body was poised for flight. All I wanted was to get to my bench and dream of leaving all this heaviness behind.

"What do you care?"

I turned on my heels and hurried towards the woods, towards my secret bench.

"What do you mean: what do I care? Of course, I care. Why do you think I have been so careful in the last few weeks to make sure that nobody would associate you with me?"

That made me stop in my tracks. What the hell was Henry talking about? Maybe he was losing his mind quicker than I was.

"Well, congratulations. Task accomplished. Even I don't associate myself with you anymore. So, I wish you a nice life. But, excuse me, I have to be somewhere now."

Again, I turned and quickened my step. Tears were threatening to leak, tears of pain and tears of anger. I really didn't need this kind of public humiliation to add to my long list of grievances. But Henry hurried after me and grabbed my arm. His hand did not even sink into my oversized sweater.

"I'm sorry, Cat. I never meant to hurt you. I just wanted to protect you. Avoiding you was the only way I knew how. My situation hasn't changed, and even now I don't want to drag you into my mess. But I can see that something is going on with you. I would really like to help if you let me – as long as no one else will find out about it. But I have to warn you: I'm not exactly the poster boy for 'support and solve'. But I'd give it my best shot."

Cat!

Nobody had ever called me Cat. My mother abhorred nicknames. "We gave you the name Katherine and not some abomination of it. People should respect that. They spend enough time on pointless activities like jogging and going to the gym, they might as well spend time on finishing people's names."

My mother was big on language, not so big on sports or anything that made you sweaty and look dishevelled, especially in public. Still, despite being middle-aged, she was a good-looking woman. In spite of never moving any more than absolutely necessary, she still had the figure of a teenager, while I had the figure of a middle-aged woman who had given birth to five kids. Not that I was jealous or anything. She deserved it. She never ate anything. Come to think of it, I'm not sure how my mother survived. I swear I cannot remember more than a handful of occasions where I actually saw my mother eat. We went out for meals all the time, because my mother was a business woman and not a family chef, as she liked to put it, and because my father was definitely no chef, family or otherwise. She always ordered the salad which she then left largely untouched because the three weed leaves she had ingested had filled her up so much that she could hardly finish her obligatory glass of wine. Which, to no one's surprise, she always finished and then even managed to top it up with three or four more glasses. Unwinding from work, she called it.

Anyway, Henry had just called me Cat, my name for my secret alter persona. I really didn't feel like Cat at that time, but it somehow made me feel great to hear someone refer to me as a Cat.

I had stopped walking and had started to stare at Henry like some sort of demented idiot who had swallowed her tongue.

"Please, Cat, I..." Henry started to stammer now.

"Thanks for the offer, Henry, but I've got it handled. Nothing to worry about. But what about you? You look terrible!" I winced. "Sorry, but this isn't funny anymore. You need to talk to someone. This has really gone far enough. All this because your skin is two shades darker than ours? Really? I mean, as soon as the sun comes out, everyone sheds their clothes and screams "Burn me!" at the bloody thing, just so their skin will turn the exact same colour yours is. Is everyone mad?"

"It's not just my skin. It doesn't matter."

"It doesn't matter? One of these days these goons will kill you. Is that what you want? Why won't you ask for help?" I paused. "You know what? If you don't do it, I will." I lifted my chin. 

Henry didn't get angry, though. He was the most level-headed guy I had ever met.

"Don't do that, Cat. Nothing good will come of it. It will make things much worse for me. Trust me. It isn't that bad anyway. I've got it handled." He smiled as he threw my words right back at me. I deflated.

"Why do you think it would make matters worse? How could they even get worse? Please, Henry, talk to me," I begged.

"There are things about me that you do not know. Things I'm not proud of. I told you before that I'm different in more ways than one. My skin is just one of them. But just like my skin, there is nothing I can do about it. I've tried. God knows I've tried."

"What are you talking about? Are you a criminal or something?"

"Or something." He sighed. "I really don't want to talk about it. I also don't want anybody to see us together. So..."

Before Henry had the chance to say good-bye, I blurted out, "Would you like to come to my place with me?"

Henry looked at me, stunned. He didn't say anything.

"Don't worry. I'm not looking for a relationship. But I could do with a friend." For the first time in what seemed like years I grinned, my face lighting up like a beacon, as I threw Henry's words from our second encounter right back at him.

Henry remembered. He smiled, then said, "Touché. Well, okay then. If your parents don't mind." He hesitated, then added in his best working-class accent imitation, "But they will probably be none too pleased to see their daughter associating with the likes of me."

"There is absolutely no need to worry about any of that. My parents really pride themselves on being one of the most liberal people in the world. They are anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-the-oppression-of-the-lower-classes and vehemently in favour of world peace and saving the rain forest. They promote and celebrate diversity and multiculturalism. And this is not sarcasm, either. They will love you and those beautiful handcrafted sweaters you wear!"

Turns out that people's liberalism only stretches so far – and when it comes to their own daughter, then it seems that it has reached the end of the line.

When I opened the front door, my mother rushed into the hall. I wasn't usually very talkative, so she always tried to catch me before I managed to disappear into my room. She had this really big grin on her face, when she saw that I had company. But that grin turned sour very quickly, when she realised that Henry and I were holding hands. Well, we weren't really holding hands. I had just grabbed one of Henry's hands because his nerves were getting the better of him, the closer we got to my place, so his flight instinct was about to kick in.

"Oh, hi Mum, this is Henry, my friend." I didn't really make the connection between the 'handholding' and my mother's deteriorating mood, so my mother's pinched face left me a little confused.

"Your friend." She sounded strangely critical. Hadn't she always tried to make me bring friends home, going on and on about the importance of social relationships and Emma's huge circle of friends and so on and so forth? What the hell was wrong now?

Henry gave me a questioning look. I shrugged and pulled his hand harder, trying to evade this awkward situation.

With a quick "We're off to my room then", we fled.