One February day in the seventh grade, I was apprehended in the girls’ bathroom at school trying to cut my arm with my Swiss Army knife. It is always February in the seventh grade, that terrible border year.

I was apprehended in the girls’ bathroom, in the act—to be precise—of wearing at my arm with the saw blade of my Swiss Army knife.

Until the moment of my apprehension, I didn’t once think people will find this odd. How could they? Is there nothing more fascinating than our own blood? The scarlet beauty of it. The pulsing immediacy. The way that it courses through its endless circuit of comings and goings, slipping and rushing and seeping down to the cells of us, the intimate insider that knows all the news, that’s been down to the mailroom and up to the boardroom.

In Mr. Davidson’s biology class, the air dry with winter heat and pricked by the smell of formaldehyde and decay, we had been peering at mounted samples of unknown origin pressed flat between glass slides—papery shreds of tissue and muddy blotches of long-dried blood. And I got the idea that it would be more interesting to examine my own blood under the microscope. Blood still wet, still rich with urgent color. I imagined lively, plump little corpuscles tumbling against each other like a miniature game of bumper cars.

Everything is perfectly clear when looked at in the right light; I chose the school bathroom for my theatre of operations because if you want your blood to be fresh to the task, you have to be handy to the microscope when you bring it forth. I had brought my Swiss Army knife to school precisely for this purpose. It was recess. I would cut, and then I would quickstep down the hall to Mr. Davidson’s classroom—with its shelves crowded with chunks of rock and skeletal remains and things floating pickled in Ball jars—and screw down the probing eye of 10-X magnification onto the very essence of my own self.

I found this plan so compelling it blinded me to other thought. The idea of the blood beckoned to me hypnotic and seductive. How often do we know the blood of our veins? It reveals itself to us only as the herald of bad news: the injury, the illness, the sudden slip of the paring knife or the prick of the doctor’s needle. Why should we meet only in disaster?

It wasn’t as big a leap as you might imagine. I’d never been blood squeamish. I proudly displayed my scabs and scars, vaguely envious of my older sister who seemed to garner all the really good injuries, the satisfyingly dramatic ones that needed stitches, and constructions of gauze and splint and tape, and shots and salves to ward off deliciously hideous consequences: lockjaw, sepsis, gangrene.

The key to success is to envision the thing in your mind. Draw the bright chrome of the blade along the slender rope of vein wrapping sinuous around your left wrist, and everything parts obediently beneath your command, like the Red Sea before Moses.

Except it didn’t. The knife blade was worn too dull, as dull as the dun walls of the bathroom where I stood. With my arm braced against the warm metal shelf over a radiator, I could see the veins meandering blue and purple and green like a road map beneath the thin cover of my flesh. Only the frailest membrane of tissue keeping self from self. Yet who would have thought that skin could have so much substance, so much resistance?

I attempted and discarded in quick succession the can opener, the leather punch, and the flathead screwdriver. I settled at length on the saw blade, an unhappy compromise. It scraped back and forth like a fiddler’s bow against my arm, chafing the skin red and raw. Little white clumps of flesh gummed up the blade, and the stubborn shelter of my skin refused to give way.

The radiator clanked and hissed. I stood there and sawed.  I wasn’t doing a very good job of it, because sawing on your arm hurts.  It burns. It was nothing like the swift, precision operation I had imagined.

To compound matters, I gathered a tiresome audience of other girls.  You know, the popular girls. The typecast antagonists of the after-school movie. The ones who have always found that life just happens to be in perfect agreement with their opinions.

“Eeeuhhh.  What are you doing?”

“I’m trying to cut myself,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I want to.”

 “That’s really disgusting,” said one.

 “She just wants attention,” muttered another darkly.

But still they stood about, like rubberneckers at a train wreck.  After so many years of recesses, after all, what excitements are left?  You have fifteen minutes, and you have to kill them somehow.

“You’re going to get in trouble for this,” announced the ringleader at last, rendering her verdict with a self-satisfied toss of her confident head, before guaranteeing the outcome by retreating to alert the authorities.

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