EXCERPT In the woods she sits on a rock, bends over her bag real low. She pulls something out, then something else. I figure she's gonna tie off a vein, shoot up, cook some heroin in a burnt spoon in these woods, but she stays hunched over, still as wax, giving a blessing, saying a prayer. White patches of breath rise above her head. She sits up from time to time, takes a drag off a cigarette, looks around. I duck down real low behind a tree and feel somewhat like a pervert. She bends down again, begins rocking back and forth, side to side like a cradle. Smoke loops up and behind her, sucked off to heaven with the wind. I imagine throwing rocks at her, pulling out a switchblade, showing her what I'm made of, but I don't have a knife and the only rocks around are pebbles. I stay crouched, waiting for the right moment to pounce. Soon she hikes up her skirt and I see dark stains the size and shape of eyeballs tracked down the length of her leg. I think, what the hell are those? But then I see. She is burning herself up, scarring stories into her skin with the cherry of her cigarette. I am caught in the moment of not wanting to be there and not wanting to leave. Each wound is deliberate, plotted. She holds the burnt end of the cigarette to her skin, closes her eyes while it lances, cringes until she can't bear any more. Each time though, she holds out a little longer, endures a little more pain. She takes a drag, burns a hole, takes a drag, burns a hole. Guilt expands in me like the gritty sound from a white noise machine and I close my eyes, trying to erase it, erase her. I don't know how many cigarettes she goes through that day, or what else she brings out of her bag, but I feel sad for her because I understand this, what she's doing. Before she can see me, I turn and leave, staying low and slow, taking the edge off the crunch of leaves. I trail through campus the long way. There are initials carved into trees, cigarette filters driven into the earth and I think, we're not so different from the bark, so different from the dirt. There is a film on me then and for a few days after. Something like a coating I feel but can't see. It's as if I read about myself in someone else's journal, witnessed something that wasn't mine to see, like another couple having sex, my father getting out of the shower, my roommate masturbating. It's funny how sometimes you think you want to know something about a girl, but it's not that girl you learn about. Excerpted from the novel The Long Haul by Amanda Stern; published by Soft Skull Press, 2003.