A recent New York Times survey found that 46 percent of teenagers know someone who has tried to kill themselves. While recent attention has been focused on young men who direct their anger outwards, young women are much more likely to turn it on themselves. Writer Katie O'Bryant recalls her agonizing passage through junior high school, and reflects on why the lure of suicide is so powerful at that age. O'Bryant is on the staff of YO! (Youth Outlook), a newspaper by and about young people produced by Pacific News Service.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a statistic about teen suicide: Forty-six percent of the teenagers they surveyed said that they knew somebody who had tried to kill themselves. Female adolescents are far more likely than males to attempt suicide, though less likely to succeed.

This is a story about death--the death I experienced over and over again in the three years I spent in junior high. I was 11 when I started, part of the first class of sixth graders to enter what had previously been an intermediate school for seventh and eighth graders. We were young, still babies. Our parents had petitioned in vain against the transfer, concerned that we weren't ready yet to be thrown in with 14-year-olds. I remember being scared, but I was always scared at the beginning of the school year. I had always hated school.

As it turned out, I learned two things in junior high. One: Never to trust anybody about anything, under any circumstances; they will always hurt you, especially when you need them most. Two: Never to trust myself.

I can't say I had any friends in junior high. I had friends before I came and after I left--some of them were the same people--but they weren't my friends then. We walked all over each other, we lied, we spread rumors, we were victims of rumors, we faked camaraderie and compassion, and we did whatever we had to do to survive in a war zone. Everyone was the enemy.

I wanted to fit in more than anything. Not with the normal kids--I never wanted to be normal. I wanted to be different but I wanted to be accepted. I hung around with kids who wore all black, who spoke of suicide, Kurt Cobain's and their own. They all wanted to die, wished they were dead; some of them felt that they already were. I remember that I could not complete a sentence without apologizing at the end of it. I always thought that everyone was angry with me. When I would ask them, they would tell me to shut up.

I left those kids and moved on to another group, none of whom knew me. I sat through lunch time in silence for months, never eating, just sitting there. Finally someone said to me, "If you want to hang with the loud girls, you're gonna have to start talking." So I did. I started getting in all kinds of trouble--drinking, smoking pot, dropping acid.

My relationship with my mother deteriorated. My father was drinking more than usual; their marriage was falling apart. I hated being at home, and when I was there I just locked myself in my room. My room was the only place that ever felt safe to me.

In seventh grade I fell in love--with a girl, just by chance. She was my best friend. I always seemed to fail, everyone always left me, and I was terrified of abandonment, so I never let anyone get close to me, but I let her in, even after my other friends had turned on me. One of them had gotten expelled for smoking pot, and she was convinced that I had narced her off--even though I hadn't. Where I come from it is worse to be a narc than a murderer.

I still had one friend, my best friend. I confided everything in her. I told her about how I had been cutting myself, and she said she did it too. It was something we shared, as sick as it sounds. We would cut up our wrists, our legs and our breasts with razor blades and kitchen knives, because blood was life. Bleeding reminded us that we were alive, and it relieved the pain by distracting us from the reality of our lives--that we were alone. It was a way to get attention and scare people off at the same time, because we didn't know what we wanted.

We got a little drunk at her house one night. She fell asleep before I did and I kissed her goodnight on the forehead. It was innocent. I left the next morning and she never spoke to me again.

That was it. I had no one. I tried to kill myself six or seven times that year. I was quite serious about it. I sat alone in my room all night and cut myself up. I had never known such betrayal. I was devastated, humiliated. Worst of all was my betrayal of myself, because I denied I had any feelings for her. I said it was sick and disgusting. I became one of them, and it was then that I was defeated.

When I remember junior high I see images of myself ugly and fat, standing in the halls after the bell rings, the only one left, crying quietly. I remember being publicly humiliated, screamed at, accused. I remember people reaching out to me. I remember walking all over them in order to impress someone else who seemed more important. I remember people doing the same thing to me.

I have heard too many people tell similar stories of their experience as adolescents. What is happening to us in these institutions? What are they doing to us, and what are we doing to each other? The rage either goes inward or outward. Either way, the damage is done.