I didn’t respond.
“Okay,” Izzy said, putting on a serious face. “So who is she, then? I mean, if she’s not herself.”
I looked over at the Krampus mask watching me. Had it shifted its gaze somehow? Impossible.
“You think she’s, like, got multiple personality disorder or something? Or dementia?”
I shook my head. “Nothing like that. Though I did at first. Teresa and I discussed the possibility of memory loss.”
“And what did Teresa think?”
“She’s not sure. She says there could be a dementia component. It could also just be your grandmother’s cancer. Or the meds she’s on.”
“Makes sense,” Izzy said.
“Remember when she first got here?” I said. “How you said she seemed fake? Like she was trying too hard?”
Izzy nodded.
“Do you think that still?”
Izzy shrugged. “I think… she’s a little different with each of us. But then again, aren’t we all like that?”
I nodded, knowing she was right—we were all a little chameleonlike. We all had our own masks.
She frowned, looked at the computer monitor, at her sister and grandmother cuddled up together. “It is weird, though, isn’t it? How close she and Olivia got so fast. All their little secrets and stuff.” She looked a little pained at the idea. Was she jealous?
I swallowed the hard lump in my throat. “Has your sister shared any of them with you? The secrets?”
Go carefully, I told myself.Don’t say too much. Don’t push.
“Nah.” She looked down at her phone, then back at me. “Well… there is something.”
“What?”
She wasn’t meeting my eye. “Olivia asked me about it. Grandma told her that you’d been in the hospital once, a long time ago. Back when you were in high school.”
My jaw clenched so hard that my teeth clacked together.
“A mental hospital,” Izzy said, looking up to study my face.
“She told your sister that?” I asked, words strained.
Izzy nodded. “So is it true?”
“No,” I said, the word too sharp, too loud.
No one knew about that particular incident. Not even Mark or Penny. And I wanted it to stay that way. The idea that Olivia knew, and now Izzy—it drove a spike into my chest.
It had happened my sophomore year of boarding school. My memories of that whole period were fuzzy. I felt detached from myself and my emotions and moved through my days like a sleepwalker. I’d been experiencing more frequent periods of missing time—dissociative episodes, I knew now.
During one of them, I apparently took every pill I could find in thedorm—everything from Tylenol to muscle relaxants to my roommate’s birth control pills—and woke up in the psych ward, where I’d been transferred after having my stomach pumped. I stayed for two weeks. The doctors prodded me with questions. They asked me about the scars on my back. I told them a friend had done them because I asked her to. They asked if I liked hurting myself and having others hurt me. I said yes. I did one-on-one therapy. I did group therapy and art therapy and played checkers with kids who were way more messed up than I was. Girls whose arms were thick with scars, girls who couldn’t eat without puking. My mother came to see me once while I was there. I still remember the disappointment on her face. And I never forgot what she told me.It’s one thing to feel pain, Alison. It’s another to flaunt it, to share it openly with the world. Have some fucking dignity and keep your brokenness to yourself.
Izzy looked at me now, narrowing her eyes. Could she tell I was lying? “Why would Grandma tell Olivia that?”
“I don’t know, Iz, to scare her? To make her scared of me?”
“But why?”
