“Why does Bella have this?” I mutter.

Someone over my shoulder whispers, Go.

I don’t turn around to see if anyone’s there. I just stuff the photo into my pocket and run away from the house, wishing I could run away from myself as well.

Maddie

It was a project getting back into the house and I set off the alarm again, pissing my mother off even more. She starts getting edgy, nervous, as if she’s waiting for a killer to show up—or that she’s living with one. She keeps her distance from me, glad when I spend a lot of time in my room, waiting for the police to show up like a vulture waits for death. It’s all I think about; it consumes every inch of my mind. I watch the news for a discovered body. Hide the button. Throw Bella’s clothes away when I get home. I call in sick for work for the next four days, worried what I’ll find when I get there. The police. River had to have given up my alibi by now and if not, then someone had to have discovered the blood at Bella’s apartment. Bella. I’ve tried to call her, tried to make sense of the blackout and the scene I woke up to, but her cellphone’s been disconnected. Something’s wrong. If I was a good person I’d go to the police, risk myself to make sure Bella’s safe. But I’m not a good person. I’m Lily. All her.

So instead I stay home and lock myself in my room with my secrets. Nothing happens except for when I get a call from a concerned Glen asking if I’m okay on a voicemail. I’ve been sick for so long and he’s worried about my health. I’m worried about my health—my mental health.

I don’t sleep more than a few minutes a night. Too afraid to shut my eyes. I can’t take any risks. But it’s starting to affect me. I’m starting to see things that aren’t real, like Lily standing in my mirror all the time. And I’m talking to her more and more. In fact, she’s pretty much all I talk to.

To pass time, I do some research on fires nearby where my mother said I was hit, wondering if I put the pieces of my past together then perhaps somehow I can figure out the madness of the present. I find an article about a forest fire that happened in the general location. No casualties, but it did say an old building burned down. There’s a picture of it in the article. It’s faded, black and white, but it looks like an outdated hospital, one I know for a fact I’ve been to before.

Flames ignite around me. Smoke smothers my lungs. My skin feels like melting wax.

“You did this,” someone whispers. “So you might as well run.”

Run? “I can’t… not without her.”

“She’ll be fine. She did put you here after all.”

They’re right. She did put me here, made me take her place. And now it’s time to run away from it. Let myself be forgotten instead of her. So I take off running into the scorching flames, letting room fourteen slip farther away from me, feeling lighter with each step. I can almost taste the freedom. Right there in the trees, but then I hear her call my name.

“Maddie, don’t leave me. Please.”

I hate her. I love her. I don’t want to help her. But it’s not about me. It never is. It’s always about her. So instead of running away from the fire, I turn around and burn, burn, burn. All for her. Everything is.

I jerk from the memory, trembling, my veins pulsating with adrenaline as I touch my finger to the scar on my hand, tracing the faint lines of the numbers. “Room 14.” I look up at the picture of the old hospital. “Is this where I was? Was I locked up here once?”

“Does it really matter if you were?” Lily asks. “You already knew you were crazy.”

“Yeah, but it’s…” I trail off, looking at the computer screen. “It’s terrifying to think about… being locked away.”

“You’re locked away now.”

“Yeah, but this is different.”

“How so?” she asks as I move away from the computer desk and study myself in the mirror. I can see her staring back at me, watching me through the looking glass, same face, same eyes, only the pupils look rounder, darker.

“Because it is,” I reply, blinking quickly as my hair starts to shift from black to blond. By the time my eyes open again, the illusion is gone.

“You’re afraid all the time,” Lily says with a glimmer in her eyes, like she knows a secret. “But of what?”

“You,” I reply then sigh. “Myself.”

The reflection reaches up and touches her chin-length black hair, her fingers lingering on the blond streak, then she traces her fingers along the dark circles under my bloodshot eyes. “Well, we are the same person.”

I shake my head. “No we’re not.”

“I think you’ve known all along that I am,” she adds, the reflection lowering her hand to the side. “Maybe that’s why we were at the hospital. Perhaps they kept you there because you were insane.”

“But who’s they?”

“Your mother probably.” She says it like she knows it’s true, like she understands what lies behind the veil blocking out my memories. Perhaps that’s what Lily is. Maybe she has my memories and she’s keeping them from me. Perhaps she knows that I was once locked away in a hospital, because I was bad, because I talked to myself, was two different people. That the memories of the girl are really just memories of me. That my mother knows this but doesn’t tell me in the hopes that I won’t become that person again. That I’ll turn into the good daughter she’s always wanted.

“Yeah, but if that’s true, you and I know that’s not possible,” Lily says. “We’re not good—neither of us are good.”

I want to argue, but as I look back at my bed at the box of buttons, the computer screen with the article, and then at my hands that only days ago were saturated with someone’s blood, I can’t deny the truth. I can blackout. I can forget. But in the end, whatever Lily does, I do to, because she is me.

I created her.

Maddie

It’s going on five days since the detective showed up at my house and three days since the incident at Bella’s. Thankfully the days have been uneventful, at least that’s what I tell myself. But in the end I start to go stir crazy. The endless hours get to me and the need to do… well, something works its way under my skin. So when the alarm suddenly goes off in the dead of night, I feel twistedly excited.

I’m fully wide awake when it happens, still suffering from insomnia. For a second I think I’m hallucinating. But the longer the siren shrieks, the more I realize that it’s reality and that something set it off. Moments later, my mom comes stumbling down the hallway and runs fearfully into my room, right as I’m walking out of my bedroom to see what’s going on. We end up colliding into each other and she falls to the floor, landing on her ass while I brace myself by grabbing onto the door.

“What are you doing?” she hisses, fastening her robe as she scrambles to her feet. The house is dark, the only light coming from her room, so I can barely see her face but can hear the annoyance in her voice. It’s how she’s been with me for days. Always annoyed, especially when I try to pry answers out of her. I’m starting to get to the point where I’m considering tying her up and forcing her to tell me what she’s hiding.

I throw my hands over my ears and shout over the screeching, “Um, hello. The same thing as you are. Turning that thing off.”

She huffs and then stomps down the hallway. I hear a beep and the alarm silences. Then she’s rushing down the hallway toward me with a stern look on her face. “You didn’t set that off?” she asks as she reaches me.

I lower my hands from my ear and fiddle with the drawstring on my pajama bottoms. “How could I if I’m standing here?”

She looks over my shoulder into my room. “You didn’t open a window or anything?”