Aren’t we sort of the same?

Not at this moment.

I start to picture ways to make this possible. Tie my mother up. Handcuff her and torture her. And just like that, the craziness is back. And the peace I found with Ryland is gone.

Late that night, the screaming in my head starts up again. It’s more powerful and deafening than it ever has been. After lying in bed for what seems like forever, staring at my ceiling, I make a choice, on my own. I tear off all the buttons on my clothes. Every single one, then I put them in a box. When I’m done, I have my very own button collection again. And even though it’s not quite the same, it still helps me calm down and silence the screaming, something it’s done in the past when I was locked up. I try to put some of the stuff I’ve figured out together as I run my fingers through them, scooping up handfuls and letting them go. I was locked up once, not counting in the hospital, if that theory is true. Once with a boy who I’m guessing is Evan and a girl, that’s either my Lily or my sister. Evan and I counted buttons to distract ourselves, hence the button collection now and the calming effect it has over me. But in the memories, the buttons came from something dark and morbid. And the fire I keep seeing… that had to be the fire the detective was talking about. The real question is, if I have been locked up, once, twice, however many times, why is my mother refusing to tell me? Does she really think that ignoring the problem will allow me to forget? Does she really think it’ll help me never remember the horrible memories I can feel about to come forward?

“Is that why I created you?” I wonder. “To help me deal with whatever happened to me? Is that when you surfaced?”

“Who said you created me?” Lily replies.

I sigh, scooping up handful of buttons. “Who else could?”

“Life. Your environment. Things done to you. Lily.”

I freeze. “My sister? Do you remember her?”

“No, but you seem to.”

I drop the buttons in the box. “I think I was locked up once because I was crazy, but that was when I was older… the younger memories, the ones with the girl and the boy…. I’m not sure what was going on there… And who the man was, the one I’m so afraid of in the memories? The one that calls me a whore. The one that was in my house… the one I hallucinate sometimes…”

“For each person I kill,” he says as he cuts a button off the blouse. “I keep one of these. It helps me keep track.”

I feel like I’m dying in the corner, hugging myself so tightly I swear I’m going to crush my own bones. “Why do you do it?” I whisper in horror, pretending like there isn’t blood all around me, death, pain. That I didn’t see the worst side of life moments ago.

He tosses the knife aside and it lands beside my feet. Then he holds up the button between his fingers, examining it in the light, his dark eyes filling with elation. “Because these people are wicked, Maddie. Bad. Just like you.”

“Yes, she is,” a woman whispers from somewhere. “And it’s time to make her pay too.”

I jolt from the memory and fall out of the bed, landing on my back. It knocks the wind out of me, but the pain is small in comparison to the pain I felt in the memory. I was locked up once, by a killer, someone who killed bad people and who thought I was bad too. And there was a woman there… her voice… I’ve heard it before.

I’m trying to push my brain further, to put the pieces together when I see a face appear in my window and the sound of something scratching on the glass.

“Shit.” I jump but then hesitate, wondering if it was the man who broke in that night, who knows about Lily, who maybe had once locked me up and killed people in front of me. Perhaps he tried to kill me once, too and now he’s doing it again. Maybe that’s what I was running away from that night.

Gathering up enough courage, I cautiously tiptoe over to the window and peer out into the front yard. I see a figure standing in the middle of the road, just out of the light of the lamppost, with their arms crossed, watching the house. I hear the words you’re a whore! Bad! You’re just like all of them! I almost bang my head on the glass just to get it to stop. My breathing quickens as I rub my eyes and by the time I lower my hands, the figure is gone and the voice has dissipated into the night.

As I turn away from the window, fearing the possibilities of who could be stalking me, I notice that my breath has created fog on the window and the words I know are traced in it. At first I think it’s on the outside of the window, but I’m able to wipe them away from the inside with the sleeve of my shirt, which means two things: 1) I zoned out and wrote them or 2) someone was in my room.

But I’m not one-hundred percent sure which one it is. It’s hard to see the reality when there’s so much craziness inside me.

Maddie

I quickly discover that the longer my insomnia goes on, the more insane I get. It makes me fear my mind less because there’s so much scattered nonsense in it that Lily’s voice has even become incoherent. But the longer it goes on, I do start to get paranoid about allowing myself to sleep. I start waiting by the window for the figure to show up and another message to appear every night, but it never does. Every time I shut my eyes, I slip into the nightmare full of rain, cold concrete, where I’m afraid and imprisoned by a man who loves to kill and who always threatens to kill me. The woman’s voice always appears but I can never see her. I’m forced out of my nightmare by the worry of what I’ll do when I close my eyes. I get jittery, unsettled, twitchy, not a good combination for a girl with a split personality. Lily and I both are desperate to rest, but I won’t cave and give in. My mom starts to notice, too and when she catches me one day in my room, talking to myself, she loses it and tells me no more skipping out on therapy anymore. I’m too exhausted to argue and tell myself that in a few weeks I’ll have my own place—my own life—and none of this will matter anymore.

Preston notices right away how tired I look and starts probing me with questions about my sleep schedule the moment I enter his office. Then he brings up my behavior at home.

“Your mother called me today before you came here,” he says with a pencil tucked behind his ear, like he’s a shop teacher ready to build something. I wonder if that’s how he sees me. If I’m a project he’s trying to put together. “Your mother said you’ve been having a hard time the last few days and that you’ve been very uncooperative.”

“I’m too old to be living with her,” I state, tapping my foot restlessly against the floor. His desk is a mess today, papers in a chaotic order, folders everywhere, and his shirt looks wrinkly, the smell of cigarettes more potent than ever, a real hot mess just like me. “I’m an adult for God’s sake... I think it’s time for me to move out. I’m too old to deal with this anymore, no matter what she wants to believe. Besides, it might be good for me to get some space from her… she makes me worse instead of helping me. Always lying.”

It takes him a second to answer, as if he’s calculating the right thing to say. “Maddie, I know you don’t want to hear this, but I think it might be for the best if you continue to live with your mother.” He fidgets, taking the pencil out from behind his ear and tossing it onto the desk. “I know in age your old enough to live on your own, but I think your confusion with your identity sometimes makes you act younger than you are. And the lying part… I can assure you that everything your mother does is in your best interest.”

I stare out the window at the grey sky and beads of water rolling down the glass. Out in the parking lot is a blue Camry that belongs to my mother—she refused to leave me here alone. “You sound like you’re on her side.”