A Danger to Herself and Others(63)

When Alex fell, we thought it was because the magic stopped working. Now I wonder: Did I let go on purpose?

Dr. Lightfoot’s voice runs through my mind: Symptoms usually start between ages sixteen and thirty. But she also said my symptoms were subtle, functional. Maybe my brain has been working differently for years, in second grade with Alex, in eighth grade with Rebekah.

Maybe I heard a voice at Mary Masters’s sleepover party. Maybe it was Alex’s stuffed rabbit, hidden deep inside her sleeping bag. No one else knew that Alex brought her toy that night. She didn’t want the other girls to think she was a big baby.

I close my eyes and concentrate until I remember it: the little rabbit told me to let go. I thought it was magic, the same magic that lifted Alex.

I open my eyes. Maybe I never heard a voice at all. Maybe my special/strange brain is trying to trick me all over again, to make me think I’ve been sick my whole life.

I roll onto my back and straighten my sheets. I’m sweating despite the artificially cool air.

That night with Rebekah, was there a voice then? Did it tell me to let go? Did I listen?

But that was an accident. Like Gavin Baker said: Accidents happen. It didn’t occur to him—or anyone else—that it was anything other than an accident. Two weeks later, Gavin kissed me at some other girl’s party. Rebekah didn’t get her first kiss until tenth grade, and then it was with some guy she barely liked, because she wanted to get it over with. Did I drop Rebekah because I wanted Gavin for myself? But I didn’t even like Gavin.

Symptoms usually start between ages sixteen and thirty. Thirteen isn’t that far from sixteen, and I did so many other things ahead of schedule: long division, reading chapter books on my own, saying please and thank you without prompting. Maybe I got sick ahead of schedule too.

At the courthouse today, Dr. Lightfoot explained my disease carefully, as though she didn’t think the judge or Agnes’s parents would understand it otherwise. She said that she’d worked with patients whose hallucinations were much more elaborate than mine; patients who had crowned themselves queens of their own kingdoms, who’d gone on adventures to foreign lands. I only created a best friend and a bad pseudo-boyfriend.

Lightfoot made it sound as if I had an advantage over those patients because my hallucinations didn’t entirely remove me from the real world. My hallucinations were subtle enough to allow me to continue functioning in the real world. It should make me feel like my illness is less serious than those other patients, the ones whose brains took them to their own private Middle Earth or Narnia or Hogwarts. But instead, I feel inadequate, like those other patients are better at this disease than I am. Like they had more fun with it.

I wonder where my disease might have taken me if I hadn’t been diagnosed so early, if I’d gone years without therapy and medication. Lightfoot’s voice: We’re lucky to have caught Hannah’s disease this early.

(Caught it. As though it were running and hiding.)

That night with Agnes was different from the nights with Alex and Rebekah. It was just the two of us. Light as a Feather doesn’t work with two people.

Truth or Dare was so much easier to play than Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board. It was Jonah who gave me the idea.

Truth or dare, he asked me once, in between kisses. We were in the room that Agnes and I shared, but Agnes was in class and we (obviously) weren’t. We’d both memorized her schedule by then.

Truth, I said.

What’s your favorite body part?

On me or on you?

Jonah laughed.

Truth or dare, I challenged him back.

Dare.

I dare you to kiss me outside, where anyone might see us. Before Jonah could argue, I added, You can’t say no. That’d be breaking the rules.

So Jonah led the way outside, through the dorm lobby and out into the sunlight. It wasn’t actually all that much of a dare, when you think about it. The first time he’d kissed me had been outside.

Afterward, Jonah leaned in and whispered, Truth or dare. His breath was hot on my neck.

Dare, I answered, my heart pounding.

I dare you to play this game with Agnes later.

I press the heels of my hands to my temples, then my eyes, until I see spots in the darkness. Or do I? Will I ever know the difference between hallucination and reality? Will I spend the rest of my life questioning every new acquaintance, every overheard whisper? Who’s to say whether Jonah and Lucy were the first people my brain invented? Maybe there were others who came before: a man smiling at me on the street, the checkout girl at the deli around the corner from school, a teacher calling me in for a private meeting. I’ll never know for sure.

Maybe I’ll never be certain of anything ever again.

No. There are some things I’m certain of:

I’m certain that I didn’t like it out there in the world today. I didn’t like sitting in the back seat of Stephen’s car on the winding and twisting roads from here to the courthouse. And I didn’t like the look on my parents’ faces in the conference room or the parking lot. None of it felt good or safe.

This room is safe. It’s not even that small, now that I have it to myself. I could stay here forever.

But they’re sending me home. Because I have a diagnosis, and the judge said what happened to Agnes wasn’t my fault. Soon, I’ll be flying back across the country, sleeping in my own bed, walking through Manhattan with my mother. My mother, who hated being alone with me for just five minutes this afternoon. My mother, who was careful so her fingers wouldn’t brush against mine when she handed me her lipstick. I get out of bed and pace in the darkness.