Pretty Girl Thirteen (9 page)

Of course. She’d only called it a million times. “Forever,” she said.

“Then maybe the rest will come back. So yeah. Call.” Liv lingered another moment, glowering at Greg, before she whirled and left. A moment later, the front door slammed.

The air felt thinner as soon as she was gone. Angie took a deep breath.

Greg relaxed back against the pillows, his fingers woven behind his head. His legs stretched out in front of him, his feet huge and hairy. In a good way.

“Is it true?” he asked. “What you said? Or did you just not want to tell Livvie? I wouldn’t blame you. She’s such a loose lips.”

Angie felt like she should defend Livvie—she never spilled other people’s secrets—but then again, Liv might have changed there, too. “No. It’s really true. I have this giant mental block. But I have a psychologist helping me with it.” The whole medical evidence thing, the words and phrases she’d overheard, she didn’t want to think about. Definitely didn’t want to share.

“Well, you look great,” he said. “It can’t have been too awful.”

Look great? It wasn’t the first compliment on her new appearance, but it was the most meaningful, coming from him. Maybe she could learn to like her big eyes and narrow cheeks.

“I love your hair this way,” he said, stroking it all the way down the back of her head and halfway down her back. “It’s like honey pouring.”

She’d never cut it!

His fingers pressed against her back, bringing her just an inch closer to him. “C’mere,” he said. “I missed you. I missed you so much. God, we were all so sad. It was awful wondering … and wondering. At eighth grade graduation, you know, they rang the bell for you, thirteen times. I felt like they were ringing you out of existence.”

His eyes were sad and faraway. “I didn’t want to believe it.” He twisted a strand of her hair between his fingers. “And now, here you are.”

Angie ached to hold him, comfort him, close the distance. She wasn’t sure what to do.

“T
HEY’RE TRYING TO TAKE OVER MY LIFE
, D
R
. G
RANT
,” A
NGIE
complained. She had moved to the sofa, figuring that sitting on the desk again would look like an act of defiance. And she didn’t want to be defiant. She wanted help.

The doctor was wearing a pale blue sweater set today. It set off her eyes, a matching robin’s-egg blue. Carefully tweezed eyebrows rose at Angie’s outburst.

“Your parents? The other kids at school?”

“Well, yes, them too. No, the … the personalities. The alters?”

Only a tiny twitch of her head betrayed the doctor’s emotional reaction. “So now you are aware of their presence? At our first meeting, you weren’t so sure.”

The power of those brilliant eyes compelled honest gut-spilling—a good feature for a psychologist, Angie thought. “Well, yes. At our first meeting I was in denial. Right? I thought I was just spacing out during the fuzzy dropped time. You know, when it was just seconds here and there—I could make excuses to other people, and to myself.” She forced herself not to break the eye contact. “I mean, everyone tunes out occasionally. Right?”

“Of course.” Dr. Grant slow-blinked, a subtle nod. Go on.

“But now much weirder things are happening. Things that make me think you … you may be right.”

“Such as what?” the doctor asked in a level voice. Calm, interested.

Obviously, Dr. Grant didn’t find any of this strange. Multiple personalities. Dissociated identities. Splintered consciousness.

If it weren’t happening to her personally and screwing up her life, Angie would have found it fascinating. However, under the circumstances, the idea that her body was saying and doing things she couldn’t control—things she didn’t even know about—terrified her. Humiliating herself with Greg was the worst so far. She still didn’t know what exactly had happened, and she wasn’t about to ask. It was worse than humiliating. Whatever she’d done was so off-base, he told her to leave. Ugh. It made her blush all over again to think about it.

She’d dodged Greg and Liv for two days now, hiding deep in the ninth-grade pack for camouflage. And that wasn’t too hard. They stuck to her like Velcro from the beginning to the end of the day. Which was getting incredibly tiresome. When would her novelty wear off?

“Angela?” The doctor broke into her thoughts. “Are you still with me? Or am I in the presence of another?”

“Oh, sorry. Yeah. It’s just me.” She offered a halfhearted smile. “No one more exciting.”

The doctor gave her an encouraging pat on the arm. “You were going to tell me of the weird things that led you to believe you may be experiencing DID.”

Angie rolled her eyes. “Yeah. Example One: Someone dusted my room and folded my clothes while I was asleep.”

“Your mother?” the doctor suggested.

“Nope. I asked her.”

“Hmm.”

“Example Two: Someone keeps moving my rocking chair. Not me. Not Mom.”

“And that’s disturbing because …”

“She sits in it and rocks for hours. There are new lines and footprints in the carpet every morning.” Angie raised three fingers and continued. “Example Three: I went to bed early the other night because I was exhausted, probably from all the stupid rocking, and when I woke up in the morning, someone had done my math homework.”

“How … industrious,” Dr. Grant commented.

“Her handwriting sucked, and she got half the questions wrong. Not helpful.”

“Ahh.” The doctor tugged the sleeves of her cardigan and smoothed them. “Perhaps the alter believed he or she was being helpful. After all, your mind created them as protectors. The instinct to protect is still in there”—she pointed to Angie’s temple—“though we believe you are out of physical danger.”

“Hold up a second. He?” Angie blinked hard. “I thought you said she was a Girl Scout. You think there’s a guy in my head?”

The faintest hint of a smile lifted Dr. Grant’s lips. “It’s okay, Angie. We don’t know one way or the other yet. But generally speaking, alternate personalities can take on either sex and any age,” she explained. “Whatever is appropriate to their role. Suppose you needed a big, tough guy to stand up to heavy beatings?” She flexed her arm muscles to demonstrate. In the blue fuzzy sweater, the effect was lost. “It would be possible even for a small girl like you to have a big, tough guy alter.”

“In-ter-est-ing,” Angie said. “He’d feel kind of lame in my clothes, though.”

That earned her an honest laugh. “Sometimes people discover alternate wardrobes in their belongings, representing the tastes of their alters.”

A lightbulb went off. “So that explains it!”

“Yes?”

Angie blushed. “When I changed for gym yesterday, I nearly died. I was wearing ho underwear. I don’t own that kind of thing.”

The doctor’s eyebrows twitched only slightly as she asked, “How do you define ‘ho underwear’?”

“It was all black and lacy and slutty,” she whispered. “Like a thong. I sure didn’t buy it, and I know Mom didn’t buy it for me.”

“So, you worry that these alters are choosing clothes for you and taking on some of your chores and homework, perhaps rocking in the night when you would rather be in bed. Would it help if you understood their motivations?”

“It would help if they would cut it out. How do I make it stop?”

Dr. Grant rested her chin in her hands, leaning close to Angie. “That will require communication and negotiation. You’re reclaiming your position as dominant and they’re naturally resisting.”

“Oh my God. You make them sound like real people.”

The doctor nodded. She rolled her pearl choker absent-mindedly with her left hand. “Angie. This is something you absolutely must realize. They
are
people, sharing your brain space, mapped into different neurons in your brain. They have a physical reality. They aren’t figments of your imagination. You share some things, like a body, a pair of parents, et cetera. But your traits and desires might be worlds apart.”

Angie was silent, thinking about the word “desires.”

Dr. Grant waited patiently. “What are you thinking?” she asked after a long minute.

Angie concentrated on the pattern of light filtering through the loose woven curtains. “I’m afraid they’re going to get me into trouble. I had … an incident. You won’t tell my mom any of this, right?”

The doctor made the gesture of locking her lips and throwing away the key. “You, Angie, are my patient. Not your parents.”

She took a deep breath. Confession was good for the soul. Souls. Right? “Okay. Besides suspecting that the ho-wear is probably shoplifted, which is bad enough, I have a problem with a guy.”

“Oh dear. Unwelcome advances?” Dr. Grant asked.

“You could say that.” This was so embarrassing. “But not by him. By me. Part of me, like, attacked him. I, um, got physical in a way that’s completely NOT ME.” She couldn’t help raising her voice. Then she whispered, “Can they hear me? The alters?”

“Can you hear them?” the doctor reflected back.

Angie sighed. “Only a couple of times, I thought maybe I heard a voice and no one was around, but I figured it was just my imagination. How does that work?”

“It’s absolutely fascinating,” Dr. Grant replied, her blue eyes shining with the enthusiasm of an expert. “In the memory centers of your brain, different sets of neurons hold the separate memory patterns of the alters, however many there are.”

“However many?” Angie gasped under her breath, but the doctor went on.

“The connections between them are few or nonexistent, which is how the alters can keep their secrets from you, the dominant Angie, and from one another. When you hear their voices, the speech centers of your brain are activated just as though you were hearing them from outside yourself. We’ve seen all this with functional MRI studies and PET scans.”

Angie felt the dismay on her own face.

Dr. Grant frowned. “Does it help you to understand this? The science, I mean?”

“I suppose so.” Not really. She’d read a bunch of websites, a bunch of threads. It all seemed so weird and unlikely when other people talked about their own experiences. But it was real. It was her reality. Her life. And currently she was time-sharing it with someone who liked to shoplift sexy underwear.

“Do you have questions?”

“Only a million,” Angie said. “But the most important one is how to fix it. I don’t want to blank out. I don’t want to find strange clothes in my drawers or on my body. I don’t want to do humiliating things. I want my life back.

“I want to be in charge.”

“I understand. Of course you do. You want to control the gate, and that’s only natural.”

“What gate?”

“It’s typical to have a personality who stands aside, stays inside, observing and recording and deciding who needs to come out in different situations—a gatekeeper. Like a boss who stays in the home office and decides who gets to go out on the road.”

“Great. How do I get that job?” Angie asked. “So I can lock the damn gate.”

“Therapy, my dear.” Dr. Grant put down her notepad and folded her hands in her lap.

“So talk to her. Tell her it’s time to retire. Time for a new boss.”

“I wish it worked that way, Angie. But gatekeepers are recluses. She’ll never interact with us directly, but she’s listening and remembering and directing traffic all the same.”

“She’s watching? Listening?”

“I believe so,” Dr. Grant said with a tight smile.

“That’s insanely creepy.”

“I can see why you’d feel that way. But remember, she pushed you out here again, to face the world. She has only your best interests at heart, and she thinks you’re ready.”

“Fabulous.” All of a sudden she wasn’t so sure. “Am I?”

“That’s why we’re here, my dear. We’re working on it, together.”

“All of us?” Angie muttered. She framed her words with finger quotes.

Dr. Grant’s smile loosened, and she picked up her pen. “Angie, how old are you now?”

“Thir—Four—Shoot, I don’t know. Technically sixteen.”

“What do you imagine happened to you during the three years you can’t remember? What do you … guess?”