Pretty Girl-13

INVITATION




“THEY’RE TRYING TO TAKE OVER MY LIFE, DR. GRANT,” ANGIE 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?”

Angie’s eyes moved to the silver ring with its weird inscription. What did it say again? Something important. She felt a thick fog descend in her mind the more she concentrated on remembering. She rolled it around her finger to ease it over her knuckle, but her left hand pulled away. She tried again, and her left hand dodged her attempts. “Did you see that? Doctor, did you see that?” she said with rising panic. “It’s like I’m possessed! You have to help me. Please.”

Dr. Grant caught her left arm by the wrist. “We are not going to take the ring,” she said clearly.

Angie’s hands settled on her lap, but her heart still pounded.

“Someone is very frightened of the story coming out,” Dr. Grant said softly. She stared deep into Angie’s eyes, to the inside of her head. “But someone needs to know that you want to communicate. That it hurts you to be outside of the group.”

She swayed toward and away from Angie, holding her gaze. Keeping the eyes in focus made Angie dizzy, and she began to sway in unison.

The doctor spoke so quietly, murmuring soft words. Angie’s ears rang with straining to hear. “Someone needs to speak for the others, to let me help you help Angie. I invite someone to step out again, please. We need to talk. Angie can wait nearby.”

Angie rocked forward and backward, her eyes trained on the brilliant blue light of the doctor’s irises, which got farther and farther away, until they merged into a single dot in the black sky. Still, her eyes stayed fixed on that pinprick of light. Beneath her, the rocking chair creaked slightly on the loose slats of the porch. Porch? Yes, there was a porch. She couldn’t see it, just knew that’s where she sat, on a wooden front porch. Déjà vu grabbed her—she’d been here before. For a long, long time. Behind her was an old gray cabin, cobwebs in the windows, rust on the nails. She rocked, looking forward. She couldn’t see the cabin, but she knew it was behind her. She felt the weather-beaten, loose boards of the cabin invisible behind her.

And the tiny blue dot blinked once, and Angie knew that the porch rocker beside her was empty. Someone had been there, rocking like she was. But the chair was empty now, just finishing the last of its back-and-forth motion. A khaki Girl Scout sash hung over the arm. Angie couldn’t see it in the night, but she knew it was there, a khaki sash, a needle and thread, left behind by the person who had left the porch. In her peripheral vision, there were still blacker places in the dark, silhouettes of more rockers and more girls rocking. A busy, quiet place, this old porch.

Behind her, a hole in the cabin. No, a doorway. Someone stood in the doorway, the door closed tight behind her, and watched and listened. A hand reached forward and pushed the back of Angie’s seat. “Go back,” a strong voice said. Angie tipped forward and fell into the blue gleam; it tugged with unworldly gravity until azure light shone everywhere. She blinked hard against the glare. Dr. Grant’s face came into focus, the rest of the office dropping into place behind her. The light shrank down to the size of two blue irises watching her with a soft, compassionate expression.

At last, Angie found her voice. “Did—did I pass out?”

The doctor shook her head. “No. You do hypnotize quite readily. That will be a great help in our work.”

Angie spun with dizziness. “So what happened? What did I say?”

Dr. Grant tilted her head. The effect was birdlike. “Not you, my dear. Girl Scout spoke with me again. I know this will sound odd, Angie, but she asked me not to share our discussion. She wants to tell you herself, but you won’t let her. Apparently the wall between you is too thick for her to break through yet. I invited her to find a way. She wants you to hear her story first before the others.”

“Oh God,” Angie said. “Others? That’s so, so weird. How many? Did she say?”

“She named several.”

Angie’s stomach hurt. “How many is several?”

“She mentioned three, besides herself.”

“Four! Oh God. I’m a complete mess.” Her head sank into her hands, and the backs of her eyes prickled, but tears wouldn’t come. “What do I do? How do I get better?” She felt Dr. Grant’s arm move to rest across her shoulders, offering warmth and acceptance.

“Watch and listen for messages. Be open. That’s all you can do for right now. We need to move much further along the road of discovery before we can talk about recovery.”

“But I can? Recover?” Angie grasped at the word like an under-seat flotation device.

“Oh, certainly,” the doctor said. “You’ll have several options, but not yet. For now, listen to your inner voices. They may be trying to reach you directly, Angela.”

“How’d it go today?” Mom asked as she tucked Angie in and kissed her good night. It was a new ritual she was probably too old for, but she liked it all the same. Mom smoothed her hair. “Any breakthroughs?”

Great. Mom wanted an instant cure, and Angie had just discovered her issues were even more incredible than they imagined. She shook her head. “More like digging the hole deeper. And I’m at the bottom.” She raised her hands theatrically. “Someone, throw me a rope! Please!” Maybe someone would hear and take pity on her.

Mom kissed the tip of her nose. “I’ll go to the hardware store. Get a good long one.”

“Ha. Pick up a ladder while you’re at it.” Angie rolled on her side and stared at the slash of moonlight where her curtains didn’t entirely meet. Mom clicked off the bedside lamp and tiptoed out.

Angie woke early and stiff, curled up in her rocking chair. The reading light was on, and the fuzzy blanket was tucked around her shoulders. Had she fallen asleep reading? Wait, she’d fallen asleep in bed, watching the moon cross a sliver of sky. That much she remembered.

Her journal lay under the rocker tread. Very strange. She hadn’t touched it since her return—it belonged to the past. The twisted metal of the lock left it open to curious eyes, anyway. As she bent to retrieve it, her neck was one giant cramp.

The open page was covered with tiny, neat handwriting—not her curly, flowing style. She squinted at—it was a letter, addressed to her.

Breath caught in her throat. Her stomach rolled in nervous anticipation. She stretched her neck side to side and started reading.

Dear Angie,

My name is Girl Scout. I wish we could talk. There’s so much good stuff I could tell you about if you’d let me. You wouldn’t believe how much I learned how to do while you were out.

First of all, I’m the reason our arms are so strong. You can thank me for that. Carrying water, splitting firewood—they build a lot of muscle.

See, when the man first took you to his home (well, you were actually already gone into hiding by then, so I guess he was taking me), he was very calm and reasonable. Sure, he did attach my legs with those heavy cuffs, because he didn’t trust me not to run away. I would have back then, you know, before I realized how much I depended on him and he depended on me. It took me a long time to win his trust about unlocking me. That wasn’t till he knew I wasn’t going to leave him.

Anyway, when he first took me, I was shaking. I didn’t know how to get back to camp if I could get away, and we’d walked for a long, long time in the woods. I lost my sense of direction, even looking at the mossy side of the trees. Plus, they were so thick and close, I didn’t see our cabin till we were right there.

So he sat me down at an old, chipped Formica table with a brown ceramic pitcher in the middle and explained about how he was never very good at courting, and what he really needed was a wife, and how lucky I was he picked me out of all the other Girl Scouts. He knew he wanted a Girl Scout wife, he said, because we know all sorts of skills, like fire-building, and cooking, and sewing, that sort of thing. That’s what he wanted, he said. A Girl Scout who could build the fire in the cabin stove (because there was no electricity) and cook for him.

I explained very politely that he had picked the wrong girl. I couldn’t cook anything that didn’t come in a box with “just add water” instructions on the back. I really thought he would realize his mistake and let me go. Like I said, he seemed very calm and reasonable, apart from the shackles with chains that ran from my feet to the legs of the cast-iron stove. He said I had a week to learn, and he handed me an old cookbook, which he said was his mother’s.

“You know how to light an oil lamp?” he asked me, and he showed me how to trim the wick and light it. “Now be real careful,” he told me. “You knock over a burning lamp and you’ll burn up with my house.” He had a smile that nailed me to my chair.

You know how scared we all are of fire. Oh. Maybe you don’t, but that’s something all the girls have in common. It only makes sense when you live in a wood cabin that you can’t ever leave.

I asked about a fire extinguisher, and he patted me on the head and said something about “Always be prepared,” which is the Boy Scout motto, as you well know, not ours. Anyway, he didn’t have one and he didn’t plan to get one. “Just be careful,” he warned me.

If you’d been there, well, you would have been as confused as I was. No running water, no refrigerator, no electricity, and he wanted a housekeeper? He told me then he was going to work, and I was to be a good girl and have dinner ready when he came back.

“When will that be?” I asked. I had to know how long I had to escape. Yeah, I actually thought that first day that I could escape. Can you believe it?

He pointed to an old windup clock on the wall with two heavy weights hanging from it and a key sticking out of the winder. “Seven. There’s some salt pork in the barrel in the pantry. You should be able to reach it okay. I measured the chains.”

“What’s your name?” he finally asked.

At first, I didn’t know whether to tell him your name. But then I thought, it would be good if he accidentally mentioned it to someone, because they should be looking for you already. So I told him Angela.

Then he pocketed the key to my leg shackles, kissed me on the cheek, said, “Don’t let the fire go out. Have a nice day, Angela,” and left.

I never heard an engine start. I didn’t know how he came and went.

His kiss was drying on my cheek, and I thought, “Wow, I’m in the hands of a madman.” So I started looking for a way out. The body of the cast-iron stove was already hot, but I grabbed at the feet and tried to lift one to slide off the restraints. I might as well have tried to lift an elephant. Not a hint of budging. I was hot and sweaty by the time I gave up on that; my hands were burn-blistered from trying to get a better grip on the stove. You can imagine.

So I thought, with all that sweat, maybe I could slide my feet out at the other end. They were pretty bloody by the time I gave up on that. I thought about smashing them flatter with the iron skillet (Girl Scouts are always resourceful), but I knew even if I didn’t pass out from the pain, I’d never get far on my knees in the woods. I’d bet anything he was a good tracker, and he’d have me back here in no time.

So I sat at that cracked table and cried for a long while. Then I screamed for help till my throat felt bloody inside. Sorry to depress you with the details, but I wanted you to know that right at the start, I tried everything I could think of to get myself loose. I don’t want you to blame me for not trying.

I had about ten feet of length in every direction from the stove, and that was enough for me to either walk through or see the whole two-room cabin. Gray wood walls. Two rooms. No bathroom, just a chamber pot with pink roses on it. No running water. Next to the stove on one side was a cradle full of split wood that I was supposed to use to keep the fire alive. On the other side was a narrow door, which opened into the pantry. I found the salted pork in a barrel. Sure enough—it was full of salt. Ceramic crocks on the shelves were filled with oats and rice and different beans. The few spice jars had faded labels. I smelled them, but not being a cook back then, I had no clue what they were. And besides that meager collection of ingredients, all I had to work with was a huge bag of flour and another bag of sugar.

I hefted the iron pan, wondering if I could swing it fast enough to be a weapon. I worked that scene out in my head over and over, but it always ended up with me lying in a pool of blood with my head smashed, so I gave it up. No knives in sight, not even in the jar of silverware. I didn’t think I could fork him to death, not fast enough, anyway.

Not to depress or worry you, but I did consider breaking one of the ceramic crocks and using the sharp edge to off myself quickly before he could get home. I kind of liked the idea of cheating him that way, but I couldn’t do that to you, Angie. I would protect you, but not that way. So I cried while the shadows got longer. Then I lit the oil lamps, opened the cookbook, and started reading. The clock hands were moving faster and faster toward seven.

Through the back door, I saw a well pump handle. I shuffled toward it and stopped short, wrenched back by the metal cuffs scraping the fresh scabs off my ankles. What was I supposed to do for water?

Lucky for me that first day, the pitcher on the kitchen table was filled to the top with water, otherwise I never could have made a small pork and bean stew and a pile of rice. I didn’t dare waste any water rinsing the salt pork like the recipe book said I was supposed to.

When the man came in, he looked happy and excited. He rubbed his hands, kissed my cheek again. He pulled out a chair for me and sat me down. “How was your day, dear Angela?” he asked me.

“Busy,” I said carefully, and he chuckled.

His face turned soft and round. “Mine too. Crazy day at the office.”

It was completely surreal, like we were a couple on an old TV show.

He tried to pour water into the two tin cups I had put on the table, but of course, the pitcher was empty. He thumped it with a loud clatter and hurled my cup across the room. A fury possessed him, and I saw my first hint of the demon inside. He pushed back from the table, his face dark and thundery. “Angela, I’m terribly disappointed. This table is not properly set.” He smacked his fist on the table, and his spoon flew off the edge. He walked toward me, his fist still clenched.

“I’m so sorry,” I said quickly, dropping my eyes to my lap. “I couldn’t get to the well. It’s too far.” I gestured helplessly at the chains.

His face changed in less than a second. An entirely new mood. “Oh, my poor dear. All my fault. I wasn’t thinking.” He dropped to his knees next to my chair and tilted my chin back up. I held as still as a rabbit. He watched my eyes and I let nothing out, nothing at all.

Then he noticed the scabs on my ankles. He brushed them with his fingertips, and I held my frozen position. “Your poor, poor legs. You must have tried so hard to reach the water. What a good girl you are. I’ll bandage them for you after supper.”

While I sat and shook, he went out to the well and pumped another cold pitcher of water. He filled my cup and presented it to me with a gracious smile, watched me drain every precious drop, and refilled it. He dipped a spoon into the salty stew and tasted it, his eyes growing round with pleasure. He raised his cup. “To you, my dear little wife,” he said.

I don’t know what would have happened to me that first night if I didn’t have two bowls filled with a delicious dinner. I’m fairly sure it saved my life, so that’s good.

I knew perfectly well I wasn’t his wife. You don’t marry someone by stealing them and locking them in, and if he wanted a little wife, she wasn’t going to be me. Someone else could take that job.

Someone else did. She can tell you about it. I wasn’t there. I refused.

Anyway, the next morning, after the man was gone, I started making a knife out of an old spoon handle. There were nine spoons, one mismatched, and I hoped he wouldn’t miss it. I thought maybe the new girl, the Little Wife, could use it at night while he was asleep. But by the time it was sharp enough, she wouldn’t take it, and I couldn’t use it either. Not on myself. Not on him. So I concentrated on staying alive instead.

Yours truly,