Pretty Girl-13

PROPOSITION




“I CONTAIN MULTITUDES,” MS. STRANG ANNOUNCED TO THE freshman lit class.

Angie’s heart leaped in response.

The teacher continued, “Does anyone know what Walt Whitman meant by this? It’s part of the closing stanzas of his ‘Song of Myself,’ which you all should have finished reading last night. Anyone?”

Angie had. She’d loved it—the language, the images, even the parts she didn’t understand at all but let them roll around in her mind. She felt her hand rising on its own and pulled it down abruptly. “Figuratively,” she whispered to herself. “It’s just a metaphor.”

“I’m sorry, Angela. Could you speak up, please?” Ms. Strang must have the hearing of a bat.

Angie’s fan club stared, waiting for her answer. What would the Gone Girl say?

She collected her thoughts. Her own thoughts. “I think Whitman means that he contains all the ancestors who lived before him—like a huge human family tree that all comes to a point in him. And also, he contains all the world today, all of creation, because he’s part of it and connected to it and stuff.” Fifty large eyes swung back to the teacher to see if that was correct.

Angie added, “It’s NOT like a multiple personality. It’s a metaphor.” Why’d she blurt that out?

But I do contain multitudes, she thought. Literally. Whitman would probably think her version was pretty cool too. Maybe she’d write her own “Song of Myself” once she got to know herselves better.

No progress there, unfortunately. After a couple of weeks of waffling, Angie brought her journal to a session, hoping it would help. “Do not mention this to my mother,” she commanded as she handed it to Dr. Grant. “She’d flip out.”

Dr. Grant read quietly for a few minutes, her placid face concealing her own reaction. “Ah,” she said gently. “So, the kidnapping hypothesis proves true.”

Angie felt a burst of gratitude for Dr. Grant’s under-response. It was so much easier to deal with things on an unemotional level. “Yep. But I still can’t remember it myself.”

“That’s okay, Angie.”

“Shackles. Suicide. Pretty heavy stuff,” she said flatly. “I don’t want Mom to have this in her head every time she looks at me. Okay?”

“I understand,” Dr. Grant said. “What about Detective Brogan, though? This is valuable evidence, an eyewitness statement.”

Angie thought about it. “There’s not much there. No descriptions or anything.”

“Still,” Dr. Grant said. “There might be enough to prevent wasting his time on false leads or wrong ideas.”

Point made. Angie shrugged. “Sure. Go ahead and make a copy. But I need to keep the original.”

“Of course. So, how do you feel about Girl Scout’s story? Her experience?”

Angie rolled her eyes. “It sucked. Obviously. But I kind of admire her spirit.”

The doctor allowed a smile. “There’s much to admire in a survivor, isn’t there?”

Angie felt a twinge of jealousy. Some days Dr. Grant spent most of the session with Angie under hypnosis. How exactly was that helping her?

“So … what do you guys talk about? I mean when I’m ‘not here’?” She made quote marks with curved fingers.

“Whatever Girl Scout needs to talk about. She’s working through some of her own issues.”

“Oh great.” Angie digested that idea for a moment. Her problems had problems. Fabulous. “But what about this Little Wife person she hinted about? Do you know who she’s talking about? Does she have issues too?” Angie absently scratched her left hand. She frowned at the silver ring. There was something about it. Her chest tightened uncomfortably.

“I haven’t met her yet,” Dr. Grant said. “Or any others, for that matter.”

“What the heck? Is this like some mental hide-and-seek game? I mean, how am I supposed to get better if you can’t even find these stupid alters?” She bolted up from the couch and paced to the window. She parted the drapes, pressed her forehead against the cool glass. A circle of moisture formed as she loosed a heavy sigh.

Silence stretched in the room behind her. Blinking away the almost-tears, she turned back to the doctor. “Well?”

Only the faintest lift of her chest betrayed the doctor’s answering sigh. “Angie, therapy for DID takes a long time. Achieving complete integration, if that’s what you want, will take a huge amount of work and dedication, on both our parts.”

Angie was back on the desk again, swinging her legs with agitation. “What do you mean, ‘if that’s what I want’? What’s the alternative? Go on like this? I want to be one person. Me.”

“I understand,” the doctor said. “But realize, the negotiated blending of the separate personalities is going to result in you-plus.”

“Plus what?”

“Memories, feelings, shades of the alters. They’re you too.”

Angie was silent, absorbing this idea. Her heels kicked against the wood.

Dr. Grant smiled gently. “As I said, this is a very gradual process. Everyone will be evolving toward one another. You will feel like you, one you, in the long run.”

“What’s the long run? It’s been almost a whole month already! So when will I be one me? Like six months? A year or so?”

“Angie, dear. We’re talking about several years. Potentially longer, depending on how cooperative everyone is feeling.”

“You’re kidding.” Angie kicked the desk a little too hard, a new worry taking over from the last. Dad’s insurance didn’t cover this kind of thing. She’d accidentally seen the bill for the first three weeks of therapy, nine sessions—Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays: more than thirteen hundred dollars. There was no way Mom and Dad could afford that—not now, and certainly not when there was a baby coming. “I can’t wait for years. I need to be myself again now. Why should it take so long?”

Dr. Grant laid her pen down with a shrug. “Hypnotism, reprocessing, and talk therapy, the work we’ve started together, is a gradual process of revealing, experiencing, and coping with the injuries and abuses you, the primary, can’t remember. You can’t rush it. But there’s an excellent track record of success. I have no worries about your eventual success, especially as you have no alcoholism, no signs of depression. Angie, you’re a very resilient personality.”

Angie huffed. “I am the personality. The boss.” She ignored the sensation of laughter inside her skull. “It’s not that I don’t, uh, admire and thank Girl Scout for taking one for the team, but it’s time for the team to disband. I’m back.”

Dr. Grant sat back and twiddled her pearls. “Hmm. I hear you. But we haven’t heard from the rest of the team, have we?”

“Why do they get a vote?” She met Dr. Grant’s unblinking and surprised stare.

“They’re people. The citizens of your body. Aren’t you curious, Angie?”

Typical. Why did she have to answer questions with questions? “Curious? Isn’t it better if the past just stays in the past? I mean, I’m doing fine in school. Things are okay at home. I’m beginning to make some new friends. I’m starting over fresh. Why would I want all the awful stuff dredged up from the bottom of my mental pond? Why would I want to remember it? Why can’t it all just go away and let me be the old me again?”

Angie’s eyes filled with angry tears. Dr. Grant’s face smeared into a pink blur.

The blur offered her a Kleenex box. “You know my primary concern is your recovery, but I have to ask you. What about the investigation? Do you want to help the investigation into your abduction? There may be other victims. Or potential victims.”

Angie imagined a new Girl Scout, chained up and frightened. Something in her mind wiped the image. “NO!” The yell exploded from her mouth before she could stop it. “I mean, no, that’s not going to happen.” She knew it was true as she said it. She just didn’t know why.

At her outburst, Dr Grant’s eyebrows practically popped off her forehead.

Angie released a huge, irritated sigh. “Fine. I get your point. I wish they’d all just tell you what they know. They’re like ghosts, hanging around with unfinished business on earth. I wish they’d just spill their guts and move on. Get out of town. I don’t need them anymore. I don’t want them!” Her voice rose again.

“Angie.”

“You hear me?” she yelled, slapping her head with both hands. “I DON’T WANT YOU! GET OUT!”

“Angie.” Dr. Grant grabbed her hands. “Angie. Don’t hurt yourself.” Worry lines stood out on her forehead. It seemed she was mulling something over.

“What? What are you thinking?” Angie demanded, reversing roles.

Dr. Grant sagged back into her wing chair. “Well, first, it’s nice to see a little color in your cheeks. That’s the most animated I’ve ever seen you.”

“Great,” Angie commented. “I’ll try to freak out more often. That’s not what you were thinking, though.”

“I have a … a proposition for you to consider.” She was uncharacteristically hesitant.

“I’ll consider anything. What?”

“I know of a psychiatrist at UCLA who’s begun clinical studies with an experimental method. He’s asked me several times whether I have any patients to refer to him.”

“Transfer? Oh. But …” Angie felt silly. “Start over with someone new? I’m sort of used to you.”

Dr. Grant clasped her hands together like a silent clap. “Why, thank you, Angie. Fear not. I’d be a full collaborator. I’d be right there with you all the time. He’d run the fancy equipment, and I’d monitor you.”

“Equipment?”

“I have to tell you, in all honesty, I have no experience with his method. It’s controversial, to be sure. It involves … eliminating, rather than integrating, the alters. But his patients can finish treatment in a matter of weeks, not years.”

Eliminating? Weeks? Oh yes. Now we’re talking. Angie leaned toward the doctor, excitement simmering. “Okay, that sounds interesting. Is it super expensive?”

Dr. Grant smiled. “It’s all being done under an NIH R34 award. The patients, of course, accept the risk of its experimental status in exchange for treatment.”

“But is it expensive?”

“There’s no charge,” Dr. Grant answered.

“I’m interested,” Angie said. “I’m way interested. How do I start?”

“We’ll speak to your parents.”

At the next session, Mom and Dad were both present, hanging on the doctor’s words. They perched on the edge of the couch. Angie slumped back in the beanbag chair.

“That sounds ideal,” Mom said.

“A win-win,” Dad added. “She can be rid of these extraneous so-called personalities.”

The doctor frowned. “With all due respect, Mr. Chapman, I wouldn’t call them extraneous. They’re unintegrated parts of your daughter’s psyche, but parts that did play a critical role in keeping her alive and sane through her ordeal. They deserve your respect.”

Even the one that steals underwear? Angie thought.

As the sarcastic comment flitted through her head, she suddenly doubled over in agony, a knifelike pain radiating from her shoulders. No one noticed her, hunched over her knees in the corner of the room. The adult voices faded.

A picture forced its way into the space behind her eyes. On a bed, her thirteen-year-old body, cold and bare. On a bed, wrists red and scratched from the tug of coarse ropes. On a bed, looming over her, a pair of dark eyes too close together.

For a moment, she felt his weight. For a moment, she heard his heavy breathing. For a moment, she smelled his sweat. For a moment, paralyzing terror possessed every crevice of her being.

Then the image and the terror vanished, leaving shock waves behind, like the moment after a nightmare lifts. But words rang in her ears, the voice a low, female growl. Don’t ever disrespect me, Pretty Girl, after what I did for you. I saved your f*cking life.

“What was that, hon?” Mom gripped her trembling hand. She was crouched on the floor beside Angie. “What did you say?”

“They saved my life,” she whispered.

A throaty laugh echoed between her ears. You’re welcome.

The voice terrified her. It was like having a wild demon in her head. She squeezed Mom’s hand and pleaded with her eyes. “When can we start? When can we do the new procedure?”

Angie was late back to school because of the appointment, arriving just at lunchtime. She had stopped shaking from the glimpse of horror, and the memory was already bleeding away until she couldn’t quite remember what she’d seen—just that she was left feeling unsettled.

The cafeteria was filled with eating, joking, rowdy students. All she had to do was find a table of strangers and sit down so she could eat in peace. What she’d told the doctor wasn’t entirely true. She wasn’t making new friends. Sure, she had a crowd of followers, of fans, but it wasn’t like she wanted to get close to any of them. Ugh. They were like fleas. Hopping onto her, touching her all the time, sucking away her energy.

It was much easier to float along, remain a mystery, keep them at arm’s length. She didn’t need to explain anything about herself that way.

She was still scanning the room with her food tray when a hand jostled her elbow.

Rebalancing her tray, she whirled to see Kate, or a three-years-older version of Kate, who made a quick sign of the cross on her chest. “It is you,” she said in a hushed voice. She patted Angie, testing her solidity. “Oh wow. I only saw you from the side a couple of times, and I wasn’t sure. I mean, I heard the gossip, but I had to know for real. Come over here.” She grabbed Angie’s tray and took it over to a table for two.

“Sit.” She leaned her head close to Angie’s, foreheads almost touching. “I can’t believe it. I didn’t hear anything on the news. When did they find you? Where were you? What happened?”

“Apparently I found myself,” Angie replied. “I showed up at home—total amnesia.”

Kate’s jaw dropped. “Oh, my. I’m sorry. Do you know who I am?”

Angie rolled her eyes. “Of course I do, Katie-Latie. You were one of my best friends.” She noticed that she’d automatically used the past tense, like she was getting a sense of time—a then and a now. She didn’t feel thirteen anymore. She felt—undefined.

Kate grabbed a baby carrot off Angie’s salad, just like she used to. “Well, you probably don’t know it’s social death to be seen with me. I should warn you. I’m a leper now.” She said it so matter-of-factly, Angie assumed she was kidding.

“I’m not kidding,” she continued. “So if you don’t want to—”

Angie shrugged. “Because of the keg thing?”

Kate startled. “See. You’re back from the other side and even you know about it. Who told you?”

“Greg and Livvie,” she replied.

“So how come you’re not hanging with them?” Kate’s nose wrinkled. “They’re right over there.”

Angie looked in the direction Kate pointed with her chin. Liv had a sour look on, watching the two of them. Well, no wonder. If Greg had told her what happened, Liv had an excellent reason to look at Angie that way. She felt the color creep into her cheeks just thinking about it.

But if he’d kept it secret, then it looked like she’d just ditched them. She never called Liv that afternoon, and she’d blocked Liv’s number after the fifth time Liv tried to call her. She didn’t want to start her new life with an all-out catfight over something she hadn’t even done on purpose. It wasn’t like Liv would take “It was my other personality” as an excuse.

And now Angie was eating lunch with the enemy.

Greg’s expression was harder to read, more intense. Whatever it was, it made her hot and squirmy inside. “Nah. Things have changed too much,” she said.

Kate raised her eyebrows. “You could easily win him back if you wanted.”

“It’s not a contest,” Angie said primly.

“Yes, it is,” Kate argued. “Everything’s a contest. Popularity, love, grades, success. You just have to learn the contest rules.”

Rules. The word struck a chord. “Why’d you break the rules? Why’d you tell on them?”

Kate’s smile was unexpected. “I may have lost the popularity contest, but I won the integrity award. If anyone had crashed coming down that twisty mountain road from Kurt’s house drunk, I couldn’t have lived with myself or with Kurt. So I told, and no one got hurt.”

“Except you.”

“Except me. Acceptable losses.”

Angie wanted to hug her across the table, but salad dressing would have ruined her expensive T-shirt. She grabbed Kate’s hand instead. “Kurt was your boyfriend, wasn’t he?”

Kate’s smile slipped. “Was. Yeah.”

“And you told on him anyway? I heard he got suspended.”

Kate’s sigh was heavy. “It wasn’t easy. But what he did was wrong. Dangerous to himself and everyone else. So yeah. I tattled. Broke the first rule of the playground. No tattling on friends. But I had to in this case. That’s the rule of self-respect.”

No tattling. The words echoed. But I had to. What he did was wrong. Angie found a strange resonance in Kate’s story. It clung to her.

“Can we be lepers together?” she asked.

Kate’s grin was the brightest thing Angie had seen in days.

The best part of Saturday mornings was smacking her six a.m. school alarm and sinking back into sleep. But today, too nervous and excited about starting the experimental treatment, Angie’s brain kicked right into wide-awake mode. She rolled out of bed and stretched, up to the ceiling, down to the floor. Her arms swung loose around her toes, and she noticed black smudges on the first two fingertips of her left hand, like pencil marks. Weird. She was right-handed. She rubbed her fingers together, and the black smeared into gray. A crumpled piece of paper on the desk caught her eye. Shreds of pink eraser covered the surface. She smoothed the paper and gasped.

Childish handwriting sprawled crookedly across the page and swerved diagonally at the end of each line. Some of the words had been written and erased and rewritten in a straighter line with a left-handed slant. The ghosting of the erased words made the note even more illegible. The writer must have crumpled it in frustration at the end. Angie dropped into her rocking chair and read.

Deer Angie,

This is very hard for me to rite but the big girl sayed I have to do it. I hop you can read my riteing OK. I was the first girl you can hear. Onely some times. But I am hideing from the scarey lady dr. I need you to get a tape recoding thing. It is to slow and hard to rite a letter.

Sinserely, Tattletale.

The big girl at the door sayed its OK I have to tell you now so no body gets hurt any more.

A cold feeling dribbled all the way down Angie’s spine as she read the note. She flipped her left hand over, awkwardly picked up a pencil, and tried to copy the letter onto a clean sheet of paper. Goosebumps raised the hairs on her arms. It wasn’t her handwriting, for sure. She could barely form the letters left-handed. The child’s writing looked polished next to hers.

The first one she could hear? What did it mean? And who was the big girl by the door? Was that Girl Scout or someone else? The gatekeeper, maybe?

Her life was a bunch of questions that no one else could answer. Instead of going away, the mysteries multiplied. Wonderful. Just like her personalities. All locked in her head.

What was so awful, so terrible, so frightening that she couldn’t even tell herself? She’d survived, after all.

The idea of a little girl hunched over the desk in the dead of night, laboring to leave her a message, touched her in a way all Dr. Grant’s wordy explanations never could. She was real—a child with her own dreams and fears. The scary lady doctor. Angie smiled.

Her smile faded as she thought about the new treatment. Dr. Grant had promised that all the alters would have their last chance to speak to her before they were erased. It was up to the alters to decide how much they wanted to tell. And it was up to Angie to decide how much she wanted to know.

She considered the crumpled paper in her hand and the little girl who wanted to speak directly to her, now, before it was too late.

Did they know about the treatment starting this afternoon? Could they hear and understand? Was this crumpled note a kid’s desperate plea for communication before she was erased?

Angie pictured her, Tattletale, blond hair streaming out behind her, blown by unseen wind, a pencil in her tiny hand.

She decided. It was time for secrets to come out of hiding. Ready or not, here I come.