Trial by Fire

“Just warm from all this exercise,” Lily said.

Juliet cocked her chin as she judged Lily’s health. The gesture accentuated the heart shape of her face, and as she pursed her naturally red lips with worry, Lily thought, as she always did, that Juliet’s mouth looked like a heart inside a heart—a small red one inside a larger, pale one. Lily knew most people considered her sister a bit plain. Juliet dressed conservatively and never wore makeup or styled her straight, mousy-brown hair. But to Lily that stuff was irrelevant. She thought her sister was the prettiest girl she’d ever seen.

“Check on Mom. I’m awesome.” Lily turned Juliet by the shoulders and gave her a playful kick on the rump to get her to go inside.

When Lily finished, she found her sister sitting in bed with their mom, taking her pulse. At twenty, Juliet was already a registered EMT and moonlighted at a hospital to pay her way through Boston University. Sometimes it seemed like everyone closest to Lily had decided at an early age that it would be a good idea to go into medicine—probably because at some point they’d seen paramedics fighting to keep Lily breathing. That kind of experience tends to leave a lasting impression on a kid.

“How is she?” Lily whispered when her sister looked up. Juliet tilted her head to the side in a noncommittal gesture before easing herself off the bed and taking Lily out to the hall.

“Her pulse is racing. Which is kind of hard to do when you have two hundred milligrams of Thorazine and an Ambien in you.”

“Is she alright alone?”

“She’s fine for now,” Juliet whispered, her big eyes downcast.

“Did she say what’s bothering her?” Lily asked. She took Juliet’s arm and led her down the hall to her room.

“She’s paranoid.” Juliet sighed as she sat on Lily’s bed. “She said another Lillian was planning on taking her Lillian.”

“That’s—” Lily stopped, overwhelmed.

“—the way she explains her hallucinations to herself,” Juliet finished for her. “The hallucinations aren’t wrong if they really happen somewhere. She isn’t crazy if there are multiple versions of people and multiple worlds that only she knows about.”

“Yeah.” Lily agreed reluctantly. Something about this explanation bothered her. She knew her mom made stuff up, but how had she known about Miranda nearly starting a fight with her in the hallway? It hadn’t happened, but it almost had. It certainly could have happened if one or two things had worked out differently. “But it’s spooky how close to true her lies sound sometimes.”

“Yeah. I know.”

“And it keeps getting weirder.”

“Schizophrenia is a degenerative disease.”

Juliet said things like that sometimes. It wasn’t to edify Lily, who already knew the ins and outs of their mom’s condition. It was to remind herself that no matter how much of a nightmare all of this seemed, it was still considered normal in some textbook somewhere. Feigning normalcy didn’t help Lily much. Cracking a joke usually did, though.

“Ah, schizophrenia. The gift that keeps on giving.”

Neither of them laughed, but they both smiled sadly and nodded in unison. It helped to have someone to nod with. That’s how Lily and Juliet survived. A textbook answer, a bad joke, and a sister to lean on, and so far they’d managed to keep their dysfunctional little family from going completely down the drain.

“So what’s all this about a party?” Juliet asked.