“Wake up!” someone screamed at me, a hand slapping violently against my face.

“What!” I yelled back, my face burning. The smack was hard enough to rattle my teeth, but I was now entirely too pissed off to feel anything but the brat-like fury you felt when you were rudely awakened. Opening my eyes, of course it would be Pythius crouching in front of me, a sick smile on his twisted face. I jumped away from him and back into a hard stone wall behind me. He looked as I had first seen him the first time he shed his skin as Evelyn, all black-veined skin with skin stretched too tight around the bones and bursting at the seams into ugly, oozing sores. Four of his tendrils hovered around me menacingly, but I kept my eyes trained on his sickly yellow eyes.

“What? No smart remark at how I look?” he asked, rocking back to sit.

“Why should I have to say anything when it’s obvious?” I said back reflexively, and I paled as a certain look came over his eyes, a certain hardening. Quickly, I spat back, “What is it with you? Why do you always have to talk shit?”

It was then that I noticed that my arms were shackled above my head by the wrists and my wing was extended and bound painfully to my back. My legs were shackled together, too, but I was still able to stand. The room I was in was dark and cold and aside from the wall behind me, everything seemed to be made of metal. The wall I leaned against felt like solid stone, and it was freezing. I tried to push myself away from it, but found that the way my arms had been bound made it awkward and painful to move them. The room wreaked of stale urine and iron. I hoped it wasn’t blood I was smelling, but it probably was. There was a single door directly behind Pythius that was featureless save for a single door handle and its hinges. Despite how it felt and smelled, the room—prison—was clean.

In a painfully, ironically light tone, Pythius said in Evelyn’s voice, “Because I hate you,” he let out a too-sweet giggle and continued, “and since I can’t kill you, I may as well antagonize you until you die.” A look of vague, but unsurprised horror, crossed my face, and my heart dropped slightly at his words. That could have meant one of two things: either I was going to die soon, or it would be a while before I died, and he would still be here trying to make sure every moment until then, would be a certified discomfort. Both were extremely unsavory outcomes I would have liked to avoid as much as possible.

That meant I needed to escape.

“But hey, you’ve still got my Truth in your hands. You can break it any time you’d like and I’ll just die,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, bringing me back to the present moment.

“Why do I find that so hard to believe?” I asked, the tiny pearl somehow miraculously clutched in my hand. I wondered how it had stayed put, but now wasn’t the time to question something fairly trivial, given the overall gravity of the situation.

Pythius let out an obnoxious chortle and said, “Yeah, because you’re right. You can break it if you want and see what happens.”

“Why in the world would I do that? For all I know, this thing could just be some weird demon bomb and kill me instead,” I said, trying to push the sound of truth into my words. Pythius had told me that it would kill him, and even though it seemed truthful enough, I couldn’t be sure. If it was true, than now wasn’t the time to use it—not now while I was still imprisoned in some place that I probably couldn’t possibly fathom. Now was the time to bid it carefully.

“Who knows? Maybe you’re feeling absolutely helpless, maybe it’ll be your only option someday,” he mused, a satisfied smirk on his face.

“I literally cannot comprehend how terrible you are,” I said, shaking my head. It burned me up inside to see such satisfaction on that disgusting, hateful face.

“That’s the point. I wouldn’t be doing my job as a demon very well if you could.”

“What do you want? Like seriously, what do you want?” I snapped. “You didn’t keep the deal we made, so you have everything you want and then some, right? Like, why are you here tormenting me now? Come to tell me your evil plan like any trademark villain or are you really just that sick?”

“No, no, you’re right; I absolutely have everything I want, and damn, it was so easy. Don’t get me wrong; Vance will remain safe. No one you know outside of these walls will die, but damn it just feels so good seeing you realize how bad you fucked up. Honestly, I need to pat myself on the back,” he started, reaching back to pat his own shoulder, “because I didn’t know if you’d take the deal. You had the right idea to avoid it, but you took it, and because you thought I was going to hurt your little boyfriend. Honestly, you humans are so easy to play with. Don’t ever let me learn psychology; I’ll rule the whole damned world with just fear. My stars, I love it!” he chortled excitedly.

“Since I can’t kill you, I’m just going to enjoy myself other ways, and trust me sweetie, this isn’t torment. Not yet, at least, but I’ll give you a slight taste,” he said. Suddenly and before I could realize what was happening, one of his tendrils lodged itself deep into my stomach, and I let out a pained and surprised exhale. Immediately, I curled into myself around the tail, and for a second, my world blacked out, but then he was slamming his hand to my forehead, my head against the stone wall, and the world flashed white before my eyes rolled back in place.

Letting out a sinister laugh, he said, “Look at you! Oh the look on your face is absolutely delectable.” He pulled his tail from the wall then, and I watched it warily, then glanced down at my stomach, which was perfectly unscathed and intact. My hands shot to my stomach without thinking, and my arms went and reached my abdomen easily, and then I realized the shackles had disappeared. My head shooting up, I asked almost fearfully, “What did you do, what’s going on?”

He let out a heinous disgusting laugh and stood, then said, “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

He turned to walk away, and I lunged after him, but a dagger of pain suddenly shot through my back as the wing felt almost to be torn from my skin.

“Get back here!” I howled. “Answer me.”

“See ya soon, little angel,” he chucked, the door closing behind him silently, but it didn’t shut all the way. Just before it closed, there was an odd, almost silent clacking sound. I watched the door warily, my body tensing as I brought my legs in close to me. The clacking continued and grew louder and more numerous, and then a spider crawled along the floor from behind the door. I inhaled sharply as I stood up. It was a small spider and black and completely un-menacing, but I hated spiders. I hated spiders with a burning passion because I was deathly afraid of them, and though this spider was moving slowly, I pressed myself as close to the wall as possible. Still, it moved unceasingly towards me, and trying to steady myself and calm down, my fear only hiked higher and higher as it got closer. The clacking sound hadn’t quite stopped, but the sound of my heart racing madly in my chest, the blood rushing in my ears, almost drowned it out.

Losing control and giving into the fear, I stomped down hard on the spider just as it reached my foot. The clacking suddenly stopped. Slowly, I released my breath and moved my foot, but without any warning, thousands of spiders sprouted from beneath and exploded up my leg.

Breathing fast and hard, my body exploded into uncontrollable spasms and convulsions, I felt my mind slip away from me as I screamed out. My hands shot out to beat the spiders away, but the shackles had suddenly reappeared and had pinned my arms to the wall. Throwing myself as hard from the wall as possible, I couldn’t stop the screams that escaped my mouth as the spiders crawled up my legs, raced up my body and swarmed me in a matter of seconds. I could feel all of their individual legs racing across my skin, and the clacking had intensified until it was all I could hear next to my own hoarse and breathless shrieks. I screamed my throat raw, and even then I couldn’t stop screaming as I felt them in my hair, scurrying against my scalp and neck and reaching my face.

“What are you willing to do to make this stop?” a voice asked, cutting through despite the endless clacking.

“Anything!” I screamed. “Anything! Make it stop! Please make it stop!”

“Whose life will you take to make it stop?”

“I don’t know!” I screamed, throwing myself back and slamming against the wall, trying to kill some of the spiders that still continued on the ceaseless trek across my body.

“A ram?” it asked. The room blackened suddenly, and an old, decrepit ram suddenly appeared before me underneath a source-less light. A knife was in my hand then, and the shackles had again disappeared.

“Sacrifice the ram, and the spiders will disappear,” the voice said compassionately, and without thinking, I lunged toward the ram and drew the knife across its neck. Blood spurted out and across my face, and I let out another scream, but I could no longer feel the spiders.

Stumbling back, the knife clattered to the ground, and the ram fell to its side, a pool of dark blood growing beneath it as air escaped its exposed throat, trying to gasp for air through a broken straw. Trembling, I slid to the ground and tried to get a handle of what had just happened. Bringing my knees to my chest and hugged myself tightly.

I buried my face in my knees, and the voice said, “That wasn’t so bad.” I didn’t respond, I just stared down into my legs, the ram’s blood still warm on my face. I stayed like that for a while, trying to get my bearings as I took into account what I had actually done. Nausea rocked and rolled in my stomach and spread to my whole being until it felt as if I were on a boat in unsteady, volatile waters. The familiar darkness I ignored most days welled at the bottom of the unsteady waters, began to stain it with intrusive thoughts I’d worked so hard to tune out. These simple black and white thoughts . . .

People don’t just kill animals.

Good people don’t just kill animals.

I was not a good person.

If there was any goodness in me before, it disappeared now. Selfish. How could I do that? How could I kill an innocent animal like that? Just to stop my own fear, which may or may not have even been real. My body grew cold as something spiraled out and away from me.

I was not a good person.

I was a bad person.

I was a very bad person.

Bad people deserved to be punished.

Slowly, my hand reached down, but the knife had disappeared. When I looked up, the ram had disappeared as well, and in its place was an old man in a wheelchair. I sucked hard on my teeth, my jaw slamming shit and my eyes widening, disbelieving what was before me, who was before me.

The old man was bald, save for a messy smattering of hair near his ears. His eyes were a tired looking gray, but they were almost shrouded by the skin that hung low on his face. His skin was carved deep with grooves of age, which ran even deeper around his eyes and mouth. He had been a happy man in his youth, but now just looked at me with an unfathomable disdain. He was wearing a faded, dark green cardigan, a dark blue, fuzzy sweater underneath. His legs were covered by an old plaid blanket, and his hands loosely gripped the arms of the chair, which I realized was automatic.

“Do you remember me, Amor?” he asked, his voice sounding gravelly and dry.

Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I nodded my head tersely, and he asked, “Do you remember the play we saw that night.”

I nodded again, and he said, “Speak up. I’m old, I can’t hear you.”

“Y-yes, sir,” I barked out.

“What time was it when it ended? Was it midnight?”

Taking a deep, shuddering breath, I said, “It was twelve fifty-two.”

“Twelve fifty-two? That’s an odd time for a play to end,” he said, his hand reaching up to rub his chin thoughtfully. “Twelve fifty-two . . . twelve fifty-two. Why does that sound familiar?”

Not saying a thing, I felt my world spin as I sagged against the wall behind me, and he said, just as I remembered, “No, no, the play didn’t end at twelve fifty-two, I died at twelve fifty-two! Silly girl,” he chuckled coldly. “The play ended at twelve fifteen.”

My mouth was suddenly dry, and I nodded rigidly and said, “Yes, sir. You’re right. The play ended at twelve fifteen.”

“Hm,” he mused, rubbing his chin again and looking up, “Why did you remember twelve fifty-two? How did you know when I died?”

I said nothing. The words hung in the air like an acrid stench, and something disgusting and metallic filled my mouth and stomach, and then he said, “I remember your cousin. What was her name? Arleen?”

“Arlen,” I clarified in a breathless whisper. “Her name is Arlen.”

“Yes, yes,” he said slowly, clasping his hands together, trying to warm them up. “I remember you two. Oh, you both looked so beautiful that night. Do you remember? We were the only ones left at the end. They up and locked us out, so we were all stuck in that chilly foyer together.”

“I remember.”

“You and your cousin stayed on the other side,” he laughed, “I remember. Wouldn’t want to stand near a crippled old man, huh?”

“N-no!” I cried. “That’s not it!”

“Well, of course it is, Amor! Maybe if I’d been a little younger, you girls might have stood closer to me, maybe helped me,” he shrugged.

“I’m sorry!” I cried out again, helpless, useless tears springing to my eyes. “I’m so sorry!”

“Ah, what are you sorry for?” he asked coyly. “It’s not your fault I died, right? Or maybe it is? It’s surely not Arlen’s fault. She didn’t even see me when you all drove past, but you did. You saw me as your mama drove past again and again. What was I doing?”

“You were trying to get out,” I whispered, staring at him as the futile tears poured from my face. In my head, a deadly repetition began to sound in my head: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m–

“Sorry, what was that? Ah, never mind, you and I both know. I was trying to get out of that damn foyer! All by myself and wheelchair bound! I get that some cripples have to try to establish their independence, but, throw a dog a bone, would ya! I really needed help back there. You saw me, but you didn’t say anything. And you know the crazy part? You ended up watching me die!” he burst out, laughing with an impossibly youthful zeal. “That’s the kicker, huh! You all got stuck in traffic right in front of the place, then I up and croak right before your eyes! Heart attacks, huh?”

“Oh, what now?” my mother’s voice suddenly snapped, and I looked over at her. I was now in the backseat of my aunt’s car, and Arlen was beside me wearing an all-black jumper. I looked down to see I was wearing a floral, sleeveless dress, my nails done and my hand clutching my phone. My mother was in the front, hitting the steering wheel, and my aunt beside her was chuckling, telling her to calm down. The city lights cast a yellowy-orange glow over everything, and the brake lights ahead of us were an almost menacing red. I glanced to the side again, at the opera house, and I saw the old man had stopped moving. My eyebrows furrowed, but I said nothing as a couple happened to walk past.

They stopped to shake the old man, but he wasn’t moving, and then the man was putting his fingers to his neck, and the woman was now pulling out her phone, and my heart was now stopping as my mouth stayed shut. I was sucking on my teeth so hard, I also ended up eating my words and sealing my own mouth shut.

“Yes, you remember,” the man said with satisfaction. He was now beside me, in Arlen’s spot, and he was watching me watching him as sirens sounded and the man was now trying to perform CPR on his body.

“You don’t even know my name,” the man asked, his breath now rancid and deathly. I whipped around to look at him, but I was somewhere else now. I was sitting on a bed. It was my bed from when I was younger and it had been on the floor because I wanted to be edgy. My phone was in my hands, and I saw a text from an old best friend of mine. My heart was beating rapidly in my chest, not from fear, but out of rage.

Marce: Yeah we fite sumtims nd hell try 2 choke me out but I hit him bak ya know

Me: he shuldnt b hittin u at all WTF!!!

Marce: It happens I guess.

Me: Grl u need 2 leave him, lyk now. Jus cuz hes 16 doesnt mean he can jus hurt u lyk tht!

Marce: hol up, he jus gt bak.

The rage boiled over slightly and I inhaled sharply, my hands trembling gently in my lap. Why was she still with that guy? She had to have known that the guy was complete garbage. I’d seen the bruises on her face; I was certain everyone had, but no one seemed to care. Everyone stayed silent, including her own mother. The only people who were outraged at the whole situation were me and her sister. Angrily, I tapped out on the keys.

Me: LEAVE NOW

Marce: Ill txt u wen I get home, k?

A different kind of anger boiled up beneath the one that was already raging and tearing through my sense. A sort of rage at her negligence for her own safety and the complacency she had for the situation, but being so young, I didn’t understand the weight of those words. At that time, it all felt like a wash, a storm and flood of the unplaced, insatiable anger.

I punched out another quick response.

Me: U better!

Because despite how much I hated that she put herself in that situation, as much as I wanted to hate her for it, I didn’t, and I couldn’t, because she had been one of my best friends since third grade, and it wasn’t really her I was mad at; it was that trash person she was dating, who in no way, shape, or form deserved this angel of a person. Anxiously, I waited on the bed, scrolling through a Facebook feed to keep my nerves and hands at bay. She needed to text me. She needed to let me know she was safe.

There was nothing I could do now that that guy was over there with her, but I needed to know she was safe at least, so I sat there for about forty-five minutes, nervously feeding thoughtless entertainment to my anxiety-ridden brain when the notification popped at the top of the screen, and I was instantly frozen.

Marce: Call the police!

Through shaking hands, I texted back, my breathing hitching.

Me: MARCE???!!?

She didn’t respond for a few minutes. The phone felt heavy in my hand suddenly, the video of a newborn kitten rolling around doing nothing to calm my nerves. Breathing deeply and unevenly, I put the phone down beside me, screen down. This couldn’t be happening. This couldn’t be happening. Marce was strong, she could handle herself, right? This just couldn’t be happening. Someone in that house had to be hearing whatever was happening, right? This just couldn’t be happening. My heart seemed to beat faster with each passing second, my mind running through all the possible scenarios. The worst I’d seen him do yet was spraining her wrist, almost breaking it in front of me one day. I should have called the police the first time. I should have reported him. I should have called the police now, and I wanted to, trust me I did, but for some unfathomable reason, I didn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone, maybe out of fear that I’d see a picture of what he’d done to her, see that I was too late anyways.

Wasn’t there someone there?

About fifteen minutes passed, and my hands were shaking for a different reason now and the world grew uncomfortably quiet. There was an itching feeling that someone was watching me, waiting for me to make my decision—to call 911 or not to call 911– and the feeling only mounted and grew. It was waiting for me to move, to make a choice, to either save my friend through action or damn her with inaction, and just as that feeling grew uncontrollable, the feeling that this someone was about to touch me—shake me, maybe even slap me– if I stayed still for just a second longer, my phone pinged. My hand shot to the phone and turned it over, and my heart dropped to my feet.

If you call the police, I will kill her.

When I looked up from my phone, I was in Marce’s hospital room, and her eyes were staring off blankly. She was hooked onto a breathing tube, and her face was swollen to the point that I could barely tell it was her. My whole body was cold as I stared at her. Her mother had been sobbing in the corner when she had gotten there, and she hadn’t left Marce’s side until she finally came to, but no one was in the room then. It was just Marce and I.

“You definitely should have called the police,” a boy’s voice said, chortling evilly. Looking up, Jack—the boy who had done this to her—was snickering at me from the doorway. Before he could take a step in my direction, I lunged at him, my fury boiling over and taking control as I tackled him to the ground and sent fist after wrathful fist into his angular, effeminate face. My fists connected with skin, one after the other, over and over. I was no longer in my thirteen-year-old body with my feeble arms, but now I was in my seventeen-year-old body where I lifted to make sure I could protect myself and others from monsters like him.

He laughed beneath me, his face receiving each hit, but not reacting to it. No matter how hard I sent the punch, his face remained the same, pristine and almost pretty. But I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop hitting him as I channeled years of guilt and hate and fury through my arms, almost desperate to see the retribution on his frail body. Looking at him now, I wondered how we could have been so terrified of him, this scrawny little boy. This little stick of a child was what had put Marce in a coma? And knowing Marce was behind me, that he had done this to her without remorse; I couldn’t stop, and he just kept laughing. Before I could get out even half of the rage I’d pent up inside, Marce asked behind me, “Why did you stop talking to me, Ama?”

I stopped then, halted mid-movement, and Jack went on laughing.

“Ama?” she asked again, and slowly, I turned around. She was sitting up in the hospital bed, but it wasn’t the hospital anymore. It was the psych ward then, and she looked as she did now. Her hair was unruly and poorly managed. Her brown eyes were vacant and her face was very still. There was a scar that reached down from the top of her head to her left temple.

“Why did you stop talking to me, Ama?” she repeated, a line of drool dripping down her mouth. I jumped up from Jack and scrambled to her, sinking to my knees in front and taking her hand.

“Marce? Marcy is that really you?” I asked, frantic tears welling in my eyes. I reached up to touch her face and I caressed her hair, and as the tears spilled over, I asked, “Marce, who’s been taking care of your hair?”

“No one, Ama,” she answered. Her voice was there, sounding as if she hadn’t been rendered nearly brain dead. “Not since you stopped talking to me,” she said, and I flinched my hands away, but forced them back to hers. “Why did you stop talking to me?”

Unable to control myself, a wail sounded from deep within me as I buried my face in the stale, scratchy blanket that covered her lap. I always hated the blankets, and she didn’t like them either. I looked up, and off to the side in the chair I used to always sit in, there was a folded pink blanket, my blanket, the one I had given her. Her favorite color was pink, and I used to always make sure it was soft just for her, and it was the last thing I left for her. Marce turned her head to look at it, and she said, “I stopped using it, Ama. I thought you were mad at me and that’s why you stopped talking to me and so I thought if you were mad at me that I shouldn’t use it anymore.”

“Marce, Marcy, no!” I cried, looking up at her, “I could never be mad at you! None of this was your fault, nothing was. I didn’t stop talking to you because I was mad at you, I promise, okay? Never think that, I could never be mad at you.”

“Then why’d you stop talking to her?” Jack asked behind me, clapping a hand on my shoulder.

“You don’t touch me!” I screamed, surging to my feet and turning on him. Grabbing him by the collar, I slammed him against the wall. The last time I had seen Jack, he was still a sixteen-year-old, and at once I thought he was very muscular, but was now very scrawny and thin and short compared to me. “You did this!” I screamed, shaking him savagely, slamming his head into the wall behind him. “You did this to her!”

“Yeah, I did it,” he said in an obnoxiously cocky voice. Marce began murmuring something behind me, but she was saying it quietly, and all of my attention was on him. He went on, “I did it, but you could have stopped that.”

I stopped then, and he said again in a louder voice, puncturing the words like slaps to in face, “You could have stopped it. She told you to ‘call the police’, but you didn’t.”

“You said you would kill her if I did!” I screamed indignantly in his face, trying to justify my inaction, but the guilt— the guilt was there and it felt like acid in my stomach.

“Yeah, like a whole fifteen minutes later,” he laughed. “Fifteen, dude! You could have called the police and they would have been there by the time I even thought to check her phone. You fucked up.”

“No!” I yelled, shoving myself away from him. “No, this is your fault, she’s like this because of you!”

“But she was calling out to you. Think about it: all of this could have been prevented if you had just called the police. Look, she’s saying it right now,” he said, pointing behind me to Marce, whose quiet murmuring had gotten louder and louder until I could hear her repeating over and over in a frantic, panicked voice, “Call the police call the police call the police.”

Just as I turned around, Marce was on me, screaming in my face, “Amor call the police Amor call the police Amor call the police!”

“Marce, please!” I yelled, grabbing her arms, but she was somehow much stronger than she should have been, and she was in my face, screaming it over and over, and above that, I could hear Jack’s voice, saying, “So that’s why you stopped talking to her. She started to say ‘call the police’. It’s really funny, now. What can the police do to a braindead idiot like her?”

“Marce, stop!” I cried, covering myself with my arms, trying to shield myself from her desperate, hopeless cries for help.

“You know, she was really hoping you’d call the police,” Jack said, crouching down beside me, and then Marce began to roar, “Why didn’t you do anything, Ama? Why didn’t you call the police? This happened because of you and now I’m stuck in this mental hospital because he almost beat me to death! Why didn’t you do anything, Ama? Why didn’t you do anything?”

“Marcy, please,” I wept, curling into myself and trying to hide from her, from him, from everything that I’ve done and everything I didn’t do.

“Why didn’t you do anything?”

“Because I was scared!” I shouted, bursting out and pushing her off of me, but I was alone then. I was alone in the cell, and the chains had lengthened enough for me to move my arms, but all I could do was curl up in myself and sob.

Oh, yes, I was a terrible person.

Marce had been a childhood friend of mine. We’d known each other for so long, and she had been my best friend since the moment we first met, even before Jo and I had gotten close. She’d always been more outgoing and adventurous than me. She’d lost her virginity at thirteen– to that fuck– and if I think hard enough about it, he probably pressured her into it, but when I think about her, about her with him, I can’t help but think about everything he took from her.

He took away her youth, he took away her innocence, he took away her ability to speak, he took away any chances of loving someone who deserved her love in all of its suffocating brilliance, and her chances of being loved by someone who deserved it just as much as she did. If there was any single person I hated beside myself, it would be him.

“If you could get her back, what would you be willing to do?” that voice asked again.

“I’d do anything,” I sobbed, remembering her that night after she’d been admitted to the hospital. “I’d do anything to get her back.”

“Would you kill the one who did this to her?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” I cried, “I would kill him in a heartbeat.”

“Then do it, and she shall be as she was before,” the voice said, and Jack’s snickering laugh came to my ears. Looking up from the ground, he was standing before me in all of his disgusting arrogance, but he wasn’t as he’d been before. He was older now. He was twenty and looked his age, as he would be if I ever saw him in real life. There was the cold heavy weight of a knife in my hands again, and I stood, tears streaming down my face and Marce’s smile in my mind.

I missed her so much. I missed her so goddamned much. But I’d put her in a box in the back of my mind with all the other things I’d done and had not done, locked it up tight and surrounded it with yellow tape that read ‘Things Beyond My Control’. Shakily, I got to my feet, and I slowly walked to him, the knife clenched tightly in my hands.

Quickly, trying to muster up the uncontrollable rage I’d felt seeing him as a boy, I pressed the knife to his neck and stared deep into his cold blue eyes, the tears still dripping down my face. in my head, I was chanting over and over Do it, do it, do it. Kill this man. Take his life. He deserves it. Marce needs retribution.

The knife was pressed to his neck, and I thought about how easy it would be to just twitch my wrist, knew how easy it would be just to nick and artery or slice open his trachea as I had the ram.

Marce, I thought. There was an image as she was now, staring off absently with her mouth hanging open. She was wrapped in the extra soft pink blanket I gave her and wearing one of my favorite sweaters. I had stopped visiting her when I was fifteen. When she’d started her murmuring, I had tried to look past it, but I couldn’t. At first they were quiet, incoherent, but as the days passed, her voice started to come through. Though they were toneless words, spoken in a monotone of a waking dream, I couldn’t escape the feeling that she was talking to me. In her memories, she probably was, but as the days continued, and it was the same thing day in and day out, the only amnesty from the consistent command was when I fed her—tearfully at that—and when she managed to fall asleep. I couldn’t be there anymore. I just couldn’t take it. Not with my own depression mounting, not with the stress of being a sophomore in a school where you didn’t really belong anywhere, not with the ravines growing deeper and more numerous on my arms. I just couldn’t do it.

I can’t remember the last day I was with her, or what I was doing or who I had been with. It was just one of those things that you didn’t realize would be your last until you tried to remember the last time. Nausea hit me then as I thought about how I couldn’t even remember the last day I saw her. I couldn’t remember it because I didn’t know it would be the last time I saw her. One day, I just didn’t go, and I never went after that, and even though Jack was standing before me now, with his snickering smile and that grotesquely smug look on his face, my guilt overpowered my hatred for him, because nothing could change what he did to her, but I could have visited her any day I wanted, sat with her and kept her company and continued to be there for her. Besides her mother and sister, I was the only one who kept seeing her, and one day. I just didn’t.

Sinking to my knees, I was sobbing uncontrollably, the knife still clutched in one hand as the other reached up to hide my face.

“You can have her back to how she was before if you only kill the one who did this to her,” the voice said, but Madison’s voice suddenly spoke, whispering to me, “Don’t do it, Ama. Don’t do it.”

“I won’t kill him,” I wept, throwing the knife to the side as I buried my face in my hands. “I can’t kill him.”

“You would rather he live knowing he did this to your best friend?”

I said nothing, not knowing what to say or what to do besides nothing at all. I was exceptionally good at doing nothing at all, and here I was, doing nothing still. Useless. I was such a useless human being.

“You’d kill a defenseless creature to save yourself, but wouldn’t kill the man who disabled your childhood friend?” the voice challenged. The words cut through me like a knife, but all control had abandoned my mind, my limbs. Useless. Do nothing like the useless human being I am.

“Ama, you need to stay strong. Do whatever you can to resist them,” Donovan whispered hastily in to my ear. “Stay strong.”

“I’m not strong,” I wept, curling further into myself.

“No, you are not,” the voice said overhead. “You are weak.”

“Resist them, Ama,” Madison said again. When I looked up, I was looking up to my aunt.

“Auntie?” I asked. I was short, and I knew immediately what had happened, and I began crying, and she sank to her knees and she was wrapping her arms around my tiny little body then.

“It’s not your fault, Ama,” she was saying, rocking me gently back and forth. “It’s not your fault, I promise.”

“But I messed with the medicine!” I cried out, sobbing into her shoulder. “If I didn’t mess with the medicine, Daddy wouldn’t have taken the wrong one!”

“No, Ama, it isn’t your fault!” she said again, frantically stroking my hair. That’s right. When I was eight years old, my father had overdosed on my mother’s medication. They’d both been on different medications for different reasons, and my father had taken my mother’s—I thought—by accident. They had their medications on different shelves, and one day when my mother had asked for hers, I hadn’t put it back in the right place. It was a blood thinner, and maybe my father hadn’t overdosed on it, but he took it and that’s all they told me. My father wore long sleeves after that day. Maybe it all started with him, the one person I was closest to in my family, the one person I idolized most. Maybe everything wrong with me started with my father trying to kill himself to get out of a marriage he had never realized would ever make him want to take his life until that day.

“It’s all my fault!” I cried out, “It’s all my fault.”

“Ama, stop. What the hell are you doing?” his voice suddenly asked behind me. I turned around, breaking free from my aunt’s embrace, and I was looking up at my father as he was now: muscular, tough, and utterly unfazed by anything except whatever happened to me, because I was the only thing that he would die for in this life. Like my mother, he told me often that if I was gone, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself, and just as he’d balanced his life on mine, giving himself a purpose just for the sake of waking up and seeing another day and seeing me happy, I balanced my life on his and my mother’s.

“Dad?” I asked, in my own body then, standing in front of him.

He looked at me for a long moment, trying to gauge how to approach this without coming off so calloused. His face softened then, watching me searching in him what he wanted to say.

Slowly, he said, “What happened back then wasn’t your fault. It was never your fault, Princess. You never told me you felt guilty for that,” he added, a question behind those words. Why didn’t you tell me?

“I—I thought it was my fault that you took those pills. I never told you how I felt because I was afraid that if I showed you how sad I was, then you’d want to take them again,” I said, staring at him with wide, teary eyes. He rolled his eyes good-naturedly and sighed, grabbed me in his tight, almost too-firm embrace.

He said, “It was never your fault that I did what I did. Even if you had put those pills back in the right place, I still would have taken them.”

“Why though?” I cried out, snaking my arms around his wide body. “Why did you take those pills?”

“Me and your mother were in a really bad place, together, Ama, and I hope you never have to be in that place with anyone, but she made me feel like I was more of a burden than I was worth. It wasn’t your fault that I did that. It wasn’t even your mother’s. Maybe if we had just talked about it, it wouldn’t have gotten that bad, but it did.”

“Dad,” I cried, holding on to him tighter.

“You know I love you, right?” he asked. “I love you more than anything, and nothing will ever change that, I promise.”

I didn’t know what to say then. All I could do was sob into his shoulder.

“I love you, Princess,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. He glanced down at my arms and I resisted the urge to tuck them behind my back and he shook his head and sighed. He took one of my arms and studied the horizontal and vertical marks compassionately, said, “Of all these things you got from us.”

“I’m sorry I’m like this,” I said, my face crumpling as tears of shame streamed down.

“You couldn’t be more perfect, Princess. Don’t ever forget that. Always remember, every decision anyone makes is their own to make, no matter the stakes. That’s why it’s called a ‘choice’,” and just as he said the last word, everything suddenly disappeared, and I was standing alone in a white room. The shackles were gone, my legs and arms were free and unbound.

Behind me, I felt something release, and I turned around to see a black rope almost slithering from off of my wing. I tucked the wing back in along my back. Warily, I kicked the rope with my toe, and it squirmed slightly but did nothing else.

“Your dad’s love, hm?” Madison asked, appearing beside me.

“What about it?” I asked, wiping at my face.

“Some things are just uncorruptable,” Madison shrugged. “I’m surprised it’s your dad’s love.”

“Me, too,” I said, sniffling.