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My lawyer waves his hand, "If she's determined to continue-"
"I am. I want to finish." My clenched fist bounces off the table. Quiet Darren looks back to me, his relaxed posture now unyielding. I nod frantically. "Please. I'll calm down, I promise. Just, let me finish."
The two men settle back in their chairs as Tight Bun Tara looks on with expectation. Looking at the three faces, the room suddenly feels much smaller, the air too quiet. Frantic silence floats all around and I am drowning in it.
"It was not real." I repeat, taking a deep breath. "It wasn't. It wasn't." Air like soup, suffocates me. "Until . . . it was.
"When Avery said that . . . about the broken jar, it was like this door inside my head opened up, connecting two rooms that I didn't know were even there. And I was sure the knowledge that flooded in like a contaminated light had to be a lie."
I can see myself back inside that bloody motel room as clear as if I'm standing in it. "I didn't know that I was the only person who set foot inside that room. That there was no one else. That I-that she was me."
Something inside me breaks. It's as if I've been kicked and all the air shoved from my body. It takes a minute to draw breath. I'm fighting to stay in this moment, fighting to get the words out. But all that comes are the sounds of giant, irrepressible sobs heaving up my tight throat, folding me in half. I sound like a wild animal and it's fitting that I'm caged like one.
I can't let myself stop now. More than my next breath, I need them to know what happened. I want them to believe me. And if I can't give them my truth now, I won't get another chance. It's a miracle that they've let me get this far into the aftermath, that my lawyer has let me go on. If I give in, they'll stop listening and all of this will have been for nothing.
All I have is breath, so I take it, use it to hold my cries inside and shove the words past them. "Doctor Bender said Doctor Williams was wrong. That I was just traumatized, had PTSD, or something. And that I had a severe mood disorder and the night with Jake . . . was because I was coming down from a 'prolonged state of manic euphoria,' which, would be controlled with new medication."
"But I swear-I swear to you on whatever I have left inside me, that everything I am was asleep on that bathroom floor when Jake walked into that room."
Breathe.
Say it.
"And I swear to you, that I did not kill Jake. I love him. Love him. I could never hurt him."
My lawyers' eyes are burning with an emotion I don't care to identify as he stares at one side of my face.
"Doctor Bender lied. He saw what happened, he talked to Avery. He knew that I always forgot everything and that Avery was the reason. She put me to sleep! She took over!"
"Dissociative amnesia and delusions." Mister Brandon mumbles and Tight Bun and Quiet Man both nod their heads, making notes on their respective notepads.
"Doctor Williams spoke to Avery without me there. She knew I wasn't faking."
The words are coming easier now, flowing together with my tears instead of one blocking out the other. "I didn't know. I couldn't see that I-that my eyes were the last ones that he saw. I didn't know that the nightmares I had of-of him dying were m-memories."
I take a deep breath and release it, letting the room fall silent. All the fight gone.
"We're done for the day." My lawyer shoots from his chair, ordering the guards and everyone else in the room to come back first thing in the morning.
I don't get a say in what happens to me, but I'm begging anyway. Yes, I've said the hardest thing, but it's not enough. And in the chaos that follows-my insistence at remaining until the end of the scheduled session and arguing with my lawyer about it-it feels as if the room takes a collective breath.
The two judges on the other side of the table seem dumbstruck, trying to absorb my confession: information I couldn't give the police, another stuid girl treated as fodder. My condition was never taken seriously.
And how could I tell my whole story when even I didn't know all of it? I was trying to come to terms with the fact that my very best friend murdered the love of my life. I had no clue that she wasn't-for all their intents and purposes-real. I saw her and touched her. I hear her still.
But she's a by-product of my fractured psyche.
A projection.
A delusion.
Things that would require years and years of therapy to come to terms with.
I didn't know that no one saw her but me. I never noticed the way people skipped over her in conversations, or only spoke to one of us at a time, never included her in activities. I never saw how we only communicated when we were alone.
I didn't know how hard my mind had to work to save me from my exceptionally shitty life. Avery's emptiness, her anger and memories, the cutting, and sleeping around-all of that was me.
It feels like a question, not an answer. How is it that Avery's eating disorder and need to coddle me was just another fractured part of me trying to find a way to cope? To coexist within myself? What type of life did I lead before that accident that I had to make up an entirely different person to handle it?
