We haven’t told Sam anything about the photo. Quinn says we can’t tell anyone else about it, that it was already risky enough showing Page. Page, whom I refuse to see, whose cunning is a reminder of how stupidly, easily, flattered I am, how I’d missed wielding power so much that I was led to believe her intentions were pure, that she was some poor, lonely girl missing her sister.

Yet, she was using me for her own personal advancement while I was using her. It would be laughable if it didn’t bother me so much, if her pulling a fast one on me wasn’t such a move from my own playbook.

It doesn’t matter. We’ve stumbled on something much bigger than a human interest story on my and Page’s supposed unlikely friendship.

It’s not like she’s texting me or anything, either. She’s too busy with Jackson, with her alleged investor meetings, insinuating herself deeper and deeper into the world she so craved, single white female-ing her sister like her sister single white female-d me.

I’m adding that, I’ve decided. My little doppelgänger twin, to the collages, little paper dolls of Odilie and me holding hands, a little happy, joyous, deadly circle dance, pasted among a sea of headlines, alongside other bits I’ve started to incorporate—bones picked clean from meat I’ve cooked, scraps of Saran wrap over our tiny heads like we’re being asphyxiated again and again, by Tom, by the media, by each other.

“This is really sick,” Quinn murmurs one day when he spots me applying my finishing, mixed-media touches.

“Then it’s doing its job,” I reply, smoothing out the plastic over my smiling sepia mouth, reddened lips that I’ve X-Acto-knifed and turned upside down into a sinister frown. My fingers, this movement, it directs my attention away from everything that is roiling in my head: What is it about me that compelled these people to become so obsessed?

All I want, all I crave, is to restore my equanimity, find a trajectory out of this mess. I want to make myself into a martyr, so I can convert that martyrdom into money, into power. And I’m figuring out how, one collage at a time.

I think of my mother, her criticisms, her obscene self-involvement. The standards to which she held me, this endless need to be perfect. The fact that my major woman role model for the first years of my life was someone so focused on her own self, the universe so casually and unquestioningly revolving around her.