I don’t tell people that, of course. I simply said I needed a professional change, a new challenge. So I moved three hundred miles away and began a second career as the head of the psychology department and a professor at a small liberal arts college east of the Mississippi.

Jim Landry’s final words still echo in my head. The words he shouted after me as I left Cora’s hospital room the last time I saw her. “You’re going to pay for this.”

And I have. In too many ways to count.

Sept 14 2018

Sept 14, 2018

Today is a good day. I get to use a pen to write in my journal and that is so much better than a crayon. It’s hard to stab yourself with a crayon. But like I said, today is a good day, so I get to use a pen.

My doctor here, Dr. Kim, tells me it’s a good idea to get my thoughts down on paper, that it will help me process everything that happened last April. I don’t know about that, but I like to write, so I do.

Dr. Kim also likes to talk about what I wrote in my old journal, the one I dropped at the train station. He walks in with his file folders, the ones labeled Case #92-10945, and he’ll say, “Good morning, Cora, how are you?” And I’ll say, “Don’t you mean Good morning, Number Ninety-Two Dash One, Zero, Nine, Four, Five?”

Dr. Kim laughs and says, “I like Cora.” We do this before each of our sessions. Every. Single. Time.

I don’t especially like talking about what I wrote in my journal. Imagine having to talk about every single secret thought you had. It sucks.

My arm is better and I didn’t lose my eye. My face has healed but there are scars. When Kendall came to visit me last week, she told me not to worry about it, that the scars make me look interesting, that when I’m older I can tell people whatever I want about what caused them. So now whenever I meet a new kid in the psych ward I say that I was in a car accident or mauled by a grizzly bear or injured in a skydiving accident. But if I really want to mess with them, I tell them the truth.

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember exactly what happened that night. It was cold, but I barely felt it. It was the dark that scared me. But I was kind of excited, too. I thought Joseph was going to come and take me away from Pitch and we’d never come back.