Without leaving me behind?

Ruth boils me in another perfect pause before she takes two more steps forward. “You little prick,” she says. “You have no freaking clue, Miss Self-Righteous. I’m sorry we can’t all be as perfect as you. I’m sorry everything’s not always rainbows and glitter, that some of us actually have hard crap to deal with in our lives.”

“That’s not—”

“Don’t even.” She jabs her finger at me like a cutlass. Now she’s close enough I can see the intensity in her face, but it’s not exactly what I expect. It’s that hurt and suffering I’ve seen before, whirlpooling and storming and battling behind her eyes. “Congratulations on living in a world where you can control everything that’s in your head, but don’t you dare look down on me for at least having some say about what’s on mine.”

My throat feels like cardboard. My whole face is burning and my hands and my stomach feel shaky. All over my skin feels tingly and I wonder if this is how it feels to go into shock. I feel too panicked and scared to be angry. My mouth is closed like it’s sewn shut.

In a movie, this is when somebody walks in, Ellie or Eddie or Mom, and there is a sweet but awkward scene where everybody talks things out and all the fights and problems are resolved. But not in real life. In real life, I stay frozen, staring between my feet that are still dangling off the ledge of my loft, until Ruth has decided she’s won, decided that I have been sufficiently shut up.

I know in my head that this really isn’t about me, that it’s a battle between Healthy Ruth and Sick Ruth. I know there’s that storm in her mind that I can’t see. I know all these things, but still it doesn’t change the freezing in my body, and I wonder, maybe, if that mental miscommunication is a tiny bit what she’s dealing with all the time.

How can a morning change so drastically, like the sudden snapping in half of a ship’s mast?

Ruth releases me from her glare, and I turn back to my pillow, barely mustering enough dignity to not pull my blanket over my head.

CHAPTER TEN

The nightmares started when I was seven. The story changed every night, but it always involved a horrible accident, someone in my family, and me—and it was always my fault. A car crash, a house fire. The part of me that knew I was dreaming would squirm and try to blink myself awake before the awful thing happened, but I never could.