You found Maura in the bathtub that time—not taking a bath, though not having done anything else either. Lying there with her feet kicked up and her heels resting on the tile. She was seventeen, and could have passed for you in a heartbeat. It seemed possible she’d been sent to punish you for feeling well. At lunch, your friend April found you, and sat across the table from you and you. People don’t ask you for an explanation. You still don’t know why that is. She slides through the world conveniently, half real as she is. Other people don’t need to be told to call her by your name. They do it automatically. “This is so absolutely fucked up,” April said. And you nodded, laughing. It certainly was. She put her laptop in front of you.

On her laptop, she had an essay your mother had written about your suicide attempt. You did make a suicide attempt, when you were seventeen.

“Did you give her permission to write about this?”

“No.”

While you read, you could feel Maura behind you. Not doing anything in particular, just breathing, twisting a nervous hand in her hair. You could hear the individual strands grinding together. “I didn’t even know she wrote about me,” you told April. Which was true. You didn’t read your mother’s writing. Because you didn’t want to have to talk about it with her. Because sometimes it was about people you knew: your uncle, your grandfather, the neighbors. Because you didn’t like the way she sounded on paper, much softer and more elegant. You didn’t like how much you liked that person.

Your mother had spilled everything all over the page. Your ugly crying, things you said but couldn’t remember saying, the way your skin divided neatly into two white walls between which blood spilled. You eventually had to block that article so you would stop rereading it; not the whole thing, just that one bit. The page unzipping, your skin unzipping, your blood, your mother.

* * *