I get few visitors now, but the ones who do venture in are either photo- or money-seekers, and the nurses don’t stop them anymore. The photo people get their money’s worth. The burns on what they say is my skin were extensive and required skin grafts that may or may not have made things better. Whenever the doctors talk I let their updates wash over me as I adhere to the old rules of chaos, trying to uninvite whatever misfortune was visited upon me, and wait for them to leave. I nod at anything they say, because compliance is painless. I have little idea what is going on with this husk they seem to think is my body.

Though I am sure none of this will last. I am sure that I’m just playing a part for now, biding my time until the next phase. I made the mistake of saying this out loud once or twice, that the universe would not leave me this way. That I was destined for greater things, or that I was destined for death. Soon afterward they put me on medication that made me crave sweets and blew me up like a balloon. I’ve come not to mind it, however. Now when I look in the mirror, or when someone shows me the photo they just took, I look like no one I know.

Every week Krystal comes to visit me. I torture her with silence, one of my few remaining pleasures. I haven’t forgiven her for saving me. She wasn’t the one who pulled me from the fire, but she had arrived with the paramedics. She has a nursing license now. If it even is the “real” Krystal. I have my doubts. She has a kid now, though it’s no surprise that she’s never brought the rug rat in to see me, his fat, extra crispy Aunt Bonnie. Sometimes Krystal talks about him, how he’s changed her life, made her see things differently. And she’s married. Married! Three years, she told me dreamily, to a man who owns a house-painting business. She has been very lucky, she tells me, but other than her outer trappings I see no sign of the Krystal I knew. The girl who sweated inside Geannie’s housecoat and begged me for money, the person I was ninety percent sure would succumb to emotional delusions and eventual drug addiction, now has her hair professionally dyed every fourth Tuesday.

She’s shown me her ID to pacify me, but I remain uncertain. Plunging the knife into her guts is still pretty vivid, let me tell you. But over the year I’ve been here, on two separate occasions, she’s pulled down her Spanx to show me her stomach, and though it wasn’t a pretty sight, it wasn’t marked with knife wounds, either.

“See?” she said then. “You never killed me. You never even hurt me.”

I took this as a challenge, but when I checked her face for a smirk, none was there. Her eyes were hopeful, entreating me to believe her.