I don’t know what to make of it.

“I only ever wanted to help you, Bonnie,” she said. “Not hurt you. Not sabotage you.” She paused. “I was worried about you.”

I was quiet for several moments. I let them think I had fallen asleep. “I wish you’d died of sadness,” I finally told her.

To my surprise, she’s never broken down into tears. Not when she saw me unbandaged for the first time, not when I deliver any of my cutting remarks. She’s different somehow, stronger. Something about her newfound strength chips away at the ground of my being, hinting at something that lies underneath everything here, an unpleasant and volcanic underworld I can feel at all hours threatening to overpower the medications, the bland white halls, my pureed smoothie of a life. All I want now is to see her cry. To get back the Krystal of yesteryear, the one I hated but the one that was familiar, not this stoic stranger who sits across from me every week and holds my hands. How’s the snow village? I want to ask her. I imagine her face crumpling. I wonder if that would do it, reminding her of all that she’s lost, of what a deluded fool she was. But I have to bide my time. Our little scenes, when I’m brave enough to try them, usually land me in some form of sedation for a while, and the nurses take away my pens and paper.

None of what I say is taken seriously, anyway. The doctors like to dwell on my fantasy life. After I first confessed to murdering Krystal in hopes of getting the electric chair, they suggested I imagined it. Most of them have seen the viral video of me raging as Cindy Snow, crushing a stranger’s camera. But they ignore my violence and concentrate on my “costume,” as they call it. They pathologize my imaginative powers. They say it’s therapeutic if I don’t watch television for a while, especially not my favorite show, and I go to art therapy twice a week to fingerpaint. This, they say, should be the extent of my imagination. For now, they say. Until I get control of it. So I paint trees, I paint blue skies. At the end of the session a counselor congratulates me on my use of color, my composition, and she hangs the picture up to dry with a clothespin. I close my eyes.

I’ve never mentioned Rita to anyone here. I want to believe she’s out there somewhere living her life. Surviving.

Lately they’ve been probing my past, the robbery, Geannie and Jim and Hernan, all of that. It’s become kind of a game. At first I was reticent, mistrustful—I had always assumed therapy was for weak, attention-seeking whiners or for the truly damaged—but I’ve since succumbed to its charms. It’s a pretender’s paradise. Now I look forward to my sessions, where I feign epiphany and confession, all the roller-coaster emotions of someone as disturbed as their version of Bonnie Lincoln.