Lauren? I say. Where are you? What the eff is going on? Why can’t I see you? It feels—and I know this can’t be true, but it’s what it feels like, nevertheless—it feels like you’re inside me.

“It’s the other way around, Olivia,” she says. “You’re inside me.” And now a horrible thing happens. My body seems to stutter and shift. Instead of my lovely tail and paws I feel for a moment that there are hungry pink starfish at the end of my limbs. My silky coat is gone, my eyes are small and weak …

What, I say, what … Let me go. None of this is happening. Let me go back into my nice crate …

“Look at it,” she says. “The thing you call a crate. The truth is right there. But you have to choose to see it.”

I look at the chest freezer, the open lid resting against the wall, the holes punched in the lid for air.

“I left you a note,” Lauren says. “But what kind of cat can read? What kind of cat can talk?” The screeching rises again. OOooooeeeeoo.

I’m imagining this, I row. If only that gd noise would stop I could think …

“One of us is imaginary,” she says. “It’s not me.”

Go away! Stop it! Stop that noise!

“Olivia,” she says, “look at what you’re doing.”

My paw is outstretched, claws extended. It rakes across the side of the metal freezer, making a scream like terrible suffering. Eeeeeeeoooooeeeee, go my claws, screeching across the metal. The noise was me, all the time. But how can that be?

“I’ve been trying to get your attention for such a long time,” Lauren says.

The screeching of claws on steel rises. The world seems to flicker. Instead of my paw there is a hand with long dirty nails, dragging, dragging … eeeeeeeeeeeoooeeee. Claws on metal. Fingernails on metal, a voice whispers and I yow and scream but even that can’t rise above the screeching; it builds until it becomes a physical thing, a wall inside me that breaks with a terrible crack.

I come to with Lauren stroking my back. But somehow, once again, she’s doing it from the inside. I start to cry, little piteous mewlings like a kit.

“Shhh,” she says. “Let it out quietly, if you can.”

Leave me alone, I say. I curl up tightly. But it feels like she’s wrapped around me.

“I can’t do that,” she says. “You really don’t get it, do you?” She strokes me again. “The first time I tried to run,” she says, “he took my feet. He broke them between two boards with a mallet. The second time I tried, you came out of my mind.