He shook the last mints into his mouth, which was already crammed with round white shapes. Even in my panic I could taste them, my mouth was filled with sweetness … I shook myself. I had to stop him.

“I’ll scream,” I said. “I’ll bring her.”

“So what?” he said, through a mouthful of clicking mints. “Bring her. You’ll feel it, not me.”

“There are more ways to hurt than the body,” I said. “I’ll tell her about your weekend place, and those cats. She will find a way to deal with that. I don’t know what it will be, but you know I’m right. Mommy knows how to make brains do things, not just bodies.”

He growled and shook his head at me in the mirror. Suddenly there was nothing in my mouth. The taste was gone. He had cut me off from our senses. He looked as surprised as me. We hadn’t known that was possible.

“You can stop me eating mints but you can’t stop me telling,” I said.

Ted took a pin from the cushion on the dresser. Slowly he drove the tip into the fleshy part of his thumb.

A red line of fire ran through me and I screamed and wept.

Ted stood before the mirror. His face held Mommy’s expression of clinical interest. Again and again he drove the needle home. “I’ll stop when you promise,” he said.

I promised.

I understand something about life that Ted never has: it is too painful. No one can take so much unhappiness. I tried to explain it to him. It’s bad, Teddy. Mommy is nuts, you know that. She’s lost it. She’ll go too far and end us one day. Better to choose our own way out. We don’t have to feel bad all the time. Take the knife, knot the rope. Go hide in the lake. Walk into the woods, until everything goes green. The kindness of ending. Teddy tried to block his ears, but of course he could not shut me out altogether. We are two parts of the whole. Or we were supposed to be.

Shortly after that I tried to kill us for the first time. It wasn’t a very good try but it showed Teddy that he didn’t want to die. He found a way to silence me. He started playing Mommy’s music when he gave me pain. He gave me so much pain that the music became it, weaving through the air. The agony only stopped when I slipped half way down, into the dark freezer, leaving the body empty. I quickly learned to vanish as soon as the first note was plucked on the guitar.