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I’m not, but it doesn’t matter. I wasn’t ready to fall for Isaac Harver or have my face smashed open or a tree branch in my lung or have my friends tell me I’m a bitch or Heath say he doesn’t care if I die. I’m not ready, but I know what I’m supposed to do. I know what Amanda wants Sasha Stone to do. And Sasha Stone is a good girl, and I am going to be exactly that, again. I run my bed controls so that I’m sitting up as Amanda pulls the side table over next to me, swinging the tabletop so that the box is across my lap.

“Okay,” Amanda says. “You look in that hole there.”

There’s a jagged circle she’s made in the cardboard, a helpful duct tape arrow pointing at it. “It’s just like Brandy’s box with the inverted mirrors. So when you look in—”

“I’ll see my sister,” I finish for her.

“Do you want more lights on?”

I shake my head, the heart monitor beside me sending spiky waves across the screen as I lean forward.

And there she is, staring at me.

I wish there were more holes so that Amanda could see her too and know I’ve been right all along, so that my parents could look in and see their dead daughter, so that Isaac could see her face light up at the thought of him. I wish Nadine could stick her head in this box, see this face and deny her existence. I wish that Brooke could meet her and be her only friend. I wish Layla could meet her and convince her there is such a thing as love and that she was in it.

Shanna is gaunt, eyes sunk into deep hollows, her cheekbones starkly prominent. Her teeth have shredded her lips, her hair limp and lax around her face. I’m looking at a life unlived, one passed entirely in darkness, her skin hanging from bones like loose clothes.

“Sasha?” Amanda asks.

“I see her,” I say. “She’s dying.”

“Okay, I want you to stop now,” Amanda says, but I can’t. Shanna has locked eyes with me and won’t be moved. She’s angry about messages left unread, unanswered, a cord kicked loose by my foot, no matter what everyone else tries to say. I see it in her eyes. Eyes just like mine.

“That’s enough.” Amanda moves the box, and I scrape my chin on the edge of the cardboard. “Sorry,” she says, but she’s moving too quickly for it be a real apology, shoving the table out of the way and taking me by the hands.

“What are you doing?”

“I need you to get up now,” Amanda says, as if it’s perfectly reasonable. “I need you to come into the bathroom.”

“I don’t think—”

“Sasha, listen to me,” she interrupts. “You said you don’t want to leave this place and you said you would do this for me. Now it’s time to get up and come into the bathroom.”

I didn’t say that; I told her I would look into the box and that was all I promised. But she wants more from me now, and Sasha Stone would do the right thing, would do what she was being asked, would be a good girl.

And I am Sasha Stone, so I get up, the floor cold on my bare feet. Amanda grabs the IV tree and follows me, one wheel squeaking as I pull the bathroom door open. She reaches past me and flicks on the lights, my eyes closing automatically in response.

“Open your eyes, Sasha,” she says.

I don’t want to. I don’t want to, but she’s asking me to so it must be what I’m supposed to do. It must be the right thing, so I do it.

I do it and I see.

Shanna is here too, in the bathroom. She looks like death in this lighting, the hollow at the base of her throat deep like a gouge. Her eyebrows are even thinning, tiny hairs gone entirely where the scar passes through her face, a red, heavy scar with pinprick dots still healing on each side of it where she’s been sewn together again like a quilt.

My scar.

My face.

“Oh my God,” I say, hand reaching up to brush against cheekbones close to the surface of my skin. “It’s . . . that’s me.”

“Yes,” Amanda says, her eyes holding mine in the mirror, our reflections honest and true with each other. “It’s always been you.”

thirty-two

The word breakthrough has been very important in the past few days, one that Amanda keeps repeating and saying forcefully, even though she treats me like I might shatter while doing so. She’s been doing a lot of explaining, told me how I’ve used Shanna to allow myself a little room to “act out” without the guilt. She even said that the white things I’ve been pulling out of my gums aren’t reed splinters or my twin’s fetal bones—they’re mine. Apparently when your wisdom teeth are super deep your jaw gets chipped a lot while they’re digging the teeth out, and those bits work their way up to the surface. Amanda has an answer for everything; she even explained away whatever Nadine thought she heard when I was talking to Heath, asking the staff if they want to know what a conversation between a teenage boy and girl that uses the word absorbed is really about.

Nadine has kept a safe distance, Jo retreating back across whatever line exists between those two and the rest of us. Layla and Brandy have been supportive in the best way they know how—by keeping me up to date on deaths in the area.