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“They don’t give a fuck.”

“Okay, whatever. You start hanging out with them, and you fall off the face of the earth and end up in massive trouble and—” She catches her breath. “I know this is important to you, but I’m worried.”

She says, “I think you’re getting worse.”

That makes me stop. Or maybe it’s the fact that we’ve come to a corner, and I have to get across the street to make it to the station, so I’m stuck. A car whizzes by. Men in suits and women in blazers carry briefcases and coffees across the opposite crosswalk.

Alyssa whispers, “I don’t think they’re good for you.”

None of this is good for me. But like Felicity said: It’s a Saw trap. If you don’t pull the key out of your eye or cut out a pound of your own flesh, the alternative is so much worse.

Finally, I glance over at Alyssa. She’s standing there with her backpack over one shoulder, hair falling out of its half ponytail, glittery eyeshadow and blush absolutely perfect.

I can’t believe that, just days ago, I thought she was the closest thing I’d ever get to someone who understood. She was there through all of it. The trial, the sentencing, the aftermath. I could’ve sworn that counted for something.

“We can find another way to do this,” Alyssa says. I decide that I’m not going to wait for the crosswalk to turn. I’m going to jog across as soon as the cars clear. They don’t clear, though. I can’t remember the last time this street was so busy. “I know you don’t want to talk to my dad, but I’ll ask him if you tell me what you’re looking for. Or, I still know some of Dad’s friends on the force. I can ask a favor. I think they’d be happy to.”

“I’m not your sister,” I spit.

“I know,” Alyssa says. “We can do this together. But we can’t do it the way you’re doing it now.”

She needs to shut up. She has no idea what she’s talking about. “I don’t need a caretaker. I don’t need—I don’t need you to take care of me.”

Alyssa doesn’t say anything to that.

She doesn’t have to. She knows I’m lying. Without Alyssa to keep me upright, I collapse. It’s what always happens when I walk away from her, and she always swoops back in to put me on my feet again because she can’t leave well enough alone.

It’s just that there’s so much I can’t tell her, and there’s so much she’ll never be able to wrap her head around, and it makes me so, so angry.

How come she gets to be okay? It’s not fucking fair.

I don’t like the idea that Alyssa was onto something, but.

The cracks are getting deeper. An ugly old wound reopening, getting worse the closer we creep to Wednesday’s trip.

The texts I send Felicity while waiting for my transfer to the Orange Line are short—something like I’m good for East Early and you’re welcome—and I turn off my phone before they can reply. If I think too hard about them, my chest starts to feel tight, and I don’t like it. I struggle to sleep, again. During school on Tuesday, I can’t focus. The ISR packet Alyssa delivers (because she insists on delivering it) swims in front of my eyes, and I have to ask permission to duck into the bathroom, where I hold my stomach while I wait for a dry heave that never comes.

I come home to find Mom on the phone with the production team. It looks like some sort of virtual happy hour, or it’s not and she’s just drunk. She’s talking shit about some woman Hexagon Productions did a documentary on—”I can’t be upset for an old bat who didn’t read her contract!” she laughs—and when she sees me, she pulls me close, tells me to say hi to the production team, slurs something about how I’m so much prettier than the odd, strange-faced children casting directors hire to play me on TV.

“You’re such a pretty girl,” she says, holding my cheek. “Just like your mother. Remember that.”

You wanted to hurt her, Dad said.

I don’t.

I do.

I want to so badly.

No matter what the TV shows claim, I’ve never gone out of my way to hurt my mother. I’ve never taken a knife and stood at the foot of her bed. The phones and plates were all smashed on walls and floors, not her head. When I was little, in the throes of a meltdown, I would bite and kick, but I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I didn’t mean to leave her with bruises. I didn’t mean to cut her cheek like that.

But every time she touches me, I want to break her fingers. According to the internet, it’d be as easy as cracking a baby carrot. I make myself an after-school snack of baby carrots, then, and eat them at the butcher block counter. I don’t relish the snap.

You want to hurt her.

I fantasize about a version of the world where she was one of the dead girls on Dad’s floor, where I had to catalog “evidence,” “photograph,” “Bellamy Slaughter—Autopsy.” I imagine being in my father’s body and cutting her throat to belly.

I don’t want to hurt her, but I think about it so often that I don’t believe myself when I say it.