"Do you ever think about it?"
I turn my head and see Alice lying beside me on the quilted blanket our grandma had given us for Christmas.
"Think about what?" I ask her, my shoulder softly pressing into hers as we lay here looking up at the starts over our heads.
In the distance crickets are chirping and the light rustling of the leaves in the wind whispers through the clearing around us.
We sneak out here every evening after our parents have gone to bed and assume we are tucked away in our own rooms as well.
It's a summer tradition.
Star gazing with my sister.
We wait night after night, eyes glued to the sky looking for a shooting star.
"What it would be like if we really saw one." She says. Her voice is low, controlled. Like it always is when she's taking her pills. She sounds like her words take her a little longer to peel from her consciousness and place out of her mouth.
A stark difference from when she isn't taking them.
The words come fast and loud. Like the firing of an automatic weapon. Her words spring free and wild and strike.
I chance another look away from the sky to glance at Alice.
I find her already looking at me.
"Isn't that what you want?" I ask her, pulling my brows together as the corners of her lips turn down.
"Maybe." She whispers. "What if I don't like myself when I'm fixed?"
"Do you like yourself now?" I touch the tips of my fingers to hers, trying to show I don't mean any harm in the question.
She slowly rolls her head away, looking back up at the sky. I watch as she blinks and one fat tear slips from the corner of her eye, leaving a shiny trail of sadness down her cheek and neck.
"I know myself." She tells me. "I won't know a different me."
Her hand reaches for mine in the dark, her fingers lacing tightly between mine. She squeezes so hard my hand hurts but I let her hold onto me.
Yesterday had been so bad.
My cheek still stings from the cut across my face I got when she threw her fish bowl against the wall and a piece of the glass flew towards me, slicing my flesh.
I can still feel the way that warm blood oozed and spread.
I can still hear Alice screaming.
"They won't stop telling me to do things!" She'd said when our father ran into the room. "They aren't normal!"
"You're not normal!" My father had shouted back, looking between my bleeding face and Alice's wild eyes.
Alice froze in her spot.
Her arms went slack at her sides and her head slumped slightly to the side. She blinked hard, staring at our father.
Mom had rushed over, grabbing hold of Alice and tucking her against her side. "He didn't mean that." She whispered to Alice, but I looked at my dad.
He was looking at Alice like he was afraid of her.
I can admit I sometimes felt that way too.
When I'd hear her voice in the bedroom next to mine getting louder and louder. The agitation in her becoming more and more apparent.
I'd feel my own heart start to race just a little faster when I'd hear her bedroom door creak open in the middle of the night.
Her quiet foot steps moving closer and closer to my own door.
I never knew what to expect.
But I am young.
I'm a kid.
Being afraid of things is normal.
But my father...
He's a man.
He's our Dad.
And when he looks at Alice, sometimes I see it peak out. He hides it well pretty often, but last night...last night I could see he was also scared of her.
His own child.
My twin.
My longest held friend.
Our mom has a photo of one of our sonograms when she was pregnant with us hung up in the hallway. In the picture you can see us holding hands, just like we are now.
Best friends forever, reads the plaque beneath it.
"Look!" Alice releases my hand, her whole body jerking upright.
I whip my head to look up where she is pointing and I see it just for the briefest of moments.
Had I blinked at the wrong time I'd have missed it.
A little flash of white skitters across the black sky.
"Do it!" Alice looks back at me, her eyes filled with tears. "We have to do it now!"
We grabbed each other's hands and closed our eyes.
We went to bed that night, both of our hearts filled with so much hope.
It was all going to be better when we woke up.
I went to bed and allowed myself to fall asleep deeply.
I'd truly believed it was going to work.
But it didn't.
Of course not.
Life isn't as easy as wishing your problems away on a shooting star.
Real life isn't like on tv and in books and other fantastical things that fill young minds with a the ideas of the impossible.
In the real world, the morning your sister wakes up and realizes she isn't healed, is the first time she tries to get rid of her issues the only way she thinks she has left.
I close my eyes and suddenly I'm in the hospital. My parents stand over me talking to the Doctors. They're saying things like restraints, and sedatives. Everything feels wrong. I look around and see all of the people who walk around like zombies with handlers, shuffling their slow moving bodies from one place to the next.
Alice doesn't belong here.
But she didn't belong in the middle of her bedroom floor where I found her either.
The blood that soaked into her carpet around her body...
She surely didn't need to be there.
But this doesn't look like someplace to go for help. This looks like the type of place you go when you've given up on trying.
"We need to go, sweetie." My mom pats my shoulder.
"What about Alice?" I say, looking up the hall towards her room where we had left her.
"She's gonna stay here for a while." My mom smiles at me but it doesn't touch her eyes.
"She isn't going to like this place." I say. "She's gonna be scared."
"Alice is a strong little girl." My mom says, glancing to my dad for help.
"She'll be just fine here." Dad says. "She's gonna be safe and happy and she will be home with us before you know it. Ok?"
I nod and let them lead my body out the door at the end of the hallway and when it opens up I walk into a large cafeteria.
I see Alice sitting at a table alone, only she isn't so young anymore.
I look down at my own body and neither am I.
"How are you?" I ask her and she narrows her eyes as she turns to look up at me, her lips turned down in a frown.
"How do I look?" She asks, her tone flat and bored. "I'm clearly having just the best life." She tells me.
"I miss you." I say, and my body tensed with the truth of it.
Her eyes roll. "Yeah I'm sure." She shoves the tray of gray looking food across the table from her. "I'm sure you hate being an only child."
"Alice, I'm not an only child." I say. "Come on, it's me."
"I know who you are, Hayden." She sighs. "I get so tired of everyone introducing themselves to me over and over as if my condition makes me just forget who everyone else is."
"I didn't mean it like that." I argue. "I just mean you know me. You know I miss you."
Alice just stands from the table and walks away.
I'm about to turn to leave too when I hear her call out my name.
"Yeah?" I ask.
"Did you even wish for it?" She asks, looking over at me. "When we were younger and we wished I'd be healed. Did you wish for it too? Or did you wish for this?"
My chest tightens.
Of course I'd wished for it.
What kind of person or sister would I be if I hadn't. If I hadn't put my trust into any type of magic that I thought might be the key to making my sister happy every single day.
The fact she'd even question me now after all of this time is a kick to the stomach.
"I wished for you to be better." I say, feeling angry I even have to say this. As if I'd wish for my sister to be locked up in an institution.
"You must not have wished very hard." She shrugs one shoulder before walking away for good this time.
"Alice."
I jolt upright in my bed, my body covered in a cool sheen of sweat. My hair is a matted mess around me from my obvious tossing and turning.
My hand goes to the base of my neck. The freshness of my sister's name still lingering so close to my lips.
"You ok?" Gabby pokes her head into my bedroom door on her way by. "You're gonna be late."
I glance at the clock and groan. "Yeah just nightmare." I say, rubbing my eyes and the images of Alice out of my head.
I'd said they were nightmares, but it was more like forgotten memories. All those stents Alice had done in and out of hospitals and institutions that claimed to be the best in the nation only to be the same sterile smelling buildings full of people who needed help. Alice hated every single place.
I sigh, rolling my body out of the bed and mechanically go through the motions of getting ready to go into work today.
I've got a funeral and a viewing to oversee within the next hour and I haven't even showered yet.
I'm not that surprised I've been thinking about Alice so much. After that night of drunk texting Ben and then confessing my frustration over him and Alice to my friends, it only makes sense that she'd be even more on my mind than usual.
But it's been constant.
For two days straight now, I just can't seem to shake her.
Not even in my sleep anymore.
I thought I'd never forget the way she'd looked at me like I'd betrayed her that day in the cafeteria. The day she'd asked me if I'd actually wished for her to heal.
In that moment I had been filled with so much anger and shame and disappointment that I'd been convinced I'd never forget her looking at me like that and having the nerve to actually ask me that question.
But I'd been wrong.
At least for a while.
I haven't thought of that day, or really many of the ones like it, in years.
Instead I was just as low as Alice had been implying I was that day. That I'd went and abandoned my own sister so that I could live my own life without a mentally ill twin sister shadow to compete with anymore.
I had been so mad at her for asking me that, but I'd been even more upset about it when I'd gotten home and locked myself into my bedroom that night.
Because the thing was, she wasn't wrong.
Mom and dad did seem so much lighter when she wasn't home. The nighttime hours weren't filled with her whispered arguments with things I can't see or her screams from terror no one but her could understand.
I liked being able to have my friends come over ached school and not have to wonder who I shouldn't have over because they wouldn't understand my weird sister.
My stomach twists with the same guilt it had done that day when she'd called me out. She knew. Alice knew me, after all, better than practically anyone else back then.
She knew how hard her disease was on our entire family and she probably also knew how much easier our lives likely were without her in it.
She'd said as much one night.
We were in the hospital with her, my parents and I. She was laying in the hospital bed, bandaged arms crossed over her chest.
"You guys want to have a normal life so badly, just quit stopping me already." Alice's angry words fill my mind and I can hear my mothers shocked gasp as she started to cry. "Let me die and you don't have to worry anymore."
"Stop it, Alice." Dad had said. "We love you too much for that."
"If you loved me you wouldn't have me here." She'd fired back. "You already have one perfect daughter, just put this one out of its misery."
Mom had clasped her hand over her mouth and rushed out of the room.
Mom could never handle when Alice was in that particular type of mood. This was the one that would break our mother down the quickest. Alice fighting or screaming was bad, but when Alice got in her moods where all she wanted to talk about was dying, and then got to the point of actually trying, that's when my parents stopped being able to hold back their tears.
I'm not a parent so I can only speculate, but I assume that's when my parents felt like they were failing the most.
When they'd fear she was really gone.
When she'd try to take her own life and then makes jokes about it afterwards, you could never be sure about anything with her. I can't imagine how hard it must have been for them seeing her everyday and then having to leave her, wondering if the place she was was actually safe enough to keep her alive until the next time they could come back and visit her.
They had to always wonder if she would eventually be successful.
They had to leave her every single day know she very well might not be there the next time they got back if it was up to her.
I'd stopped going to see her in those types of places after what she'd said to me that day about not wishing for her to be better.
I don't think I did it intentionally.
I'd just gotten busy.
And then one day soon afterwards, she was just gone.
Certainly not in the way my parents and I had been expecting after all of this time.
Alice always did things her own way. And I guess she did that even with disappearing. I don't know when she had decided she didn't want to die anymore.
But I think it was that day in the cafeteria when she had decided she no longer wanted anything to do with me anymore.
Honestly, she'd never looked at me the same way again after that night we wished on that star.
I jump as I walk into my bedroom and hear my phone ringing. I flip the blankets around looking for it and grab it just before it goes to voicemail.
I see the Texas area code number and my stomach sinks.
All these thoughts about Alice...the dreams...they were omens.
Omens coming to me to tell me she was in trouble.