They can keep me high

'Til I tear the walls

'Til I save your heart

And I take your soul

And what have we done?

Can I be undone?

In the evil heart

In the evil soul

When Cat was younger - really young, before everything turned to shit - she would daydream that she was secretly a princess of a foreign land. Her real family would be waiting to take her away from all the pain and all the chaos of her life. She missed the days when she actually believed that fairytales were real.

Now she was a jaded adult and she knew that not only were fairytales bullshit, happy endings were too. It wasn't realistic. Everyone can't have a happy ending otherwise it isn't a happy ending, it isn't special. Fairytales are so fantastic because they highlight the exception, the people that actually end up beating the odds. Otherwise Cinderella just would have been an abused teenager living in a basement and Sleeping Beauty would just be hooked up to a respirator in a sterile hospital somewhere.

One thing was certain, though. Being with Spencer had changed Cat. Before she met him, before she was this deeply invested, she wouldn't have given a shit about what just happened. Hell, she wouldn't have even let him leave the apartment. The old Cat Adams would have shot him dead where he stood and had the cleaners take his body out to the pier along with that other scumbag.

But now here she was, sitting in her empty apartment, which had always been her's but had never before felt so empty. It was a metaphor for her life and she fucking hated it.

Maybe she could have had the happy ending with the husband and the wraparound porch, but that dream is deader than Andy Giovanni.

When she got like this and felt truly miserable (which she often was in juvenile detention), she would find a place on the ceiling to stare at and tell herself, "I'm not here, I'm not here, I'm not here" until she actually believed it. She would dissociate and take herself to a different place where she wasn't so fucking miserable.

Normally it was a good trip, a pleasant experience. But this time she must have taken a wrong turn, because when she opened her eyes again she was back in her nightmares. That pink bedroom in that tiny, gray, shotgun-style house. She looks at the doorway and it's so dark and ominous despite it clearly being daytime. She is tiny in her bed and scared to get up, but because this is a memory she can't stop herself from what comes next.

She walks to the door, opens it quietly and peeks out. She smells the copper and the sweet smell of what she would come to know as death. She calls out, "Mami?" But no one responds. The light pooling in through the curtains acts as a path for her to follow, but at the end of this rainbow there is no pot of gold.

Her mother was gorgeous, all silky black hair and tan skin. She deserved a good life, way more than she ever got. Now her hair is wrapped like a halo around her head, and her blood is surrounding her like a cloud. She looks like she's asleep, but Cat knows she's not.

"Mami?"

She takes a step closer and sees the stab wounds, the blood, and the gore. She wanted to scream, but the ringing is drowning her out. That damn ringing, ringing, ringing.

Then she realizes that she's actually the ringing. The screams are resonating so loudly, bouncing off the walls that she can't even recognize them as human anymore. She looks at herself in the reflection of her mother's blood and just like that she hears a screaming that takes her out of her daydream. And just like that she is back in her empty apartment, screaming herself out of her own nightmare.