"My work won't let me keep coming to get you from school like this." Elias Spector was not exaggerating. His manager was losing patience with his shoddy attendance record and frequent family crises.

"I know," said Marc stiffly. He dropped his backpack into the back seat before climbing into the front. He squinted hopefully at his father. "Do you have to tell mom?"

"I can't hide this from her." Telling her would go very badly, and while Marc deserved to be punished, he didn't deserve… Elias sighed with actual regret. "You really injured that boy. And the principal said you started the fight."

"I didn't start it."

"You threw the first punch."

"I didn't start it."

"And that's another thing," said Elias, refusing to engage with his son's stubbornness, "she said those boys were scaring you with a spider they found outside, and that's why you got mad. But you're not afraid of spiders. I know you're not. I've seen you pick them up with your bare hands."

Marc shrugged. "I don't remember."

"You don't remember," echoed Elias, skeptically. "You don't remember a fight that happened-" he glanced at his watch "- two hours ago."

"I remember the fight, just not the spider."

"Do you remember pulling that boy down by his shirt? Kneeing him in the nose?"

"Yes."

"Do you remember grabbing a mop from the janitor's cart and smacking him in the ribs?"

Marc mumbled something.

"What was that?"

"It was a broom. Not a mop."

"You remember that."

Marc shrugged. For some reason, he had a scene from Tomb Buster playing in his head, the part where Steven Grant is about to go into the well but he drops a torch down and finds out it's infested with the one animal he's afraid of. 'Spiders!' cries Steven, 'Why did it have to be spiders!?'

"I don't know if this kid had it coming. Somehow, I doubt he really deserved the beating you gave him, but even if he did, you can't keep fighting like this. We're really lucky his parents aren't pressing charges. You're getting bigger, Marc. Pretty soon it won't just be suspension. The police will be involved."

Marc continued to look sullen, but he made the effort to add a veneer of contrition. It wasn't that he didn't remember how the fight started. It was just weird and hard to explain. He had been eating lunch, pretending to be Steven Grant. (Just in his head, of course, because he was in ninth grade and too old for playing pretend.) He had been talking to himself in a British accent, silently complaining that the cafeteria didn't offer any proper tea, when Logan MacNeill had dropped a spider into his hair. His thick, curly, Semitic hair. If he'd had fine, straight hair, like Bobby Phan in his history class, he would've been able to shake it right off. But no, his hair was an oily maze. And maybe because he had been pretending to be Steven Grant when the spider touched his scalp, he reacted like Steven Grant, shouting about his hatred of spiders in a British accent.

Because if there was one thing that adolescent boys respected, it was inexplicable squeamishness delivered in a fake voice.

Logan MacNeill had put on a mockery of a Cockney chimney sweep and told Marc to go cry to his 'mum'.

That was when the fight started.

Elias turned the car into their neighborhood. He sighed again. "Look, there's no way I can hide a three-day suspension from your mother." Marc looked ready to argue, so Elias shushed him with a gesture. "Remember Mrs. Zwinge down the street? The one who broke her hip?"

"Yeah." Said cautiously.

"I think you should go over and help her out. With chores, yard work, whatever."

Marc got the message. He'd be out of the house when Dad told Mom about the suspension. Vacuuming an old lady's carpets was a small price to pay to avoid the worst of his mother's rages. He nodded, uncertain whether saying thank you would make things better or worse.

"And you're going to see a therapist again."

"Not until she does." The words slipped out before Marc though better of them.

Elias gritted his teeth. "You don't have control over what other people do. You just have control over yourself."

Marc wasn't entirely sure he agreed with either half of that pronouncement, but this time he kept himself from objecting. Talking to Dr. Wogen hadn't been too bad last time around, once he had made clear that he absolutely did not want to talk about his brother. They did slow breathing and progressive muscle relaxation and practiced how he could use his words instead of fighting. He could put up with a few sessions of that. When he had complained to Dr. Wogen that it wasn't fair that he had to go to therapy while his mother did not, she had put down her pen, leaned forward, and asked him if he thought therapy was a punishment, something people got sentenced to for their sins.

Marc thought about the other people he saw in the waiting room and shook his head.

"This is the third time you've mentioned your mom as a bad person, as someone who deserves to be punished," Dr. Wogen had said. "Can you tell me, Marc, what she does or says, or what she doesn't do, that makes her bad?"

Marc said nothing.

"I want to help you."

Marc said nothing.

"Sometimes kids don't want to say something because it seems too big, like a problem that can never be solved. Sometimes they don't want to say something because it seems too small, like they can't see how it matters. But you have the right to your feelings. If something's important to you, it's important."

"I know," said Marc. "I just don't remember her doing anything."

And that was true and it wasn't. There were things that were easy to remember, like his times tables and the fact that he didn't like steamed broccoli. And there were things he just didn't know, like the difference between an ionic and a polar bond (he just got a chemistry test back). But there were also things that he remembered, but they didn't feel real, or they didn't feel like him. Sometimes when mom talked about Ro-ro, her voice sounded echo-y and far away. Those things were hard to remember, and even harder to talk about, so he just said he didn't remember anything at all. It was easier.

Dr. Wogen was nice. It wouldn't be so bad to talk to her again.

Elias dropped Marc off at Mrs. Zwinge's house with a twenty dollar bill so he could offer to pay when she inevitably fed him dinner. "Be home by 9:30. I expect you in bed by 10:00. It's still a school night even if you're not-" He gestured vaguely, lacking a motion to indicate 'attending classes'.

And Marc did as he was told. He weeded Mrs. Zwinge's front garden with her watching over him from the porch, shouting at him whether each plant he grabbed was a flower or a weed. They looked the same to him. They went inside and he put a lasagna in the oven for her, and set the table and did the dishes for her, but at least he got a good dinner. She declined his twenty dollars and told him he should tell his father it was silly to offer.

He looked at her photographs of her husband wearing an old navy uniform. "They came to my door," said Mrs. Zwinge, "to tell me he died. His ship sank. And my sister said I nodded and thanked them and offered them tea, but I don't remember any of that. She said the next day, I was clutching my dress waiting for the mail, hoping to get a letter from him. And I was the same way the next week and the next month."

"How?" asked Marc. "How did you do that?"

"It wasn't on purpose, dear. I just…pretending was easier than the truth. And then it felt like I couldn't stop pretending. And then it felt like I wasn't pretending at all."

"Like there were two of you," said Marc, "one who knew the truth and one who didn't."

Mrs. Zwinge shook her head. "God only puts one soul in each body. Maybe there were different parts of me, different sides of me, but there was only ever one of me."

"How did you stop?"

"I don't know that I ever did, not entirely. Even now, sometimes I wake up thinking that he'll be home any minute now." She suddenly had a look of recognition and smiled sadly. "Do you feel that way about your brother?"

Marc thought about it. He always knew that Russel was dead, didn't he? He always remembered being scared in the cave, wanting Mom and Dad to save them. He always remembered his father hugging him so tightly it hurt as the paramedics stopped working on Russel and they covered him up. He always remembered his mother staring at him in a way that didn't feel like a hug, that felt like G-d's judgment. He always knew all of that. Except when he didn't.

Still, he shook his head. He didn't know Mrs. Zwinge very well, even if she was a nice lady. He couldn't tell her all of that.

"Didn't you say you had to be home by 9:30?" She pointed at the clock. 9:26. He'd make it if he ran. One less thing for Mom to be mad about.

And then it was two days later and he was sitting in Dr. Wogen's office. She had given him a survey to fill out, about himself. The kind with no wrong answers. It said Ages 13 – 19 at the top, so that was probably why he hadn't done it the last time he saw her. He just had to circle whether each thing happened Never, Sometimes, Often, or Almost Always. I feel sad. Sometimes. My palms get sweaty. Never. I get scared for no reason. Sometimes. I wish I were someone else. Almost Always. I want to die or I wish I were dead.

Marc stopped. He didn't want to die. He wasn't going to kill himself. But just being dead – without going through the whole process of dying – that didn't sound so bad. He settled on Sometimes.

I have to do the same thing over and over in exactly the same way. Never. I use drugs. He decided they didn't mean caffeine and circled Never. I hear voices in my head that no one else can hear. Was that one about him? He wasn't crazy. It was like Mrs. Zwinge said, there was no other person, it was just his thoughts that felt like another person. But there couldn't actually be another person, because where would they go? They had to have a brain to have thoughts, and Marc only had the one brain. So he wasn't hearing voices, he was just thinking thoughts.

Or is that what a crazy person thinks?

He circled Never.

'Spiders!' cries Steven, 'Why did it have to be spiders!?'

He crossed out Never and circled Almost Always.

By the time he saw Dr. Wogen, she had his test results. They were in the shaded 'at-risk' bar for most things, with peaks for anger and anxiety, but there was one really high score.

"Psychosis," said Dr. Wogen, tapping the dot on the graph and saving Marc the trouble of sounding it out. "It can mean being a bit odd. It can also mean being out of touch with reality."

"Like crazy?"

"Sometimes, yes, it could be an illness like schizophrenia, that corresponds to what most people think of as 'crazy'. But it could be a lot of other things." She scanned up and down the questionnaire. "On your survey, you said you've been hearing voices. Tell me about that."

"Just like…another guy. He doesn't really have a lot of problems, but he doesn't have any friends either. He doesn't like it when I get in fights."

"He talks to you?"

Marc nodded.

"What does he say?"

"That I should be more careful, that I should let him make decisions because he's smarter than me."

"What kind of voice is it? A child? An adult?"

"I think he's my age, but British."

"Does he tell you what to do?"

"Yeah, he tells me to keep quiet and not argue and stuff like that."

"Does he ever tell you to do something dangerous or against the law? Anything that you feel is wrong?"

Marc thought for a moment. He shook his head. "No, he's kinda…he wouldn't do that."

"Where does the voice come from? Is it above you? To the side?"

"Nowhere. It's just there."

Dr. Wogen put down her clipboard and leaned forward. "Is this boy real? Or is he your imagination?"

Marc looked to the side. The voice felt real. But there couldn't be a whole separate person in him. But if the boy was in Marc's head, and Marc's head was real, then wasn't the boy real? "I don't know," he said.

They did more tests. More questions. She checked his hearing and vision and balance and reflexes.

Marc sat back down, put his shoes back on. "Am I crazy?"

Dr. Wogen typed on her computer and printed out two copies of the same list. It read Differential Diagnosis at the top. "This is the list of diagnoses I'm considering for you, starting with the ones we're looking at first, and moving to the ones we're not considering unless everything else is ruled out.

It was a long list. That made Marc feel better. There were a lot of other possibilities besides being nuts. "Hearing or vision problem," he read aloud.

"I screened your sensory function in-office and didn't find anything wrong, but it's good for young people to have a full exam every few years anyhow."

"Then it says 'migraine/epilepsy'. But I don't have headaches or fall over and twitch."

"Both migraine and epilepsy have less-common variants that involve unusual sensory experiences. The same is true for sleep disorders," she explained, tapping the next item on the list. I'd like you to get an EEG and a sleep study to rule those things out." She briefly explained both procedures, reassuring Marc that they were painless and non-invasive.

"That's not what I'm worried about," said Marc. "My dad's gonna want to know why I need all these tests."

"You haven't told him about the voices?"

Marc shook his head.

"Hm," said Dr. Wogen, non-committal. It wasn't possible for a fourteen-year-old to independently navigate the health care system, so if this problem was more than trivial, Marc's parents would have to be told. Which might not go very well. All the more reason to get the most out of the present session. "The rest of the things on the list are what we would generally call 'psychological disorders'."

"Mood disorders," said Marc, reading the next line. "That's like depression?"

"Yes. Hearing voices isn't common in mood disorders, but it does happen. And you have a family history of mood disturbance, so you're at greater risk."

"PTSD," he said, moving on to the following line. "I thought that was soldiers and stuff."

"It can happen to anyone who has experienced something extremely dangerous or scary. In fact, the most common cause in the United State is auto accidents. People with PTSD can misperceive things that remind them of danger, and can even see or hear elements of trauma." She avoided mentioning the extremely scary event in Marc's life, knowing that would derail their conversation.

"Diss-ock-ative disorder." Marc sounded out the unfamiliar word.

"Dissociative. It means feeling like the world isn't real, or like you're not yourself."

"You mean like, when I look in a mirror and I'm sure it's not me?"

"Possibly. What does the face in the mirror look like, if not you?"

"Just…wrong. Not like, taller or a different race or something. Just…not familiar. Like it's a stranger."

"Do you feel like you're a girl, like your face looks too masculine to be yours?"

"No. I'm a guy, just not that guy."

"That could be a dissociative experience. If it happens occasionally, it's probably normal for adolescents. Your body is changing very quickly, and it makes sense that sometimes it doesn't look the way you expect. But if it's happening a lot, it could be a sign that your brain is using some less-than-helpful strategies to manage stress."

"That sounds crazy."

"Crazy isn't a word I like to use. But when most people say that, they're thinking of schizophrenia. The biggest difference between the dissociative disorders," Dr. Wogen pointed to the words on the sheet," and schizophrenia," she pointed to the last line of the differential diagnosis, "is that people who have dissociative disorders have a fairly normal ability to think rationally. People with schizophrenia don't. For people with dissociative disorders, the fundamental problem is emotional. For people with schizophrenia, the fundamental problem is cognitive."

"And you think I might have schizophrenia?"

"I think you almost certainly don't. You're too young, for one thing. It usually strikes males in their early twenties. You don't have a family history. And your symptoms don't fit the pattern. People with schizophrenia usually begin with a period of several months in which they lose the ability to do normal things like school, work, socializing, taking care of hygiene, and even having conversations, before they start having hallucinations. If anything, most schizophrenics start showing less emotion. Some even have what we call a flat affect – they don't show any emotions at all, while your problem seems to be tied to your emotions. You're still getting good grades at school. You haven't lost the ability to do most things. So, schizophrenia is possible, but very unlikely. That's why it's at the bottom of the list."

"Isn't schizophrenia when you have multiple personalities?"

"No," said Dr. Wogen. "That's a myth. Schizophrenia is characterized by five things:" she held up her hand, five fingers splayed out to count on, "hallucinations, delusions, really strange behavior, really strange and illogical thinking, and stopping a lot of normal activities that you do every day, like talking, having fun, or expressing emotions."

Marc felt relieved. That didn't sound like him. He might have hallucinations, but he didn't have the other four.

"There used to be a diagnosis called multiple personality disorder. Now we call it dissociative identity disorder. They changed the name because people with DID don't really have multiple personalities. Instead, they have that dissociative feeling of not being themselves to a very extreme degree."

"What if they really do have multiple personalities? How would you know?"

"This is one of those things where scientists disagree. There are some therapists who believe that people with DID have lots of completely separate personalities inside of them. There are others who think that it may feel that way, but it's not actually the case. The ones who believe there are many personalities will say they've seen their clients act totally different when they're in one personality or another. They'll say that clients in one personality often don't remember what they experienced in another personality."

"If that's true, then why does anyone think it's just a feeling?"

"I wouldn't call it 'just' a feeling. It's a very serious problem. But a lot of doctors, like myself, think that the brain can't really split into different minds. It's just not built that way. If you cut a computer in half, you don't have two smaller computers, you just have junk. These doctors think that DID patients learned to act and think like a different person the same way you learned to act differently around your friends than your teachers. Only acting and thinking differently was unusually helpful because the person was in an extremely stressful situation, so that pattern got stronger and stronger until the difference went way beyond normal social adaptation."

"So why can't I remember what happened when I'm him?"

Dr. Wogen noticed the shift from abstract to personal questioning, but she answered anyway. "If you asked the first set of doctors, they would say that your memory has split in two. If you ask the second set, they would say that the information is in there, it's just difficult for you to find it, especially if it's emotionally upsetting."

"Those sound like the same thing."

"They're very similar," Dr. Wogen acknowledged. "Some therapists who believe that there are really multiple personalities might be accidentally encouraging their patients to dissociate more. There's a worry that using words like 'split' to describe your mind might make the dissociation stronger, not weaker, so the words we use matter."

"I feel like two people," said Marc, trying on the wording. "I feel like I wasn't the one who got scared of the spider." He shook his head. "It's not just a feeling."

"No," said Dr. Wogen, "not just a feeling. That makes it sound too small. There might not be good words for it, words that say it's not just a feeling, but it's not a fact either." She paused. "Can we both agree to be patient with the words each other use, since they're not going to be a perfect fit?"

"Not a feeling, but not a fact either," said Steven. "I like that."

Marc looked at Dr. Wogen and nodded.

"Thank you," said Dr. Wogen. "Now, I'd like to hear more about 'him'."


"A doctor can't fix what's wrong with you."

Smack.

"You're not hearing voices. I hear Ro-ro talk to me every day."

Smack.

"You don't know what real pain is."

Smack.

Marc never went for his audiology appointment, or his eye exam, or his EEG, or his sleep study, and he never went back to see Dr. Wogen again.