In Pallas' personal opinion, people take reality for granted.
When a person is dreaming, they don't truly know and acknowledge they were dreaming. As soon as they wake up, they'll know their dream was a dream and whatever happened in it, good or bad, wasn't real. All people knew was that their world was real, and that's all that mattered and all they'll ever need to know.
People take that, too, for granted.
For two years after that fateful day in the supermarket, Pallas had thought she'd really set the lobsters free. She believed they'd crawled their way back to the harbour and lived happily ever after. Once she turned ten, Sally found out that Pallas thought she was a lobster savior.
She also figured out that, to Pallas, all lobster were bright red.
And one by one the kindly mother broke down Pallas' beliefs.
First, she told Pallas that she hadn't set any lobsters 'free'. Pallas had gotten her arm into the tank before Sally appeared and pulled her away, streaming out embarrassed apologies.
Secondly, she explained lobsters were only bright red after they were boiled. Pallas didn't believe her, of course, because she had never seen them in any other color.
Sally never mentioned Blue Eyes, and so Pallas didn't have to ask. Her first ever friend she'd gained on her own was a hallucination: a grand sparkling entry on her resume as a crazy person.
Then Smelly Gabe persisted Sally into taking Pallas to a child therapist, and she'd gotten her first real introduction to the world of insane.
Schizophrenia isn't supposed to manifest until the 'victim's' late teens, at the earliest, but Pallas was a special case at eight (maybe even younger then that - they couldn't be positive). She was diagnosed at thirteen. Paranoid was tacked on a little while later, after she had verbally attacked a librarian for trying to trick Pallas into getting a propaganda pamphlet for an underground Communist force operating in the basement of the public library.
Pallas' medication helped sometimes. She knew it was working when the world wasn't as colorful or interesting as it normally was. Like when she could tell the lobsters in the tank were, in fact, not a bright red. Or when she realized checking her food for tracers was ridiculous. (She did it anyways, because it subdued the tingle of paranoia on the back of her neck.)
She also knew it was working when she couldn't remember things clearly, feeling like she hadn't slept for days, and tried to put her clothes on backwards.
Half the time, it felt to Pallas as if the doctors weren't all that sure of what the medication would do. "Well, it should lessen the paranoia, delusions, and hallucinations. But we're going to have to wait and see. Oh, and you'll most likely feel tired at times. Drink lots of fluids while you're at it - you'll be dehydrated very easily. Also, it could cause some fluctuation in your weight. Really, it's up in the air."
The doctors offered large quantities of help, but Pallas became irritated and developed her own system of figuring out what was real and what wasn't.
She took pictures.
Over time, the real remained in the photo as the delusions dripped away. Pallas quickly discovered what sorts of things her mind was particularly fond of making up. Like billboards whose occupants wore gas masks and reminded passerby that poison gas from Hitler's Nazi Germany was still a fairly real threat.
Pallas didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. She wouldn't say she hated people who did, because that was almost everyone. Pallas didn't hate them. They didn't live in her world.
But that never stopped her from wishing she lived in theirs.