------------| Glitch continues |------------

Schizophrenia.

I've been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Not once, but three times.

As far as schizophrenia goes, my case is considered relatively mild. I don't hear voices. I'm not (medically) catatonic. I don't look in the rearview mirror to see someone other than myself glaring back. I've merely felt an invisible presence watching me all my life.

I'd never expected to know what it feels like to be diagnosed with a mental illness. How do you react to being told that you have a glitch in your brain? I'll tell you how you react—first, you flat-out deny it.

"I'm not crazy," I say forcefully to Renee and Dr. K as we're stepping in to what I thought was a deserted hallway.

Right then, Yorkie walks by and says, "Shh, not so loud. Remember what you said about the aliens."

Yorkie walks away.

Renee and Dr. K stare at me.

"I was just messing with his head," I say by way of explanation. They don't look convinced. Renee is still staring after Yorkie like she can't believe that her daughter associates with the likes of that.

"Do you often mess with the heads of other mental patients?" Dr. K says.

I really don't like his use of the word other.

"And we try not to use the word 'crazy' around here," Dr. K says.

When the denial doesn't work, you start to question everything.

You wonder about that constant prick on your neck, the feeling of being watched, the slight movement you've always sensed in your peripheral vision at the most unusual of times—like when nothing nearby is actually moving. You wonder why, no matter where you go, you eventually notice that the wildlife in the area goes still and quiet, so quiet that you can hear only the sound of your own breathing, your own pulse pounding. Your passing is enough to clear a forest for miles.

You like baby animals? Forget it. You've learned over the years that puppies and kittens generally only react to you in one of two ways: they whine and cower near someone else's legs or they spit and snarl and try to scratch your eyes out.

Is that normal? Is that your fault?

You wonder about those times you've woken up to find the rocking chair in the corner creaking faintly despite the fact that your window is closed.

You wonder about that day with the book.

You wonder about Port Angeles.

Have I really spent a majority of my life under the delusion that I'm being shadowed by an imaginary being? Have I mistakenly attributed little things that I've seen but could never explain to the wrong source?

I don't think so.

But, for the first time in my life, I'm not so sure.

We bid Dr. K a solemn adieu and start the walk back to the car. Once we're outside, away from people, Renee completely freaks out.

I've seen Renee freak out before. Like the time when I'd fallen down her stairs and broken both wrists. Or when there was a spider in the corner of her bedroom. Or the time when her absolutely favorite ice cream, which is never on sale, was on sale.

But this.

This is a true freak out.

I know because she goes unnaturally still, unnaturally silent, as though she can't bear to talk, as though she can't bear to move. It's so completely the opposite of what I had expected her to do that I'm distracted from being worried about myself to being worried about her. We sit for awhile in the car, not saying a word. When she makes no move to drive us home, I tentatively ask her if she wants me to drive instead. Only then does she shake her head and raise trembling, tinkling keys to the ignition.

When we get home, she barrels straight through the front door and toward the back of the house.

"What is it?" Charlie asks from the couch as Renee brushes by him. I notice that he's not even pretending to watch TV; he's been sitting and waiting for us to get home.

The sound of a door closing is Renee's only answer. Charlie turns to me, eyes worried.

"What happened?"

"We received my 'diagnosis' today."

"And…?"

"Supposedly, I have early onset schizophrenia." I do a little half-laugh, expecting Charlie to laugh right along with me. Surely he has to understand how ludicrous this all is. How the doctors cannot possibly have diagnosed me with such a serious illness based on what they have seen of me so far.

But Charlie doesn't smile. Charlie doesn't laugh. Instead, he blanches and looks in the direction that Renee has gone. His bedroom door is closed.

"Ah," he says at last. He seems distraught. He seems torn, as if he doesn't know whether to go after Renee or stay here with me. Looking back at me, he asks, "You okay?"

"I'm good," I say immediately, not really wanting to rehash everything with him anyway. "Go talk to Mom. I'll be in my room."

I can feel his eyes on me until I'm up the stairs and have closed my door.

Alone at last.

I stand looking at my computer for a long time. Part of me wants to throw myself into a Google marathon, to research a veritable tome of reasons why it's absolutely not possible that I have schizophrenia. Why that very notion should be summarily bound and gagged and thrown off a cliff. I itch to research Dr. K and expose him for the fraud that he is. Maybe he got his degree at one of those online universities. After all, he does work in Forks.

Instead, I decide that the best place to start is at the very beginning. This had all begun when I was talking to Edward one day in my room.

So to Edward I would talk again.

Granted, I talk to him all the time. Not constantly, mind you, because that would be weird. During the school year, I'm in the habit of telling him what I'm thinking, mostly when I'm doing homework. It's therapeutic to talk through a complicated math problem or what I envision the topic of my next paper to be.

Occasionally, I talk to him about my frustrations with this teacher or that, with Renee, with Charlie. Sometimes I use him as a sounding board when I have a particularly difficult message I need to deliver to someone, like that time I had to tell Dr. Banner that he'd graded my test wrong.

Sometimes, I even read to Edward aloud, sharing with him my favorite passages from my favorite novels. Although I do find myself reverting to reading silently through any particularly romantic scenes. Somehow it always grows a little uncomfortable at that point.

As I'm sitting on my bed trying to figure out how to best approach this conversation, I realize that I've never talked to Edward directly. I've never actually said "Edward" and then made a statement. Does that mean I'm less crazy? Or does it merely mean that I subconsciously know he isn't real?

See what I mean about questioning everything?

"Edward," I say, because it's really the only way I can start. He obviously needs to be alerted to the fact that I'm talking to him and not myself or someone on the phone. For all I know, he can't actually see me. "Hi. I assume you know the situation." I feel more ridiculous by the second. "Just in case you don't, I'm getting a lot of flack because my parents and my psychologists think that you're just a figment of my imagination. And the fact that I have psychologists now and that they are psychologists plural is something that we need to take very seriously. They don't think you're real, and I don't have any way of proving that you are."

It's really strange to be talking earnestly to a stuffed animal.

I hadn't meant to end up looking down into the beaded eyes of Mr. Bear, I swear. But talking to the air in front of me or the mirror is a lot harder than I thought.

I continue, "So I guess what I'm saying is that I need you to help me out here. I need you to give either me or them some kind of sign. I suppose it would be too much to ask for an actual phone call, but I was thinking a note would be great. Or maybe we could reenact that scene in Ghost and you could talk through someone else."

It's a joke, so I laugh—weakly.

Mr. Bear just stares at me. His expression does not look particularly encouraging. And he's most certainly not laughing. I quickly find that there's no elegant way to end a conversation with someone you can't see. So I go with the classic, "That is all."

Mr. Bear is not impressed.

"Bells, who are you talking to?" Charlie asks through the door. He sounds worried. I hadn't even heard him come upstairs.

"Myself," I mutter.

Before today, Charlie might have taken that to be an acceptable answer. He might have grunted and moved along down the hallway. But there are no acceptable answers any more, I suppose.

"Can I come in?"

Charlie sounds like he doesn't want to ask any more than I want him to come in.

"Sure."

I kick Mr. Bear off my bed and pick up a notebook from my night stand just as Charlie steps in to the room. He sits awkwardly on the edge of my bed, and I tense as the mattress dips to accommodate his weight.

"Bella, I just wanted to let you know that you can talk to me about this."

"No offense, dad, but I have plenty of people to talk to at this point."

He looks startled, and it occurs to me that he might be thinking that Edward is one of those people.

"I know. I know you do. But Bella, we've lived together under the same roof for a long time now. We stuck together when your mom left…I just wanted you to know that I'm going to stick by you through this, too."

My eyes prickle with unexpected tears. I know I should have just let it be the kind gesture of support that he means for it to be, but I sense an opening. I have to take it.

"You believe me, don't you?" I ask, my voice cracking. "You believe that Edward is real?"

This is Charlie. This is my Dad. This is the strong, brave man whom I've turned to for everything in my life, who has stood behind me quietly but firmly, no matter what I've reached for.

This man just looks at me, his melancholy eyes a deeper shade of sad.

"I believe in you, Bella. I have faith in you, I love you, I would do anything for you." He pauses. "It's Edward I don't believe in."

I turn my face away, wordless. He grips my shoulder once and says, "We'll get through this, Bella."

Then he's up and leaving the room. I wait until the door closes softly behind him before I allow my tears to flow for the first time.

The cure for schizophrenia?

No such luck.

With an illness like this, you merely have treatment options to allow you to live a relatively normal, productive life. Can you guess which option my therapists recommend?

Therapy.

Lots and lots of therapy.

Therapy in the form of one-on-one sessions with each of the three Forks therapists (who all happen to have different specialties that all happen to be relevant to my particular case). Therapy in the form of required journaling (which will help "unearth the underlying trauma that has caused my imbalanced brain to fabricate an imaginary friend"). Therapy in the form of near-constant supervision and fewer hours spent reading books (which the psychiatrists assure my parents will only exacerbate my departure from reality).

Dr. K's favorite form of therapy is journaling.

"To write is to think," he says often.

For our first post-diagnosis session, I'm supposed to write and think about my earliest memory.

My earliest memory is of when I was four years old. Daddy had uncharacteristically allowed me to stay up past my bed time. I was settling in to watch a baseball game with the grown-ups. Mommy was puttering around in the kitchen making us some popcorn while I was arranging several couch cushions behind my back so that I could try and get my legs to touch the floor like Daddy's. They didn't.

I sat proudly beside him and watched the little men on TV dressed all in gray. I watched them very hard and tried to figure out what they were doing that would make Daddy so excited sometimes. Toward the middle of the game, I thought I'd figured it out, so I let out a shrill little yell.

The room went silent.

My parents' eyes shifted first to me, then to each other, and they burst out laughing.

"That's so precious!" Mommy had said, pulling on one of my pig tails.

To this day, I don't know what non sequitur little Bella had been cheering at. I only remember that she had felt safe and loved sitting between her two parents on that old couch, trying to pretend that she was a grown-up—just like them.

Oh snap.

I know exactly what this is going to look like.

Nevertheless, I begrudgingly present Dr. K with a copy of this week's journal entry the next day.

"So, Bella," he says after spending a few moments skimming down my handwriting. "Tell me about your Mom."

Told you.

"She's great, actually. A little flaky, but great."

"Do you find yourself holding any resentment toward her?"

"Not really."

"Any anger?"

"Nothing above what I imagine a normal teenage girl feels toward her mother."

"Hm," he says, and cogitates on that one for a while. I pass the time by following the plaid lines on his brown sock all the way to its hem, which is artfully displayed by his too-short pants.

"How did you feel when she left?"

"The usual. Sad. Disappointed. A bit confused. Charlie wasn't exactly, ah, clear on the subject at first."

His approach had been to tell me this long analogy about how a Mama Bear sometimes needs to leave her baby cub to fend for itself so that it learns to adapt. At the end of his story, he'd presented me with the teddy bear that I'd dubbed an emphatic Mr. Bear to ensure that it wouldn't also abandon me like a Mrs. Bear might have.

Only several years later did I realize that it is not socially acceptable for human Mamas to leave their children alone like animals in the wild. It was one of the moments I mentioned earlier, one of those moments in which I'd felt betrayed. But I got over it because I was old enough by then to understand Charlie's motive.

"So Charlie helped you get through it?"

"Not really. I mean, he was there and cared for my physical needs. But really, it was the other way around. I started cooking and cleaning for him as soon as I was old enough."

"And would you say that those activities helped you cope?"

Uh.

"Sure. And then, of course, there was always…"

Crap.

I was about to say "Of course, there was always Edward." He would never leave me, and I remember feeling comforted by that fact as I lay in my dark room after Renee left.

Double crap.

My mind is racing.

I know now exactly where Dr. K is going with this. I can follow his thoughts as clearly as if they are a dark train barreling across plains full of pure snow. Depending on how I answer his question, the doctor is going to posit that I fabricated Edward as a way of coping with my mother's abandonment.

Is that what I had done?

Had my four-year-old self been so traumatized by Renee's leaving that I'd subconsciously created Edward, my very own Harvey the six-foot rabbit?

I can't answer that question.

I can't answer that question because I remember sensing Edward ever since I can remember. And I can remember as far back as four years old. Renee was in that earliest memory that I wrote about, and I don't remember Edward in that particular snapshot of my mind. I don't remember thinking about him or wondering, as I often do, if he was out in the cold, alone.

My thoughts now race in circles. To use one of Charlie's favorite analogies, this is a good, old-fashioned pickle.

"There was always what?" Dr. K prompts.

"There was always Mr. Bear," I finish lamely. The doctor's eyebrows rise as though he should now add Mr. Bear to the list of reasons to be concerned about Bella Swan. "My teddy bear," I clarify. "To this day, I have a hard time sleeping without him nestled in my arms."

At my words, Dr. K's eyes glaze over like a little kid who's just been handed a gleaming Megatron Transformer toy. Sleep psychology is one of his specialties. There is an entire department of Forks Medical Center dedicated to sleep disorders, a department of which Dr. K is proudly the Chair.

Of course, I know this.

I've just thrown him a bone. I sleep without Mr. Bear just fine, thanks. But Dr. K reacts to my little white lie like a wild dog that hasn't eaten in weeks.

We spend the rest of the session discussing my minor sleep "disorder" and how it might factor into this whole business with Edward. Since I can't see any particular way that it does, my mind is free to contemplate whether I remember sensing Edward before Renee left.

My conclusions are bleak.

Edward, now would be a great time for a sign.

Any moment now.

The topic for my next session: What is my earliest memory of Edward?

I sit staring down at a blank page in my little red notebook. The only thing I've managed to write down so far is today's date. This question is significantly more difficult to answer than the last one. In a perfect world, my earliest memory would also have been one in which Edward was part of the scene. Or at least one in which he was on the periphery, as always, in which I was aware of him in some way. However, that had obviously not been the case.

Do I even have an earliest memory of Edward?

Don't get me wrong; I have lots of memories of Edward. Lots and lots. But it's hard for me to pick which one might be the earliest.

That's good, isn't it?

If I can't remember first meeting Edward, then might that mean that I never actually met him? That he had, in fact, been watching over me since I was born? Maybe even since before I was born?

The earliest thing I remember about Edward is the fact that, for a long time, he wasn't even Edward. For several years, I didn't have a name for him. He wasn't Edward for a long time, not until the incident with the book. Mostly, he's just a feeling.

Is this how it is for most people?

From everything I've read on the internet, a name is often the first thing that children identify about an imaginary friend, followed shortly by appearance.

"This is Lucy," a girl would say. "She looks like my real best friend, Susie."

Or, "This is George," a boy would say. "He's a 2-inch tall monkey that wears red overalls and fits in my pocket."

But in my earliest memories of him, Edward is faceless and nameless. Once I learned his name, I eventually started putting a face to it.

Thanks to the incident in Port Angeles, I imagine him as a guardian angel. But not a blond-haired, blue-eyed cherub dressed in white surrounded by light. Those types of angels are the type that delight in making appearances. They sing in choirs. They herald grave tidings of great joy.

Somehow, that "I'm here, shining, and visible" vibe doesn't fit.

Instead, I picture Edward more like Lucifer's good twin (instead of the evil twin, get it?): sulking in the shadows, running free in the night; devilishly handsome—the perfect mix of James Dean, James Franco, and that dude who played Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars. I don't think his name was James.

It would be just my luck if Edward actually looks like Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life. You never know; Edward is almost as ridiculous of a name as Clarence. For all I know, Edward's name really is Clarence. Maybe if I start ringing a lot of bells, I will get his attention. A cowbell, perhaps. I hear that you can never have enough cowbell. I also happen to know exactly where to find one.

But right now, what I really need to do is come up with an earliest Edward memory. I put my little red pen to the page of my little red notebook and start writing.

"Hm." Dr. K says, contemplative.

"Ah." Intrigued.

"Oh." Concerned.

This is Dr. K's scintillating play-by-play reaction as he reads my latest journal entry—the one about my earliest memory of Edward.

It just so happens that it's also a memory of Charlie. He had taken me fishing for the first time, a few weeks after Renee had left. Thinking back, I realize that he would have had to take me with him if he wanted to go fishing, for there would have been no one to watch me. It was a good couple of months before Charlie had started telling people that Renee was truly gone.

Maybe he'd thought she was going to come back.

I remember being excited to be clutching my little "fish stick" as I followed Charlie down to the water. I'd gleefully flailed that puppy about in imitation of what Charlie was doing, but I never managed to even cast my lure into the water. It usually landed in the nearest tree branch, on the grass behind me, or in my hair.

It was a child-safe lure. Probably.

Needless to say, I didn't catch any fish that day. Charlie didn't either, considering that all my flailing and splashing probably scared off every fish for miles. But that was the first day that I remember feeling Edward's presence.

Maybe that was another reason why Charlie didn't catch any fish.

I remember the sun was shining, the water was sparkling, and the breeze smelled faintly sweet. For the first time since my mother had left, I remember feeling like I was not alone. I felt the warmth of a presence somewhere in the woods. It didn't feel like a boogeyman or a wolf or anything scary like that. It felt like an angel.

When Charlie at last called it a day, I hadn't wanted to leave. He had to drag me, kicking and screaming, back to the car. That was the first and last time he ever tried to take me fishing. I'd screamed all the way home in the truck, where I wasn't sure that my angel could see me anymore. I wasn't sure that he would be able to find me again if I left the woods.

Somehow, I'd known it was a he.

I'd screamed until Charlie had deposited me onto my big-girl's bed in my room. I stopped screaming then because the air smelled like candy.

My angel was back.

Of course, in the cliff-notes version of this memory that I'm preparing for Dr. K, I don't refer to Edward as an "angel." Too weird.

"So the first time that you remember feeling Edward was a few weeks after your mother had left?"

"Yes." I'm not thrilled to confirm this potential correlation, but it's the truth.

Dr. K seems to sense my distaste for this topic and sits up straighter, which I know means that he's about to take a different tack.

"How do you know that Edward is real?" he asks.

Very philosophical of him. Two can play at this game.

"I just know."

To be clear, that was not my attempt at being philosophical. I have to work up to my inner Socrates. Dr. K smiles a small, tight smile that I'm coming to know means he's trying to be patient. Or maybe he's merely trying to bite back his knee-jerk retort.

"You've never seen him," he says.

"No."

"You've never heard him."

"Not exactly, no."

"You've never touched him."

"Not that I know of."

"Then how do you know he's real?"

Now I'm ready to be philosophical.

"The same way I know the wind is real," I say, gun-pointing toward the tree boughs waving tirelessly at us from the office window.

"I'm sorry…?"

"I can't see the wind. I can't touch the wind. But I can feel it. And I can see the effects of it."

I'm a smidge smug.

I can hear Dr. K's pen fairly dancing across his paper, and I miss my own pen. I miss my little red notebook. Dr. K politely requested that I not bring it to our sessions any more after he noticed that I spent more time writing than talking.

Such a waste.

"So you can feel Edward?"

"Yes."

"How do you feel him?"

"The same way that everyone feels someone behind them, watching them."

"Does he ever do anything besides watch?"

I hesitate. I know for a fact that he watches. I don't know anything else for a fact.

But I say, "I think so."

Dr. K stops writing, mid-word, and looks up.

"What other kinds of things does he do?"

I hesitate again, knowing that I will be crossing a line by answering this question honestly. But, as I've said before, I'm an honest person.

"He communicated with me once."

As I expect, Dr. K dissects the first half of that statement. "I thought you said he's never talked to you."

"He hasn't."

"Okay. How did he communicate with you?"

I think back to that day—the day with the book.

"He told me what his name was."

Dr. K just looks at me, his practiced eyes giving away no emotion. His gaze is always as benevolent and unyielding as a statue. Someday, I want to see him angry. Now, he's merely waiting patiently for me to continue.

"For a long time, I didn't know his name. I just felt him watching me. One day in middle school, I was sitting in my room and made some random comment that I should probably give him a name."

"You said this out loud?"

"Yeah. I tended to talk to him out loud then, before I noticed that none of my peers did the same."

I tell Dr. K about how, not five minutes later, the book that I was reading fell off my nightstand. To this day, I'm not sure if I had accidentally elbowed it as I was shifting positions or what. I heard the noise and looked down to see my copy of Jane Eyre open to a particular scene—the scene in which she first meets Edward Rochester in the woods.

It was perfect.

The name Edward was perfect.

"So this incident made you decide that his name was Edward?"

Dr. K's pen is doing that spazzy thing again.

"Yes. It fits," I say, shrugging.

"What other types of things has he done?"

I decide that this is about as much honesty as I can do today. If I tell Dr. K about Port Angeles, that will be as good as telling Charlie. I'm saved right then by the intercom beeping, the signal that Dr. K's secretary always gives us to indicate that our hour is up.

An hour has never seemed so long.

"How's therapy going?" Alice asks a smidge too casually.

We're in her room, our Yoga mats lined up perfectly side-by-side. I can tell from her tone that she's fishing for information. I've not told her the bogus schizophrenia theory. Maybe I think that by not telling her, by not saying it out loud, I'll ensure that it's not true.

Alice is performing one of her ridiculous Yoga inversions that somehow results in her feet standing on top of her head. I always feel an odd sense of vertigo looking at her in that pose, so I don't.

Instead, I stare straight at the wall in front of us, focusing on keeping myself upright in the move I'm currently trying to master—the Chair. And yes, it's exactly what it sounds like, me trying my best to squat on an invisible chair. Or go number two out in the woods.

Alice doesn't even flinch when the invisible chair falls out from under me for the third time in as many minutes. I don't flinch, either—I have an extra thick, extra squishy mat made especially for this purpose.

"Put it this way," I grump. "I'm as good at therapy as I am at Yoga."

"It's all in your breathing," Alice says, unfurling her legs slightly into the Scorpion pose.

"That's funny," I say, getting to my feet and focusing intently on the first phase of Chair—standing still. "Dr. K says it's all in my head."

"In Yoga, it's all in your breathing," Alice clarifies, now extending her legs smoothly up into a hand-stand. "In therapy, it's all in your delivery."

I wobble. I haven't even bent my knees yet.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that, if you want to get out of this, to go back to some semblance of a normal life, you're eventually going to have to start telling the shrinks what they want to hear."

"You mean that I agree with them about my diagnosis?"

"No. I mean about the symptoms that prompted the diagnosis in the first place."

"You're saying I should lie?"

"I like to think of it as telling a really good story."

I look over at her for the first time. Her head is at my feet, and her feet are at my head. She's the yin to my yang. It's symbolic—I'm her exact opposite in everything, including telling really good stories.

"You know I'm a bad liar," I mumble, teeth clenched as I fight to stay upright with my head turned.

"True," Alice agrees. "But with shrinks, it doesn't always matter. They'll be all over the fact that they've cured you."

I don't mention that what they think ails me can't be cured.

When school starts in September, I get to add yet another form of therapy to my burgeoning repertoire—group therapy. As if three hospital shrinks aren't enough, the school has one who specializes in teen angst.

Once a week, the mothers and/or fathers of five similarly troubled kids bundle them up, drive them to the wing of the Forks Medical Center dedicated entirely to that most mysterious of organs—the brain—and drop them off to experience the joy of group therapy.

I liken this to a father dropping a screaming first grader into the deep end of the swimming pool sans those little arm floaties. Either the kid will magically discover how to dog paddle, or the kid will drown.

The first evening that Charlie drops me off, I take one peek into the room into which I'm expected to enter, turn on my heel, and start booking toward the nearest exit.

I would have made it, too, had not someone grabbed my pony tail at the last second. When I recover from the sensation that my scalp is on fire, I notice that the person who has so delicately grabbed my hair is none other than Alice.

She's looking at me with her best fake Barbie smile. "If I gotta do this, so do you."

Well.

At least Alice and I can suffer through this together.

I step off the diving board and plunge into the deep end of crazy.

The scene hasn't changed since I last checked—people are moving around in a circle, flailing their arms and limbs in contorted slow motion, almost as though they are navigating an invisible obstacle course. As I watch, Tyler Crowley drops to his belly and starts doing the Army man crawl under an absolute nothing of thin air. As I watch, Alice joins in this bizarre dance. She starts whirling and twirling and toe-pointing. She makes crazy look easy. She makes crazy look graceful. She makes crazy look good.

A hippy-looking woman with golden hair to her waist and thick glasses contorts herself into my field of view.

"I'm Dr. Matthews," she says, "and we're expressing ourselves."

Hence the insanity of movement that I'm currently witnessing.

"Come join us!"

I smile politely and wonder if she would consider me flipping her the bird expressing myself. But I've done this therapy business for just long enough now to know that any gestures I make (no matter what they are) will likely be documented and catalogued and used later as unequivocal proof point that I am, indeed, nutso.

Dr. Matthews continues looking at me expectantly as she sticks her hands above her head and shimmies her hips, a genie coming out of a bottle.

I sigh and step into the circle.

As far as expressing myself goes, I'm not particularly good at it. It doesn't help that if I try to walk plus any other movement—talk, read, chew gum—I stumble (at best) and/or fall flat on my face (at worst). So I settle for a weird cross between skipping and power walking.

For a moment, Dr. Matthews regards my "self-expression" with a frown. Then she apparently decides to let me do my thing.

"Alright everyone," she says, clapping her hands twice. "Now when you pass someone, they are your dance partner for the next thirty seconds."

Gah.

Dancing.

I don't do dancing.

As everyone is about to find out.

Oddly, Tyler Crowley makes a beeline for my position in the circle. For some reason, he seems eager to dance with me. Granted, his enthusiasm dims substantially after I step solidly on his instep and subsequently elbow him in the cornea. I end my performance with a classic head butt and a knee to his groin.

After thirty seconds, Tyler stumbles away, clutching himself.

Alice cuts in, but she knows better than to dance too close to me. She opts instead for twirling around me like a ballerina. Or perhaps a stripper; I can't really tell. I'm more than happy to stand still and pretend that I'm her pole.

I'm more than happy when Dr. Matthews claps twice.

"Alright, let's form the healing circle."

Yes, let's.

At least that sounds more promising than this bizarre circle of Pan thing that we've been doing. I watch warily while everyone else sits on the floor and lies on their backs with the crowns of their heads pointing to the center of the circle.

Oh look, if only I had my camera, I could stand above the circle and forever capture this trendy moment brought to you by Crazy 'R' Us.

I slide gingerly into my slot. Over the next forty-five minutes, I discover how uncomfortable it can be to lie motionless on a hardwood floor. Yet I also discover how easy it is to talk about your feelings when you're sinking bonelessly into the ground and staring nebulously at a ceiling decorated with glow-in-the-dark stars and hand-painted replicas of the eight slash nine planets.

Not, of course, that I talk about my feelings. But the members of the group sure do. Tyler talks about the fact that he feels fat if he doesn't run twenty miles a day. No wonder he's so good at running. No wonder he's a bean pole. Ben talks about the fact that he sometimes gets so wrapped up in his love for all things kung fu that he forgets he isn't a ninja.

Even Alice talks about her feelings at great length and with great gusto, although I'm 99% positive that she's borrowed said feelings from the latest novel she lent me—the novel that I'm having to sneak read under my covers at night with a flashlight.

After Dr. Mathews dismisses us for the evening, my peers pounce on me like I'm some kind of contraband. Since I had arrived late, they hadn't had a chance to interrogate me before the session. They make up for this now, asking the one question that is burning a hole in their minds: what has Isabella Swan done to earn a coveted therapy slot with none other than Dr. Mathews?

"I see dead people," I say flatly.

Everyone oohs and aahs.

Alice just gives me a little smile and nod. She understands that I don't want to tell these people about Edward. She understands that my relationship with Edward is something to be cherished, something special and private.

I know that she understands perfectly because she has provided the other members of the group with her own little cover story to protect Jasper.

She tells them she can see the future.

Eric Yorkie's review of this chapter: I'm the eyes and ears of this school. Of course I'm the first to discover those sneaky aliens.