-| Glitch continues |-

My memories of Gran are hazy.

I remember holding Renee's hand as we stepped inside a little house so overgrown with bushes and creeping vines that it almost wasn't a house; it was a never never land. A land of curious clutter and shiny dangles and a myriad of items my four-year-old tongue could not name.

"Look, but don't touch," Renee would remind me as we wended through the maze to find Gran rocking herself by the window.

The times when Gran would look up and smile and call me by name, those were the best times. She would hold out her wrinkled hand and squeeze and show off her latest hat or scarf or socks made out of bright, tight yarn. Those times, Renee would leave me sitting with her and would go wash dishes or make tea or strip the bed. At Gran's, my mother was always working.

While Renee was busy, Gran would ask me about this or that or have me put my finger here or there as she crafted her latest masterpiece. Sometimes, we talked about her garden, with its black earth and green buds and ripe red. Once, as we peered out the window at her little patch of earth, Gran had asked, "Do you see him?"

I had nodded, smiling and pointing at the fat tabby sunning himself between her tomatoes, eyes slit, tail curling lazily.

"Fat cat," I lisped between my prematurely missing front teeth—the curse of the clumsy.

Just then, Renee surged over, slapping my hand down, pulling me away from the window, away from Gran.

"She doesn't see anything," Renee had snapped, the only time I'd ever heard her use that tone in this place. It was true; the cat was gone, scared away by the sudden movement.

Gran merely smiled at me, her kindness staying my tears. "Children often see what their elders can't."

In those times, Gran looked at me like I was her special girl, like we had a shared secret. Those were the good times. But other times, she looked at me when we arrived but saw something else. She sat still and vacant in her rocking chair, colored yarn a snarl at her feet. Those times, Renee kept me close, letting me "help" with her weekly tasks.

I remember that, although Renee always smiled wide while we were at that little house, she often cried when we left. And I never knew why. Never once had anyone told me that Gran was sick. Never once had I heard the word "schizophrenia."

Now, I know.

I know why Gran often asked me odd questions that other adults didn't. I know why Gran sometimes looked right through me. I know what she had hoped I could see in the garden.

More to the point, I know why Renee had been immediately concerned about me speaking to an invisible boy named Edward. Why she was nearly incapacitated by my diagnosis. Why she had never once questioned the conclusions of my therapists.

The drive home from Dr. K's office is hazy. As hazy as my memories of Gran. As hazy as Gran herself likely was. As hazy as I'm apparently predestined to be…

When I arrive back at the house, I let the front screen close more forcefully than normal. I drop my backpack heavily to the entryway floor. My parents look up from where they are watching TV. In the living room. Together. Something they have been doing entirely too much here recently. It's eerily domestic and disturbing.

"Everything okay, honey?" Renee asks sugar-sweetly, as though it's not perfectly clear that no, everything is not okay.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I demand.

I rarely raise my voice, so it's shocking when I do.

"Bella, what's this about?" Charlie asks.

I ignore him, honing in on Renee. "Why didn't you tell me?" I repeat. I can see from the way the sugar on her face melts that she knows exactly what I'm talking about.

"What are you talking about?" she hedges.

Of course she wants me to spell it out for her. You know, in case I'm not actually talking about what she thinks I'm talking about.

"Why didn't you tell me about Gran?"

The room goes silent. Charlie looks at Renee, eyes wide. He looks at her as if he's waking from a long winter's nap. As if he hadn't thought of Gran in a long, long time. If he had once known about her, about her condition, he had clearly forgotten. No wonder he'd been so jovial with me over the past several months, so quick to smile and wink and commiserate with me about it all.

Like me, he'd been missing something.

Unlike me, it wasn't his sanity.

"Charlie, can you give us a minute?" Renee asks, but she's looking straight at me.

We're going to need a whole lot more than a minute. Charlie knows this, and he disappears down the hall with a parting look at my face. He looks about as happy as I feel.

When he's gone, when it's just us girls, just a mother and her daughter, I repeat, "Why didn't you tell me?"

A real mother would have told me. Then again, a real mother wouldn't have left.

She lifts herself slowly from the couch, steps to be closer to where I stand on the fringe. She says, "At first, I didn't want to worry you. I was sure you were just depressed, going through normal teenage trouble, guy stuff. I didn't think that it could possibly be—"

"How about when you found out it was?" I jump in. "Why didn't you tell me then?"

She looks even more small, more sad. "I didn't want you to go into this feeling defeated before you'd even begun."

What, so I could feel doubly defeated later? Allow my hopes to go up up up only to come crashing down down down?

Focus, I tell myself. Focus on facts. Facts are always better than fears and failures and fairy tales.

"When was Gran diagnosed?"

"In her late twenties. After she had me." She looks away to hide pain, but I don't even have to wonder what Renee must have felt losing her mother when she was young. I already know.

Fact: Gran's symptoms manifested later than mine.

"Did she have an imaginary friend?"

"She had several, I think."

Fact: I have one. I wonder if one of her friends was a boy named Edward. I wonder if perhaps I'm going to someday meet a girl named Jane and a Lambert the friendly lion. Maybe it's only a matter of time. Maybe imaginary friends are hereditary. Maybe that's why Gran always smiled like she knew my secrets.

In my memory, her smile no longer seems so kind.

I press on. "Could she see them?"

"Yes. Before she died, she couldn't see anything else."

Fact: I can't see Edward.

Fact: I've never seen Edward.

Fact: I may never see Edward.

Renee takes a step.

She says, "You've always been the most normal, down-to-earth person in our family…"

She takes a step.

She says, "If anyone were to have schizophrenia, it should have been me." She seems agonized, but I've got her beat. "I'm so sorry, baby. I'm so, so, so sorry."

I'm sorry, too.

She steps, and she's close enough to give me a hug, to wrap me in her arms.

But it's too little, too late.

Stiffly, I take my own step, a step back. Rejection registers on her face, and I'm looking at this face, and I'm thinking that this is what my face must have looked like—the day she rejected me.

"You should have told me," I say. Her face falls, her arms wilt, and I'm gone, escaping to the waiting arms of Mr. Bear.

Fact: Mr. Bear couldn't close his arms if he tried.

I'm trying to sleep. A feat that I'm finding particularly difficult given the ever-increasing likelihood that I'm crazy.

Crazy? I was crazy once…

That viral rhyme that Alice and I found so hysterical in first grade has suddenly become anything but funny.

The sun hasn't set, but this is one of those days that just needs to end. My curtains are yanked shut and my door is locked and I'm curled up fetal with covers pulled over my head. It's warm and dark and my breathing is deep and my eyelids are heavy and…

My phone rings.

Correction, my phone sings: Somewhere over the rainbow…

That's Alice; she fancies being off over a rainbow somewhere. Although now is not exactly talk time, I know better than to ignore her call. I've lost too much at this point; I don't want to lose her as a friend, too.

I answer the way she expects, "Way up high." Of course, I don't sing.

"Bella," Alice says, her voice even more tinny than usual through the phone. She also sounds excited and/or frantic.

"What?" I sound neither. After today's revelations, I don't have the energy to bring the cell phone to my ear. It lies on my bed in front of my face.

"Bella, I need to talk to you," the tiny, tinny voice says. "Right now."

"Good thing we are talking." I burrow my face into the comforter.

"Are you burrowing into the comforter?"

I arch my back to lift up. "No."

"You were," Alice chides. "And this is not something we can talk about over the phone. Meet me at the rendezvous in fifteen minutes."

"I don't think—"

But Alice has already hung up.

The rendezvous? We haven't gone there in years. Despite my supreme reluctance to leave the safety of my room, I know I must. Although Alice might be summoning me to show off her newest hair color (she's not fully sold on her recent change to red), it could be something else. Something important.

I could use something important right about now.

So I slink downstairs, only to find that the 'rents are not visible in any of their usual haunts. Perfect. I wasn't planning on asking their permission anyway. I do, at least, leave a note. I'm not interested in being grounded for the rest of my life.

Then I set off through the woods toward the rendezvous. We call it that, but really it's a dilapidated tree fort that one of my former neighbors must have built when we were little. I vaguely remember the couple in the now-empty house closest to us having a little boy. I remember him because he once ate dog food in an attempt to impress me. He didn't.

As I approach the familiar, gnarled tree, I can tell from the silence of the forest that Alice is not yet here. I circle the tree, a hand tracing grooves in its bark. My memory of this place far exceeds reality; the fort looks less impenetrable than I recall, the wood more dessicated.

I don't have long to wait in the creeping quiet. Unlike me, Alice fairly flies across the forest floor and doesn't have mud stains on the knees of her jeans. She's also wearing a white coat, something I could never pull off. White clothes in general are a no-go for someone like me in this wet, muddy climate.

When she draws near, I see that Alice is still a ginger, her bright hair rivaled only by the expression on her face. Her lips are straining to stay closed. As she places a booted foot on the lowest board nailed into the trunk, I sigh.

"Can't we have this conversation down here?" Despite me being taller, the ladder still reaches far too high.

"No," Alice says over her shoulder as she spirits herself up the hatch.

I guess I understand. We've had every important conversation of our life in this tree. We discussed our first crush, first period, first kiss. Well, we'd discussed her first kiss. The tree is still waiting to hear about mine.

Ten minutes later, after I've slowly and meticulously hauled myself up the ladder with much scrabbling at bark and much grasping of Alice's hand, I perch carefully in the dead center of the remaining flooring and just breathe for a while.

"Okay," I say after I've recovered enough from the feeling of wanting to faint due to my vertigo. "What is it?"

"Bella," Alice says, picking up right where our phone conversation left off. "I saw him!"

Him.

I know there is only one him to which she can possibly be referring. I feel faint all over again, but for an entirely different reason.

"No, you didn't," I say.

She can't possibly have seen him.

She frowns. "Yes, I did."

"Alice, I don't know what you saw, but you can't possibly have seen him."

Her frown deepens, and she's starting to dig in. "Yes, I did." She's not used to me contradicting her. She's not used to me showing anything but the highest level of enthusiasm when it comes to Edward. She has absolutely no idea what's going on.

And I…I can't tell her. I can't explain to Alice that she can't possibly have seen Edward because Edward is nothing more than a glitch in my brain. I can't convince her that she hasn't seen my glitch without basically accusing her of having her own.

Best tread carefully.

"You saw Jasper?"

Please, please let her have merely seen Jasper. Jasper is not my problem. Jasper is hers.

"No," she said. "I saw Edward."

At his name, I feel faint again, but this time for a completely different reason. Three reasons, to be exact. One, if Edward is merely a glitch in my brain, then why did Alice see him? How is she somehow able to tune into my anomalous frequency? Two, although I love her to death, Alice's testimony on this subject is…suspect. And three…

Oh, three.

Three is the fact that I'd asked Edward to show himself to me—to give me a sign. And he doesn't show and doesn't show and then he shows himself to Alice?

Really?

How dare he.

Forget faint, I'm now furious.

But I fight not to let the anger in my chest bleed into my face. Alice is off down her rabbit hole; she isn't focused enough to understand where I'm coming from.

"How do you know it was Edward?" I say, trying to stay calm.

"Because Jasper called him Edward."

Forget a beat, my heart skips three. Did Alice truly hear Jasper calling Edward Edward? Or are the blue of my delusions beginning to mix with the red of Alice's, creating a purple palace in the sky in which we both now live together?

Focus.

Facts.

"Tell me exactly what you saw. Tell me where you were when you saw it. Tell me everything."

The combination of adrenaline and fear and anger causes my heart to pound painfully in my chest. I can hardly breathe.

"Well," Alice begins, looking past me into the forest, her eyes going all fuzzy like they do when she's thinking about these visions of hers. "I was drawing in my room. You know how drawing lets me focus."

I nod. Sometimes it's hard to get her attention when she's working on a particularly elaborate sketch.

"I'd decided to start working on my most difficult sketch ever—a man standing in a room full of mirrors. The man is standing with his back to me, and his face is reflected infinitely in the mirrors surrounding him. I've been trying to draw each incarnation of his face perfectly, so it's been slow going.

"After lunch today, I was suddenly in the zone. His slightly crooked smile and nose were perfectly crooked each time. His heavy brows arched just right. I was working on his hair—which I realized that I'd been trying to draw too tame for the rest of his face—when suddenly I wasn't seeing my drawing any more.

"I was seeing his face—his real face."

I've got chills, they're multiplying.

"Was it Jasper?" I whisper, so faintly that my voice could have been the wind through the nearby boughs. But I already know the answer. Jasper doesn't have a crooked smile or nose. Jasper doesn't have wild, untamed hair.

"No, it wasn't Jasper." Alice smiles faintly as she gazes off into a distance only she can see. "It was Edward. For one split second, I saw Edward. He had his eyes closed, as if he were listening for something in the middle of the forest.

"And then someone called his name, and his head whipped around.

"And then he was running."

"Running?" I echo.

"Sprinting like no one has ever sprinted before. It was…incredible." Alice focuses on my face for the first time. "Have you ever seen a cheetah run?"

Impatient, I say, "Not a lot of cheetahs in Forks, Alice."

"No," she says, exasperated. "I mean like on the Discovery Channel or something."

"You know that we pretty much only have ESPN."

"Oh. Well then—picture Tyler."

Ah, now I see. Alice and I are the only regular attendees at the Forks High track meets. No one else wants to sit out in the rain. We don't either, really, but we do want to see Tyler run. Off the track, he's a disgusting, drooling pig who hits on any female with two legs. On the track, he transforms into a lean, mean speed machine.

"It was like watching Tyler…on crack. Or, more appropriately, on speed."

"But you said that you saw Edward with Jasper…" I prompt. While I appreciate a good Tyler sprint, I've never been as easily distracted by the sight as Alice is.

"Yes! They were running together. Edward caught up to Jasper and quickly passed him."

She looks at me again, her eyes liquid with emotion.

"Your Edward is very fast."

I don't really know what to say to that.

"So they just ran together?"

"Through the forest. The tree trunks whipping by; branches mussing their hair. It was beautiful."

I'll bet it was. If only I could have seen it.

At least there is one thing I can see.

"Do you have the sketch?"

"Of course," she says, pulling a folded paper from her coat pocket.

I've never wanted to see something more desperately in my life. I take the paper from her, and it shakes in my hand.

In the gloom of the evening, I can barely make out the strokes of her pencil on the page. But what I can see is surreal, the nearly indiscernible figure of a man standing with broad shoulders to me, a wonderful bit of symbolism for Edward in real life. His face in the mirror—with those sinister brows, crooked features, and wild hair—looks downright menacing.

Edward—if this is indeed Edward—doesn't look the least bit angelic.

In fact, he looks downright demonic. The space where his eyes should be is blank, devoid of expression below stormy brows.

Alice can see that I'm troubled. She's apologetic. "I only saw his face for a second, Bella."

Yeah, just one second. One second more than I.

"You didn't draw the eyes," I say, refusing to meet hers.

"No," she says. "I didn't see his eyes. They didn't open."

At least there is one part of him that's still mine.

After that, there isn't much else to say. We sit in silence for a while, except for the boards creaking and the wind rustling.

"I promised my mom I would be back by dinner," Alice says, noting for the first time how dark the forest has grown around us.

"Yeah," I agree, although I had made no such promise. I don't follow Alice as she shimmies gracefully down the tree.

This time, I don't want her to watch me make a complete and utter fool of myself getting out of this stupid, ridiculous tree. I don't want to be further reminded of my garbled limbs when compared to her graceful ones.

She stands looking up at me from the base of the tree, her face a moon in the gloom. "Are you coming?"

"In a while," I say. "I may just sit here and cogitate a bit."

Cogitate, cogitate, throw up all the food I ate.

"Do you want me to wait for you?" Even though her question frustrates me, she's right to ask. If my ascent was any indication, my descent is not going to be pretty. Yet another reason for me to do it alone.

"No, I'll be fine. I have my cell phone if anything happens," I say, vaguely patting my coat pocket.

"Okay," she says doubtfully, but I hear her dutifully moving away.

Then she's gone, and I'm left in the everlasting silence of the woods. I wonder if the woods are always so silent for everyone else. I wonder if everyone else feels like they are the last person on earth.

I sit in a dilapidated ruin of a happier time, and I refuse to speak to Edward. I refuse to speak to Edward because he's refused to speak to me. He's refused to speak to me or show himself to me or to give me even the smallest of signs that he's real, that he's himself, that he's not…me.

And yet he'll show himself to Alice? He'll give her a sign? He'll show her his pretty little face and his pretty little hair and his pretty little limbs?

Forget crazy, I'm crazy mad.

Crazy? I was crazy once…

Eventually, the protest of the rotted wood and the descent of dark propel me to start the laborious climb. Gritting my teeth, I grip the edge of the hatch and gingerly lower the ball of my foot until it connects with the topmost rung.

I remember shifting my weight.

I remember gripping the edge of the hatch.

And that's the last thing I can remember.

Because at that point, something goes very, very wrong.

As it often does for me.

I don't know exactly what happened. My hands or feet could have lost their purchase against the damp, mossy wood. The rotted area around one of the nails could have finally crumbled. My inner ear could have decided that down is the new up.

Regardless, I slip.

I slip and—for one glorious second—I'm flying headfirst toward the welcoming ground.

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

In a moment of hysteria, I feel like that whale in the Douglas Adams book, although I'm smart enough to know the ground beneath me wants to be anything but friends. I'm going to be lucky if the ground is nice enough to let me walk out of this alive.

Or maybe not so lucky.

Maybe alive is not the greatest thing to be right now.

One split second, and then my inner ear informs me that all kinds of weird things are happening. The wind picks up, and I feel myself snap like a flag in the breeze, twisting and turning in mid-air.

Then I land, but I don't land on my head. I land on my back, and the wind flees my lungs. I think: That's one way to descend a tree house. If you want to break your neck.

It's a miracle I didn't.

A miracle—or maybe…just maybe…it's something else.

Maybe it's a sign.

Maybe I've finally figured out how to get Edward to reveal himself after all.

Not even the merest breath of wind stirs the leaves. Yet I most certainly just felt the effects of the wind.

A pretty poem that I in no way wrote:

Crazy?
I was crazy once…
They put me in a round room.
I liked that room.
They gave me a huggy jacket.
I liked that jacket.
I hugged it and it hugged me back.
One day I died
and they buried me under daisies.
I hate daisies.
One day I sniffed the daisies.
They smelled so bad it drove me crazy.
Crazy?
I was crazy once …