Chapter 5: Aria

The pen swerved rapidly over the pad paper, forming words Aria couldn't read from her angle. Like most of her psychiatric sessions, she smiled and answered every question honestly. Usually she was just given a refill on her prescription medicines. This time, however, the psychiatrist was holding the pen tightly, pushing the tip harder into the paper in frustration.

"How could it be that ten years, we haven't learned anything more about your condition, Miss Montgomery?" Dr. Phillips, a Radley newbie, flipped through her files. "Ten days spent in seclusion with doctors watching, and your other personality didn't come out once. They tried angering you, they tried saddening you, nothing. Yet you've been caught in the middle of the night with memory loss. How are we certain you're not just a sleepwalker?"

"She's a tricky one, I guess," Aria said with a shrug of her shoulders. "But she has come out before. I wish I could tell you more about that, but it should all be in my files." She didn't really like to talk about A, and A didn't really like it when people tried to talk to her. If she did, then she'd come out when the halls weren't abandoned.

Shaking his head and murmuring, he jotted down a couple more things and underlined them with three long, agitated swipes of the pen. He closed his eyes and put his head in his hands to think. In a way, Aria enjoyed being a brain teaser. It made Radley more interesting. Being trapped anywhere for ten years would get boring, even in a mental hospital.

Eventually he awakened and picked up his pen again. "I have a suggestion," he said while writing. "It's going to seem odd, but trust me, it has proven successful before." Ripping off a few empty sheets of pad paper, he handed them to Aria along with a pencil. "Write a note to yourself every night. See if your other self answers."

Aria stared down at the torn-off paper and pencil. In her hands, she felt like a detective. There was her new game: Detective Aria and the Unsolvable Case of the Double Identity. She nodded, a half grin creeping on her face. It was time to punch her other half in the face.

"You, my dear, are a very special case. But there are still so many options we can try."

Around lunchtime Aria received a visitor. By this point Aria wasn't surprised when the young man in the sweater vest was standing at their usual table. Why he kept coming back, she had no idea. She'd barely been a help; she'd listed for him at least ten doctors he could talk to instead of her. But yet here he was again—for her.

"If it isn't Mr. Big-Shot Writer himself," Aria said as she pulled out the chair across from him and sat. She crossed her hands in front of her to make herself look more intimidating. It was an act she'd been putting on in Radley for years so that maybe, she wouldn't break down. "Come back to the loony bin to try to read my forgotten memories."

Ezra shuffled around in a bag to retrieve a couple pencils, a pen, and his trusty notebook. "That's not how I see this place," he told her honestly, clicking the pen and posing it over the lined paper. His gray-blue eyes looked up to meet Aria's murky ones. Her eyes, it was one of the first things he wrote down in his notes marked under "observation." The colors inside them blended and changed like a mood ring. On top of the empty page he wrote down a color—amber-green: neutral. As in she wasn't feeling particularly glad or irritated by his presence. Based on doctors' descriptions, her eyes were browner—which made sense, because brown was the most mysterious of all colors, a blend of every spectrum—when her double identity came out, only for a second before the other half fled and left Aria behind.

"I have an idea," Aria said, tilting her head to the right slightly. "For every question I answer, you answer one of mine."

What harm could that do? "Deal," Ezra agreed, immediately questioning his judgement. "This other identity… Do you have a name for it? Just something to call it rather than…it, or she."

"I prefer to ignore it" was her bold response. "Why are you really here? Why do you keep coming?"

"That's two questions," Ezra corrected her, setting his pen down. "And the truth is, I think you know more than you claim. My brother did."

Suddenly Aria's throat was scratchy and she could feel her heart pounding like a scared rabbit's in her chest before dropping to her stomach. She could feel it in her bones that she'd unknowingly poked an open wound. "Your brother?"

Shifting uncomfortably in the plastic seat, Ezra avoided looking at her face. "He had multiple personality disorder too, and my parents refused to treat it properly. They thought if they just medicated him enough it would go away, but…it didn't. I came home from school one day and found him with the empty bottle of pills in his hand and a gun in the other. It was his other identity that pulled the trigger. Or, at least, that's the story I created to cope with it."

Speechless, Aria turned her eyes to her clasped fingers and chewed on her bottom lip. She wasn't expecting him to tell her that much. She expected him to fly past it with a simple "it fascinates me." It was supposed to be a simple question, but that was an ignorant assumption, because there were people like Ezra who wished it was a simple question.

Had her other half ever driven her to hurting herself? Shutting her eyes, she caught flashes of light and colors: a silvery reflection, a young girl with dark hair looking into it. Was it a mirror? A blonde girl, there was a blonde girl on the ground. Was she okay?

"When did this other side of you start coming out?"

Now Aria returned to the present and filed those blurry images away, waving them off as dreams or hallucinations—she'd had plenty of strange reactions to her changing medications. After Ezra was so honest with her, she realized she wanted to be honest with him. After all, who else would ever want to hear her story? Why not help someone instead of step away? "I personally don't remember much of this, so this comes from my parents." She tapped her right wrist and continued, "When I was eight years old, I broke this wrist. I called it my escape world. As an eight-year old, I didn't have any friends. My family and I had just moved back from Iceland and it was my first year there—not that many people noticed the new girl. So, I drew. When you're that young, you don't understand a lot of the world. But when I drew, my thoughts made sense, it made it on paper."

"Do you still have any of these drawings?"

Nodding her head, Aria dug through her pocket and pulled out three folded sheets of yellowing paper. "These were the salvageable ones. Most of them…I destroyed."

Ezra unfolded the papers, noticing how the creases were worn and thin like it'd been folded and unfolded multiple times, and spread the drawings out on the table. For an eight year old, they were impressive. One was of a doll on a windowsill; the scenery was sunny and trees blossomed, but the doll had a neutral, almost sad, face. The other was of a barren landscape, a cold, wintery scene. The last was of a little girl crying, one doll cradled in her elbow while she painted something red with her fingers on a sketchpad. "Why did you destroy them?"

Ashamed, Aria said, "The day I got my cast off, my parents took me home and fawned over how even though the fracture permanently damaged the joint—" To prove her point, Aria tried to roll around her wrist, but it could barely bend in any direction. "—I could learn to draw again. I tried—balls of paper littered around my room. That's all I can personally remember. But my parents explained that suddenly I was screaming, and they found me tearing my room, and drawings, apart. Like I was possessed by something. They couldn't console me. And then I stopped, looked around, and asked them what happened."

A single tear rolled down her cheek and, embarrassed, she forcefully wiped it away. Suddenly, she had the strong urge to run. "And that's all I want to talk about today." Slamming another piece of paper in front of Ezra, she got up and rushed out of the dayroom before Ezra could ask her what it was—and if she wanted him to come back.

Unfolding the paper, Ezra studied a poorly done drawing of a crooked house. Compared to the other drawings, it was, honestly, pathetic. It was obvious it was done by someone with limited wrist motion, as the lines were either stick straight or barely bended.

It was the creation of a depressed little girl ripped away from her Terabithia. The death of a young artist.

When Aria returned to her room, she slammed the door behind her and continued to rub her face raw. When was the last time she cried, anyway? And all because some random guy prodded her about it, made her feel like she wanted to help him after his sob story. "Aria?" She whipped her head up and immediately shielded her red eyes with her hands.

Spencer was sitting on the bed reading what appeared to be a physics textbook; she had notebooks and colored pencils to organize her notes. Even though she'd missed the first week of school, she wasn't about to give up on her valedictorian spot for rehab. Her parents had allowed her to enroll in classes and were sending her her assignments.

But now her focus had shifted from rotational kinematics and torque to her distraught roommate. "You okay?" she asked kindly, not pushy.

Aria peeled her fingers from her face and peered at Spencer as though she was trying to read her soul. "Did you know who I was, when you first saw me?"

Taken aback, Spencer shut her textbook and set her notes aside. What was the point in being dishonest here, where nothing left the walls? She nodded her head, guilty. "Did you know who I was?" she threw back the question.

Aria tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and also nodded, guilty. "Spencer isn't a name you hear every day, especially for a girl. You asked me to sit with you at lunch." Then, with a blushing red face, she prodded, "Did you know why I left?"

This time, Spencer shook her head side to side. "No one really did."

Aria kicked her slipper on the ground. "So people noticed?"

Though it was strange considering their serious conversation, Spencer smiled. "You fought Alison. Everyone noticed."

With drooping, puppy-like eyes, Aria glanced at the window, and Spencer could see the moonlight reflecting off her watery eyes. "I didn't," she whispered. "A did."

In just a few minutes, the Aria Spencer knew had gone from a tough, take-your-medicine teenager to a broken down child. Spencer sat up on her bed, understanding that the conversation had shifted into fragile territory. "A?"

"My other identity," she explained, now staring down at her lap, at her damaged wrist. "The one who likes to hide in the day, seek at night. Like some mischievous devil worshipper." She built up the courage to lift her head back up and look at Spencer's face. "You're the first to know about A—the name, that is. The doctors don't know that I named it. But it seemed simple, explainable."

"For Aria," Spencer said, and Aria cracked a weak grin.

"For Anonymous," she corrected her. A was nothing like her.

Draping her legs over the side of the bed, Spencer felt her heart race, but she needed to ask that looming question Aria must have been facing since the moment she walked into Radley: "Do you think you'd want to leave this place?"

The night grew darker, and Aria climbed under her covers without changing clothes. "Maybe…" She reached for the lamp on her nightstand and kept a steady gaze on Spencer's face. "If I wasn't convinced that A will forever be tormenting me."

The light disappeared, and the room was covered in darkness.

…

Once Aria heard Spencer snoring (and that took almost two hours of straining to keep her eyes open), she crept out of bed and padded over on the tips of her toes to her desk. Pulling out a sheet of paper quietly, she scribbled a note on it and went back to sleep.

Her slumber didn't last long until she was shaken awake. Grumbling, she saw a dark silhouette hovering over, their hands on her shoulders. "Look who's here to visit," a feminine voice rang in Aria's ears.

When her vision adjusted, Aria nearly jumped out of her bed. "Mona?" she exclaimed. The petite, dark-haired, dark-eyed girl stood in a white robe at her bedside. "What are you doing here?"

"It's been so long, Aria," she said, reaching one hand out affectionately to brush Aria's messy hair behind her ear. "I miss you!"

Aria slapped Mona's wrist away and glared at her. "No. You do not get to leave the fourth floor to come make friends with me again."

"But Aria," Mona protested, "I didn't mean—"

"Didn't mean to what, Mona?" Aria's voice rose, and her teeth chattered in anger. "Push a patient off the roof? Because you and I both know you're not crazy enough to do that! You feel lucky that she healed and didn't snap her neck." Ever since Mona had been hospitalized on the upper floors for that incident, Aria had felt betrayed. Mona was her roommate for seven years. They knew each other, and how they didn't belong there, like the back of their hands. In fact, Aria blamed Mona for losing hope in leaving Radley. After all, she and Mona had planned to escape together. And Aria truly believed that the Mona she knew wouldn't hurt anyone. When she first confronted Mona about it, about if she was protecting someone else, Mona played the mute act on her, and the doctors asked her to leave, as Mona was in no mindset to have visitors.

Aria had given up on Mona two years ago, but Mona liked to visit from time to time despite Aria's recurring fury that was hot enough to boil her skin off. "I don't want to see you. Go back up to the other lunatics where you belong."

The hopeful glint in Mona's eyes dimmed and was replaced by something sour. "You never let me explain, and you know that." With that, she turned around and left Aria in the dark with a snoring Spencer.

…

The next morning, Aria woke before Spencer and stood over her desk. Her cheeks flushed with icy cold.

There, in her handwriting, was I want to talk to you. –Aria

But there, below it, in a scrawl she didn't recognize, was a response she wasn't expecting to get.

You've talked to me plenty of times already. Or have you forgotten we're the same person? Open your eyes, Aria. You see everything I see. –A