In a Dark Mirror

by Kat Davis

It wasn’t that she felt bad for any of the times she had acted out; she just didn’t want to be punished again. So she took a breath, swallowed the anger in the moment, took it with her back to her room to scream it out into her pillow in the dark.

The Mirror Universe was about getting away from the mundane, about imagining themselves elsewhere, somewhere where things actually happened and life had meaning.

“Delusional” meant believing in something deeply irrational, something that might defy most people’s conception of reality.

Hope is a powerful drug, and dangerous for someone like her, who hasn’t dared to feel it for so long. The key is to keep the fantasy clear from the reality, to see things as they are, not as she wants to believe them to be.

She was pretending again, the way they sometimes pretended about Leonora and Mariana and spent so much time pretending to be those people that they almost became them.

There was a saying, wasn’t there—What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

Gran had found Maddie’s copy of Twilight, read it cover to cover, and announced that she didn’t think it was appropriate reading for a girl of Maddie’s age. Maddie just rolled her eyes; who was Gran to lecture her when she read all those novels with heaving bosoms on the covers?

mean, the movies are never as good as the books, obviously, but it’s interesting to see what they do with them.”

Of course the vast majority of schizophrenics are a danger to no one but themselves.