I had one of those mornings where I woke up tired, like I hadn’t slept at all. And then my next thought was that I probably hadn’t. And where was Natalie? Because even without sleeping I hadn’t heard her get up and leave, but she wasn’t there, so she must have.

And then I thought—no, I didn’t think, I knew, I realized, I was sure, as sure as I was that there was snow on the ground and that her name was Natalie and that I loved her—I just knew, I knew that she was dead. Natalie was dead.

I didn’t start crying, because a realization like that hits you pretty hard and your body doesn’t know how to react at first. How do you react when you suddenly find out that the sister who was alive when you went to bed in the same room the night before was dead now? I wish that was the worst of it, though, because the next thing that I knew—no, the next thing I found out, that works, the beauty of the English language is in the number of words and slightly different meanings that you can get, from think to know to realize to find out; there are more that I’m just not thinking of- it’s a wonder that we can even use any of it—

I found out that Natalie was dead and then I found out that I had killed her. Somehow during the night, the night when I didn’t sleep, I had killed my sister in the bed across from mine. I think it was with a pillow and I had suffocated her, she had probably struggled and cried, only I hadn’t paid any attention and had somehow managed to kill her and get her out of there, without even knowing it.

I screamed, then. My hands were at my mouth and I was screaming. I was screaming and crying and tearing into the closet to see if Natalie’s body was in there, then I started going through our parents’ room and the bathroom and the room with the computer and then I ran downstairs, only I tripped so I fell downstairs—that’s why I’m here, that’s how my arm broke—and then my parents came running in from the kitchen but I got up and pushed them away and kept rifling through the rooms, the closet and the bathroom. And then I burst into the kitchen crying with my parents right behind me—I knew they would throw me right in jail when they caught me so I just wanted to keep away from them—and I saw Natalie looking at me like I was—crazy. She gasped at my arm and I fell down, pointing at her, telling her that I had killed her, telling her that she was dead and that I had killed her—

This is all new, you know, I don’t know what it’s like to be crazy. I don’t know what it’s like to have people force Risperdal down my throat, I’m not used to people always asking me if I’m okay and looking at me like I’m a grenade they’ve just thrown. I used to think the neighbors next door had a cat because I always saw it around their house, but cats hide all the time, so it was never weird that Natalie didn’t see it. I used to tell her it didn’t like her, I thought it only came out for me, and she told me plenty of times that they didn’t have a cat but I saw it, and why shouldn’t you believe what you see? And I knew—I know—that Natalie’s dead, but you’re sitting here telling me that she’s not, that I’m not a murderer and that that cat with the white chest that I saw for all those years isn’t real—I feel betrayed. Can you see the snow out there? Is there actually a heart monitor next to me that’s making a rhythmic beeping noise? I have a hard enough time trusting other people—now I can’t even trust myself.