EXT. Wide pleasant street. Bright blue sky. Typical suburbia.
CUT TO: Cute boy on a BMX bike.
He showed up at the house having arrived on that bicycle—I remember that detail vividly. I was in the living room watching TV, and emerged only when it started getting loud and weird. He was a good-looking kid, about my age, so I put him at fifteen. He stood on our front doorstep, and I heard him ask very specifically for Chloe.
Naturally, Mom told him he had the wrong address, and he replied that he was from Marblehead, had recently moved to town, and had met a girl named Chloe at our restaurant. She’d invited him over to hang out and do math together, something like that, and she’d given him this address. My guess is, knowing boys of that age, that he didn’t have just numbers on his mind when you, Chloe, told him where to meet.
How do I know it was Chloe in the restaurant talking to that boy, inviting him to our house? I can’t be sure of it, but I was at Big Frank’s that day, and I distinctly remember you sitting at a table, math books splayed out in front of you, being very diligent about your work. So I guess when the cute boy—pretty sure his name was Troy—came over to talk to you, you gave him the name of your most studious alter.
Now that Troy was standing on our doorstep, Mom was as confused as I was. She called you to the front door, asked if you’d ever seen this boy before, and you said no, never. And then, well, then he started laughing. He pointed at you and he just kept on laughing, but not in a mean way. It was an awkward thing, more like he was the butt of some joke.
Troy said to Mom—and to me, because I’d come out from the living room by this point—that this （here he pointed at you） is Chloe. This is the girl he met at Big Frank’s. He stood there like he was waiting for this ridiculous joke of ours to end. It got quite uncomfortable, as you can imagine, I remember that clearly. And you, Penny, well, you just kept shaking your head, saying, “I don’t know who this boy is, tell him to go away, Mom.”
I’ve learned a few things about your alters over the years. As Penny, you say Mom, but as Chloe you’d say Mama; Ruby was Mum; and Eve says Mother.
Looking back on it, that’s how I can be sure it was you, Penny, upset as could be, screaming at that boy to go away and leave you alone.
“I don’t know him! I don’t know him!” you shouted, clutching your head as if your brain was on fire.
Mom panicked, which made perfect sense because you were out of your mind, truly frightened. She slammed the door in that poor boy’s face. He must have been beyond confused, and so was Mom, but me? I’m not sure. I was thinking of other people you’ve pretended to be, about Eve, and Ruby. And now Chloe? Remember, we didn’t know about DID at this point.
I figured either you were embarrassed about inviting a boy over without permission, or you were an amazing actor, or you really didn’t remember ever meeting Troy. To this day I’m still not sure. I wish I’d captured that look on your face, though. Such profound shock and horror—it reminded me of the way Mom looked that day we thought we’d lost you and you were hiding in the bed.
After the boy left, Mom made a dozen phone calls. With that you got yourself a new psychiatrist. Dr. Caroline Cross.
I think without Dr. Cross, you’d still be getting treated for OCD and depression, but the signs were there all along. Different types of memory loss … different personality states … anxiety … depression … and those were the symptoms we could see.
Your other doctors weren’t incompetent; it’s just that the whole Chloe incident made it easier for Dr. Cross to diagnose you. She was very methodical, patient, or so Mom would say when singing her praises. Dr. Cross observed things about you that we didn’t, like how you’d sometimes talk faster, in a tighter, more nervous voice when you discussed schoolwork and grades, especially when under pressure to perform.
One day, not long after your diagnosis, Dr. Cross met with us as a family. She wanted us to understand DID so we weren’t frightened of it. It was more common than people realized, she said. First and foremost, you weren’t different people. You were one person with multiple personality states, each identity expressing a part of a whole. If we could integrate those different states, she said, you would be Penny—who sometimes got angry like Eve, who obsessed like Chloe, and who could be as fun-loving and carefree as Ruby.
“It’s not something to be scared of,” Dr. Cross assured us, mainly addressing Ryan and myself, because this meeting was our primer into the condition.