When I was small, I found an invisible friend; I think most lonely children do. She was pink and blue and bright and lovely, and I imagined if everyone could see her and watch the edges of her glow, I could fade into nothing–– dissipate into my chair or a puddle on the floor. She told me her name was Alice, and I thought, if you were really here, I could go anywhere. 

I saw her in ways I didn’t know weren’t ordinary. I set aside half of my dinners for her, my bananas at lunchtime. She ate everything with her hands and licked them wet and clean. When the house, our big gray house on top of the hill, filled with screaming, Alice would lay with her back against the crack underneath my bedroom door. It’s quiet now, she would tell me, and I could sleep. I trusted her to know when it was safe, when a storm was coming, when it was time to hide behind my shoes in the corner of my closet. Alice knew all the things that I wondered about; Alice kept me safe. 

My mother poured Alice her own glass of orange juice at breakfast, but my father dumped it down the sink drain. It’s not normal, he’d hiss in my mother’s ear, and she’d swat at his chest and pretend he didn’t mean it. Let her dream, she’d say to his feet, and she’d give me an extra waffle when he was busy with the morning radio. Alice would smile and reach over me to take her extra serving. She’s good to me, she’d whisper, and my nose and mouth would fill up with her scent of clean laundry and peaches and grass from somewhere else. 

My father checked me out of school just before lunch on a Thursday. Alice tried to make my toes feel less full of lead as we walked to the office, and to make her happy, I pretended it was working. I bet he’s taking you to Six Flags, she whispered in my ear, I’ll hold your hand when the roller coaster drops. He was waiting for me with his briefcase still slung over his shoulder, pager still beeping its robot song through his blazer pocket. Ready? He asked me, and I looked at Alice. She shook her head and her eyes grew big and black. Say no, she told me, but he took me by the back of my neck and walked me away. 

He took me to a psychologist. I didn’t know what that word meant, and when I asked Alice to spell it for me, she spit bright green sludge onto my feet. I shrunk up tiny. My father waited for me in a front room full of fish tanks and coffee in a tall silver urn. I sat in the center of a bright red couch, leather shiny and sticky on my clammy palms, facing a window where I could see cars crawling all over the highway overpass like ants. I slid to the left to make room for Alice, who was so warm, I was sure she burned me when she laid her head on my shoulder. 

Is Alice next to you? The woman asked me softly, her eyes beady and sunken into wrinkled paper skin. Alice dug her nails into my arm, her nails that had suddenly become mean red claws. It was unbearable; her nails and her warmth. Say no, she told me, so I did. Alice held me there for the rest of our time at the psychologist, and when the ant-eyed woman took me back to my father, she handed him a tiny blue note. The whole ride home, Alice sat on top of the suburban, and wouldn’t come down to me even when I closed my eyes and begged. When we got home, my father handed the blue note to my mother, and she ripped it clean down the middle. Pills? No way in hell–– Alice covered my ears to keep me from hearing the swearing. Her palms still singed my skin. 

My father came to me in the mornings, when my mother was still wine drunk sleeping, and handed me a tiny orange pill and a glass of chocolate milk. It’ll make you see the whole world right side up, sweetheart, he would say to me with his voice hiding low in his throat. The first time he did, Alice grabbed my ear and twisted it clean off my head. I felt the blood run down the side of my neck. Don’t you fucking dare, she told me, so I held it underneath my tongue. My father left for work and I spit it into the toilet. Alice kissed me on my forehead, her lips like menthol spread across my skin. I flushed. 

I grew taller, and Alice taught me things I was too stupid to learn on my own. She’d hold me underwater in my bathtub, pinning my shoulders to the porcelain until I begged her to let me breathe. I would sputter and cough and cry and she’d laugh at me, the sound like church bells, and say, you have to know how to find the edges of things. She would run her fingers through my hair and promise me one day it would look like hers: full of light, weightless, never grabbed in tangled handfuls. She took strawberries off my plates in the mornings and hid heaping scoops of rice beneath a checkered tablecloth. When I stood in front of the mirror she would lift my shirt up and count my ribs, sharp and beautiful, one by one. You’ll be so light you’ll be able to fly, she’d tell me, then we can go anywhere. I love you, I sometimes wanted to say, but knew it would make her disappear. 

My father left in the middle of the night on a Monday. Where is Florida? I asked Alice before bedtime. She took my face in both of her hands and touched our noses together. It burned. A different planet, she said. A place that’s ugly and dark and reeks of gasoline. I shook my head and said he can’t be there, he doesn’t mean it, and she pinched the skin of my cheeks in between her razor sharp fingertips. She drew blood and said we’re safe here, you and I, and he’s never coming back. Okay, I thought, and she heard me. Alice had always kept me safe. My father called me early in the mornings when he knew my mother was asleep, and I’d lift and slam the receiver back down after half a ring. 

I trusted Alice more than anyone, maybe besides my mother and whatever god heard my prayers. She walked up and down the aisles of my math class, touching everyone on the parts of their hair and turning them red or green. How can you tell? I’d ask, and she’d roll her eyes ‘til they turned colors I’d never know how to name. I can see the insides of everything. How else would I know you? 

She began to visit me only in the nighttime. The sun hurts my eyes, she told me from under my pillow. My mother took me out of school and on car rides curved sharp up mountains or flattened bright black parallel to the sea. I would look out the window and pinch my eyes shut, burning the shape of things into the backs of my eyelids–– pictures Alice could pull from inside my ears when I lay down to sleep and recognize. I started to see a doctor who would touch the bridges of my spine and lift me onto a scale in front of my mother. If it’s not right, they’ll send you somewhere I can’t follow you–– it’s a game, you see? Alice told me. For her I’d hide in the bathroom, gulping water down from the rusty faucet until nausea made my head swollen and heavy. Bloated and red I’d stand on the scale for them, rigid-legged like a show pony, and my mother would sigh in relief. Thank you, Alice, I’d tell her after I’d thrown it all back up before bedtime. There are so many things inside you that you’ll never see, but they’re good and they fit just perfect, she told me, holding my hair back and wiping spit from my shirt. I got older, so Alice grew with me. My mother’s brain turned heavy and mean, a black thing I couldn’t look at, so Alice taught me to cook macaroni and bring her ginger ale in bed. Will mine be this someday? I asked, and Alice smiled into the back of my neck. Maybe it already is, she said, and I locked her out of my bedroom that night. She snuck in through a window anyway and bit my fingers off, one by one, held the softness of my stomach in her fist as evidence. You’re nothing when I can’t get in, she hissed at me. I let her climb into my pillowcase and listen while I prayed. 

Alice kept me safe and taught me how to build walls to keep things in, and in return, I made sure she stayed a secret. Men from the bank drove my mother’s car away, brought in five huge men to carry the piano out of the study onto a truck trailer. It’s because you didn’t pay the bills you brat, Alice reminded me, but she’d lay down across my lap at night and turn her back into the ivories and flats and sharps so I could play my mother’s lullaby. 

I only made friends with people that Alice turned green until I met him. He was something I’d never seen before–– golden. He was older than me, told me what rum tasted like and helped me in by my hand through his bedroom window in the middle of blistered summer 

nights. He showed me movies I’d never heard of and took me to parties packed with rooms of only red. Alice hated him, but she hated me more. She turned blackened and electric to the touch. If you see him again I’ll leave you, she told me, but I couldn’t help myself. He held delicate paper rolls up for me to take drags from, kissed my throat while I sucked down red wine. He told me I was beautiful and I turned to Alice to laugh at how he lied. She was gone. 

Of course, he went away too. He will come back to me for years when I am at my lowest with all the lights turned off, like a ship with a compass set north to my emptiness. At night I pressed my mouth to my bedroom floor and said I’m sorry Alice, and begged her to come home on my knees, just how she used to watch me pray. My mother did nothing but sleep, now in the basement of my grandmother’s house where we lived with no money but plenty of dinner to eat. I vomited after every meal in a summoning ritual, wiping my own spit from my cheeks and looking out windows at the endless hills of corn. 

When I had emptied enough space for her, she came home to me. I hear the hum of her breath from underneath my bed frame and cry with foreign happiness when she crawls out to touch my ankles. I missed you, Alice I’m sorry, I’ve been trying–– I wept into her lap. Shut up, she tells me, and I finally sleep through the night. She was different. The after-Alice didn’t glow or burn or laugh with me at the stupid stories I made up for her at bedtime. I tried desperately to warm her up again; I asked her to tell me which cows behind the school stadium were red or green, but she turned to mist that smelled like mildew. I starved and hid the new pills the doctors gave me into my sock drawer, yet she stayed quiet. What can I do to make you bright again? I asked her, but she’d grown so faint I could barely see her at all. 

Just past midnight on a Sunday, Alice wakes me with her lips to my ear. Make me happy, she says and I stumble from the covers, eager, following her barefoot down the hall. She leads me to the bathroom. She turns on the light. In the mirror, she stands beside me, her face a perfect copy of my own. My stomach bundles into a white hot knot and I tear my hand from hers. Her skin is layered paper, flaking off in nasty bits and strips even when she is still. Her hair is tied back with my red hairband, her fingernails painted messy just like mine. What are you doing? I ask her, my eyes brimmed damp with fury and my nose filled up with snot. For the first time, Alice smiles at me–– at us, together in the weak fluorescent light. It’s been this way all along, hasn’t it, she snarls, and in a rush of acid through my stomach and up my throat, I can’t bear to be alive with her a moment longer. I take a hair dryer from the drawer beneath us. Go ahead, Alice smiles at me with my own teeth, dripping yellow down our chin. I can barely breathe through her scent of peaches. I shatter the mirror into a million shards with the barrel of the hairdryer, and watch the pieces tear Alice into smoke. I pick one up. I tear myself open, finally clean, in a neat pink and blue line down the center between my ribs: twelve sharp on each side.