When Morgan was in elementary school, she overheard classmates talking about divorce. She had never heard the word before and was shocked by the concept.
“What would you do if Mom divorced you?” she asked Matt later.
“I’d kill myself,” Matt said.
The idea of suicide stuck with Morgan, and from then on, whenever she felt bored or upset, she pictured herself dying. After watching The Dark Knight, starring Heath Ledger as the Joker—a role that purportedly strained the method actor’s mental health, resulting in his death by accidental overdose—Morgan decided to cut a permanent smile in her face, like the Joker had, and to slit her wrists. But just as she was getting the knife, Sev talked her out of it.
Bella still pretended to see and hear Maggie and Sev and the others. But it was getting to a point where she could barely keep up. Morgan’s arsenal of imaginary friends was expanding to include unicorns, Ninja Turtles, and an abusive boyfriend for Sev named “Geoffrey,” who wore suspenders without a shirt and had what Morgan described as “man boobs.”
One day, when Bella and Morgan were changing out of their gym clothes in the locker room, Morgan stepped on an earring, and it stuck in her foot.
Morgan stared at it. “Oh,” she said. “Pretty.”
“You need to take that out of there,” Bella chided. “Right now, or I’m going to get a teacher.”
She was starting to feel more like a babysitter than a friend.
At school, Morgan drew pictures of herself running through a whirlwind of colors, floating peace signs, rainbows, bearded faces, and suns wearing sunglasses. At home, she slipped into the pink princess gown that she and Bella used for dress-up and danced to horror-influenced punk rock songs about the devil. To another girl, Morgan’s behavior might have been scary. Morgan even said as much in her emails to Bella, calling herself “absurd, awkward, and potentially violent.” But for the most part, Bella had become accustomed to Morgan’s odd behavior, and Morgan loved her for her loyalty. Police would later find a letter that Morgan had written to Bella, saying what a good person and friend Bella was for accepting Morgan for who she was. She emailed Bella, “These days I live in my own world and I am happy that you join me in it. I am terrified of the color red now also.”
When Bella was busy on the weekends, Morgan forced her favorite gerbil, Molly, into Barbie clothes and gripped her tightly on her lap while watching the film Edward Scissorhands on repeat—a story about two people who could not really connect without hurting each other.
She wondered if anyone else in the world felt like she did, torn between divine hallucinations and the alluring possibility of death.
She assumed that her parents would never understand. She drew a picture of the three of them, with an arrow pointing to her head, and the words “Me, mental case” scrawled beside it, singling herself out as the only one in the family who was sick.
A few months after Morgan’s parents started dating, Angie took Matt on a ten-day trip to Seattle. They drank Seattle’s Best coffee. They ate pierogis. They got matching tattoos of Celtic knots, which signified eternity. They promised never to leave each other. But when Morgan was two years old, Matt tried to kill himself. He spent two weeks comatose in the ICU. Depression and anxiety are ancillary symptoms of schizophrenia. About 40 percent of adults with schizophrenia go untreated in any year. One out of ten cases ends in suicide.
Years later, despite this trauma, or perhaps because of it, Morgan’s parents could not bring themselves to see that Morgan was unraveling. On Instagram, Angie shared photos of everyday joys: a naughty cat sneaking into the fridge, optimistic fortune cookie slips, homegrown vegetables arranged in the shape of a face, a grinning Morgan getting ready to blow out the candles on her birthday cake. When Morgan told Angie that she saw colors, Angie, who worked in health care, reassured her daughter that it was just a migraine.
“But my head doesn’t hurt,” Morgan thought. “And it happens all the time.”
“Bella noticed I was changing,” Morgan later recalled. “She was like the only one who did know. My parents, if they saw it, they just pushed it to the backs of their minds, ’cause they didn’t want to admit anything was wrong—my mom has this thing where she wants her life to be like perfect, and she wants everyone to be perfect, and she wanted us to be this perfect family, and like so much shit was going on behind the scenes, and she just didn’t know about it. Because she refused to see it.”
The summer before sixth grade was windy and dark. At the Waukesha County Fair, vendors sold fried cheddar nuggets and bacon cream cheese on a stick. Girls from the 4-H club competed for the title of “Fairest of the Fair.” Morgan and Bella were eleven years old. In the fall, they would start their first year at Horning Middle School, home of the Hawks, “Where your mind, body, and heart soar!”
Like most eleven-year-old girls, Morgan was becoming more and more curious about the ways she was different from other people. Surrounded by Harry Potter characters and purple dinosaurs, she typed into Google, “What kind of insane am I?”
Morgan usually turned to Bella with serious questions. But Morgan thought it was only a matter of time before Bella became the coolest girl in school and abandoned her for someone who wasn’t a freak. Bella’s mom wanted them to stop being friends, and while Bella had promised not to listen, Morgan didn’t want to tempt fate by telling Bella how badly she wanted to die. She loved Bella and didn’t want to scare her, didn’t want to lose her.
“That’s all she talked about: Bella, Bella, Bella,” Morgan’s grandma Dianna later recalled. “And then all of a sudden, there was Anissa on the scene, and it all went downhill from there.”