THE LAYOUT OF the bedroom is identical to mine; mirrored from the wall we share. Margaret’s room is infinitely messier, though—she hadn’t cleaned in a long time, by the looks of things.

I look around, every familiar object radiating a different degree of pain: the indoor tent we used so many times in both of our rooms for sleepovers, rolled up around the poles and leaning against the corner of her dresser; the composition notebooks we often passed back and forth, taking turns with a story that we were imagining on the spot. Chocolate wrappers lie scattered around a coffee cup of colored pencils on the corner of her desk.

I wonder if she kept a journal, I think as I step toward the desk, my heart a hollow of hope at the idea of a single object that could tell me everything I need to know. I imagine pages filled with explanations, how she really felt about me, what she knew about Penelope.

The anticipation dies away as I dig through her desk to no avail, rapidly becoming desperation instead. I look in her nightstand, and underneath her pillow and mattress, and on the shelves surrounding her vanity, which is like mine but painted white. I look through the piles of notebooks for any I don’t recognize. I look under her bed, which is mostly clogged with clothes and stuffed animals and crumpled-up drawings that Margaret apparently deemed unworthy but actually are pretty wonderful.

Once I’ve combed through the bedroom, I turn my attention to the closet, my final chance at finding anything. The white shutters on the closet doors are turned down, keeping everything inside hidden, and for some reason I am overcome with a wave of nervousness as I reach out to pull on the knob of the handle. The doors fold open in one swift movement, the wheels on the tracks squealing in strain. The only thing Margaret kept on hangers were her dresses for the club events, hung hastily in a row of lush fabrics in black and tones of jewel.

The floor beneath is littered with shoes, both sneakers and heels alike. I look on the shelf above the dresses, initially finding nothing except for spare blankets and old books from our childhood. But when I reach around the side of the blankets to see if anything’s hidden inside, I discover that the shelf goes on farther than it appears to, an extended closet shelf that reaches inside the bedroom wall.

I drag Margaret’s desk chair across the room and stand on it, moving the blankets out of the way to try to see if I can look down the hidden space. It’s too dark to see anything, so I go back to the nightstand and grab a key chain I found while searching, a flat black disc that works like a flashlight when squeezed. Once back up on the chair, I can see the outline of something sitting on the shelf, closer to the end and out of reach.

It’s got to be something, I think excitedly. It’s too out of the way to not be deliberately placed. I use my hands to check the stability of the shelf, then cautiously lift myself up onto it. When I swing over the edge, my feet hit the old books and send them flying to the bedroom floor below. I lie still for a few seconds, on my belly, my hands and face pressed against the dusty shelf as I wait to see if the shelf will collapse or not.

It holds strong. I wince as I reach back to my skirt pocket for the key chain, still afraid of breaking the shelf and falling the seven-foot distance to the floor. I hold the little black disc ahead of me and press down with my thumb, lighting the way just a few inches at a time. I wriggle forward, sneezing twice as dust particles cloud the air around my face.

After I’ve moved forward a foot or so, I’m able to see that the object in the back of the shelf is a picnic basket, the top closed, the long arch of the handle nearly grazing the ceiling. I’ve never seen it before. I flip the top up but don’t reach inside, afraid there might be spiders. After a moment I decide to tip the basket on its side so I can look straight in; when I do so, something rolls out before coming to a halt against my wrist.

It’s a jar of teeth.

I gasp at the sight of them, all piled on top of each other with their roots all curved and yellow. There are at least twenty in the jar. My own teeth suddenly feel like they’re squirming in my mouth. Why on earth would Margaret have hidden a jar of teeth in her closet? How did she even get these? Suddenly I’m bombarded by an old memory that I’d completely forgotten about until now, something that had to do with Margaret and Penelope, something that had to do with teeth.

Something that started in the attic.

I tip the light into the basket to check if there’s anything else, eager to get out of the tiny enclosed space. Resting inside are a folded cloth, a few white candlesticks and a small bundle of what appear to be bones, bound with a string of brown leather.

I nudge the nightmarish jar back into the picnic basket with shaking hands, disgusted, then push it upright again. But something behind the basket prevents it from sitting flat, like it was before. I reach my hand behind the curved wicker corner and pull out a long wallet of shining black leather. I’m almost afraid to open it.

When I do, I instantly wish I hadn’t.

It isn’t anything like teeth or bones or clumps of hair inside the black leather wallet. It’s a stash of alcoholic wipes, and a scalpel, and tissues dotted with old blood. I lie there with it unfolded in my hands, like some sort of messed-up doctor’s kit, wanting to die. Margaret was hurting herself, just like I do.

And I’m the one who taught her how.

I’m overcome with a wave of dizziness. It’s difficult to breathe up here; I need to get out, but all I can manage is to rest the side of my face against the shelf and try not to pass out. The attic. The teeth. Penelope. Margaret.

Scriiiitch. The sound is quiet, a little muffled and coming from right next to my head. Scritch, scritch, scriiiiitch...

It sounds like fingernails being raked across the inside of the wall.

That’s just rats, I tell myself in my vertigo. Put the wallet back and get the hell out of here, now.

I scramble to fold the awful black wallet back up, then slide it behind the picnic basket against the back wall. You’ve lost your mind as much as Margaret did, my mind screams at me as the scratches against the inside of the wall become more frenzied, desperate, angry. I’m reminded instantly of the scratches on the wall in the attic, when Margaret made me cover my eyes.

I knew then that I used to be afraid of the attic, but I couldn’t remember why. It wasn’t the boxes of my mother’s things that scared me away. It was something else.

“Lucy,” I suddenly hear, a pleading, muffled voice coming from in the wall. “You won’t believe how much it hurts to be dead.”

I let out a strangled moan, in disbelief at what I’m hearing. No, I think wildly, remembering Margaret tearing up as she told me about hearing the voice of Penelope. No.

“Be quiet,” I say out loud without even meaning to, my voice frail. I scoot backward out of the tiny, terrible space, flinging myself down as soon as I possibly can, missing the chair completely and falling to the floor.

Once I’m up again, I don’t bother to put back the blankets I took down from the shelf, or the books that I accidentally kicked. I leave Margaret’s room without taking a single thing, no photos, no art, no reminders of a life that was once here and now isn’t. I somehow manage not to run.

There was a voice in the closet. And now all I want to do is cut myself into shreds.

I can’t let myself be driven to madness, like Margaret was.

Once back in my own room, I lock the door, take the glittery cigar box from my vanity shelf and open it to remove the purple flick lighter from inside. Then I close the box and walk across my room, shoving it into the ashes of the fireplace. I arrange sticks around and over it like a little house, then use the lighter to set the sticks on fire.

I watch until it’s gone, turned into molten bubbles of melted glitter and glue, smothering the glowing red-hot tools inside. It’s done now. No more. When I’m satisfied it’s been destroyed, I take off my clothes and climb into bed, rubbing my fingers over the lumps of scarring that web the skin of my hips and thighs and knees.

No more counting, I promise myself, only allowing the tears to come once the covers are over my head and everything is black. No more counting scars or you are going to lose your mind, if you haven’t already.

But I’m sure that I already have. For the first time since I found the jar of teeth in Margaret’s closet, I recall the memory of what happened all those years ago in the attic.