Free The Atheist's Daughter by Renee Harrell

Matrix?
    You take the right pill, you get to believe whatever you want to believe. The same thing everyone else believes. You take the wrong pill and you’re lost in Wonderland forever.
    One pill makes you larger. One pill makes you small.
    This morning, I didn’t flush Dr. Ron’s pink pill down the toilet. I still have it, safely nestled in the bottom of my jewelry box. My old Disney Mad Hatter pin is lying on top of it, in case Mom decides to take a quick peek through my earrings and necklaces.
    Which has never happened, not once in my entire life.
    But just because something hasn’t happened doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Like when I saw the ghost people. Seeing ghost people was definitely a new experience.
    Hawk was there, too, and he got angry, mad at the glass asshole, but he didn’t see anything unusual about the guy. But the ghost man realized I could tell something was wrong with him. As if he was aware he was a see-through monstrosity and he knew I knew but he also knew I wouldn’t tell anyone. Like, somehow, he’d come across people like me before.
    If I’m reading him correctly, then maybe I don’t need to book an immediate return trip to the pastoral grounds of Kendall Sanitarium. Maybe. Because, just when I thought I’d finally figured out all the things that were weird about me, along comes Mr. Glass – sorry, Mr. Locke – to prove me wrong.
    Which makes me wonder if I’m wrong about some other things, too. Like taking the pills Dr. Ron ordered.
    If I’d been using my medication all along, as my psychiatrist insisted, maybe I’d be normal by now. Because what if there’s a process involved? At first, the medication leaves you feeling all fuzzy and wool-headed but, later, you’re turned into a good, upstanding citizen, a little dull of thought and slow to respond but no longer seeing crazy-ass crap that can’t/shouldn’t/doesn’t exist?
    That’s not exactly the life I crave but there are days when I’d settle for it.
    Somewhere along the line, I must have taken the wrong pill. But is the pink pill the one I really need?
    How do I escape Wonderland?
     
    *
     
    About my Mad Hatter pin: I bought it about three years ago, when the Debate Team traveled to Southern California for the Nationals and everyone went to Disneyland. We all acted like we were too cool for some overcrowded theme park, and we were, truly, but everybody showed up at the front gates, anyway. The Nationals were a total bust, only Cleve Kisner won anything, but it was fun, anyway.
    At the gift shop, paying three times what a chain store would charge, I bought the Mad Hatter pin. I stuck it on my t-shirt on my way home and Mom spotted it the instant I stepped off the bus. She had a total meltdown. She acted like I was advertising my past, rather than properly hiding it from the world.
    As if everybody in Winterhaven didn’t already know about me.
    “The gift shop had to have other pins,” Mom said. “Why didn’t you get Alice? Or the Cheshire Cat?”
    Her exact words.
    I know this because I wrote everything down the night I came home. It’s maybe the best thing about keeping a diary. If you put in an entry every three or four days, like I do, you can go back and see the things that happened to you. Your memories are right there.
    I flip through the pages and I see all of the stuff I wrote about Dr. Ron. The other stuff, too. The paragraphs about melting faces. The dreams I’ve experienced. All of the pills I’ve flushed.
    In other words, the complete and total chronicle of my unbalanced life.
    This comes to mind because, sitting at my desk, staring out of my bedroom window, I notice Tinkerbelle has somehow moved off of my window sill. Miss Belle, with your wings so pretty, did you somehow fly down to my end table last night?
    Or did someone put you on the counter and forget? Was someone in my room?
    I don’t remember turning my computer off, either. I’m sure I left the window open. Pretty sure, anyway.
    This is