Free Don't Slay the Dragon (The Chronicles of Elizabeth Marshall Book 1) by Rachel Lucas

check on her, but finals were coming up and I’d recently met this college guy.  He was calling me every night and we were making plans for a date.
    By the next week when I still hadn’t seen her I decided to call her home and see how she was doing.  Barbara answered.
    “Hi, this is Caitlyn.  Can I speak with Lisbeth?”
    “She’s not here.”  Silence.  Nothing more.  It wasn’t like Barbara to be so tight-lipped. 
    “Do you know when she’ll be back?”
    “Caitlyn, Elizabeth is at Mountain West Regional Hospital.  She’s in the psychiatric unit.”  Her voice was hollow, dead.  I didn’t know what to say. 
    Barbara went on to tell me that Lisbeth had had a n ervous breakdown, a psychic break.  She had lost her temper over “nothing” and Barbara hadn’t been able to calm her down.  She’d called the paramedics who had transported Lisbeth to the local hospital.  It had taken six hospital staff to strap her down and medicate her.  She couldn’t have any visitors.  She was still undergoing a full psychiatric evaluation.  She would let me know when I could visit her.
    I hung up the phone and sank down into a kitchen chair in a state of shock and with a sense of guilt.  Had I failed my friend?  Was there something I could have done to prevent this?  I beat myself up with the questions for a long time after that. 
    It wasn’t until months later that I found out that her scholarship offer letter had arrived the day after she’d been admitted to the hospital. She had been accepted to the Naval Academy with a full scholarship, but she would never get the chance to go.
    I didn’t hear from Barbara again until she called me a few weeks later to tell me that Lisbeth had been transported down to the state mental hospital.  She was finally allowed visitors and Barbara wanted to know if I would go with her for the first visit.   It was a frightening thought, going down to the state hospital. 
    I agreed to go, as much to see my friend as to reassure myself she was ok.  Giving Barbara support was also important too.  I didn’t always agree with how she treated Lisbeth, but I could sympathize with her struggles with being a single mother trying to raise a daughter as changeable and unpredictable as her. 
    Driving down the interstate in Barbara’s small compact, I sat in silence and listened to her explain to me what to expect from the visit.  There would be security checks, our purses would be searched to make sure we weren’t bringing anything unsafe into the hospital. Our visits would be in an open common room, so our interaction could be monitored. We could only visit with her if her doctor thought she was doing well enough that day to be able to handle visitors.
    It was a cold, hard dose of reality.  Very few people question their sanity until someone close to them loses theirs.
    Lisbeth had been diagnosed as being bi-polar as well as with multiple personality disorder.  At that time, still being a junior in high school, the words meant little to me.  At first, the only thing I understood was that my best friend was very ill, and that our friendship may have changed in ways it might take years to understand.  It wasn’t until Barbara started going into more detail that I realized the full impact of just how much my friendship with her daughter may have altered.
    Barbara went on to explain that the doctors at the state hospital had found as many as nineteen different personalities in Lisbeth, and they suspected there were more.  It was a rare disorder, one they were still just trying to categorize. A team of doctors were working to try to understand and properly document the different personalities within her. As Barbara went on to list them, their names and individual characteristics, I numbly realized that I had met or was familiar with every one of them. 

 
    Chapter Fourteen

     
    Lisbeth, I would learn, was the “core personality”, the base.  She kind of kept everyone