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

her fashion rules.  I never realized that Liz was an entirely different person.
    Those were the ones I knew the best.  Others I had just brief glimpses of.  There were still others that the doctors discovered during her stay in the state hospital and that I met during my visits there. 
    Every weekend and sometimes during the week I would travel with Barbara the seventy miles down to the state hospital to see her.  Many of the visits she wouldn’t see Barbara.  The doctor’s had been doing some deep therapy and were spending a lot of time delving into her past.  Her anger at her mother would get dredged up and she wouldn’t be able to see her. 
    Somehow, I was the “safe” one.  The only person all her personalities felt safe being with. 
    The doctor s were trying a combination of different anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and mood-altering medications to try to “integrate” the different personalities back into one, back into the core Elizabeth or Lisbeth.  Some she reacted well to, others she didn’t.  Sometimes during my visits she was barely there, just an over-medicated patient, one who hardly recognized me.  Other times, she was a manic chain smoker, a habit she’d picked up to fit in with the other patients.  Still other times, she was a stranger to me, a new personality that I didn’t know, but who had “heard” about me.
    This was when I met Maxine, the brash and hard truck driver.  She was tattooed and pierced from head to toe.  She could tell you such detailed stories about some of her tattoos that you could swear you could see them appearing on her arms.  Maxine loved her Camel cigarettes and had an attitude about everything.
    Chad was one of her personalities that frankly made me uncomfortable.  He was in his late thirties, loud, abusive and controlling to women.  He was a bully and mean-tempered.  He was the embodiment of the men Lisbeth despised or feared.  Possibly the echo of her dead-beat father.   I would keep my visit short if Chad was there.
    On they went until the doctors had identified twenty-seven different personalities.  They carefully diagnosed their individual characteristics and traits.  It was well documented that when one of her more calm personalities were present, such as Beth Ann or Bethany, she would be right handed, her features were softer, her entire appearance warmer.  When Chad or Mick was there, and especially Vesper, she used her left hand, her voice lowered, and her features sharpened.  There was even an incident where Maxine was talking to one of the doctors and he could actually see piercings appear in multiple places in her ears and face.  When she changed to Bethany, the piercings disappeared.
    Throughout the rest of that school year and into that summer, when Lisbeth should have been graduating from high school, packing and moving to Maryland, she was instead at the state mental hospital, a guinea pig to medication and therapy.  Sometimes our visits were regular, but at other times she wouldn’t respond well to therapy and the visit would be cancelled.
    I would get letters from her, sometimes several times a week.  It was always fascinating seeing the different changes in handwriting, sentence structure and subject matter based on who was writing to me at the time.  Sometimes the person writing to me would change from one paragraph to the next.  I became familiar with Lizzy’s child-like scrawl. Beth Ann’s determined print and Liz’s fancy cursive. 
    As I started my senior year of school, the doctors increased her medication in a desperate attempt to integrate her personalities.  She wouldn’t recognize me most visits and many times she would act as though she didn’t even know I was there. 
    School became more challenging to me, classes required more studying and homework, and I was sending off scholarship applications to every school in a hundred mile radius.  I wrote to Lisbeth as often as I could, but wasn’t surprised