Pretty Girl Thirteen by Liz Coley

rested her chin in her hands, leaning close to Angie. “That will require communication and negotiation. You’re reclaiming your position as dominant and they’re naturally resisting.”
    “Oh my God. You make them sound like real people.”
    The doctor nodded. She rolled her pearl choker absent-mindedly with her left hand. “Angie. This is something you absolutely must realize. They
are
people, sharing your brain space, mapped into different neurons in your brain. They have a physical reality. They aren’t figments of your imagination. You share some things, like a body, a pair of parents, et cetera. But your traits and desires might be worlds apart.”
    Angie was silent, thinking about the word “desires.”
    Dr. Grant waited patiently. “What are you thinking?” she asked after a long minute.
    Angie concentrated on the pattern of light filtering through the loose woven curtains. “I’m afraid they’re going to get me into trouble. I had … an incident. You won’t tell my mom any of this, right?”
    The doctor made the gesture of locking her lips and throwing away the key. “You, Angie, are my patient. Not your parents.”
    She took a deep breath. Confession was good for the soul. Souls. Right? “Okay. Besides suspecting that the ho-wear is probably shoplifted, which is bad enough, I have a problem with a guy.”
    “Oh dear. Unwelcome advances?” Dr. Grant asked.
    “You could say that.” This was so embarrassing. “But not by him. By me. Part of me, like, attacked him. I, um, got physical in a way that’s completely NOT ME.” She couldn’t help raising her voice. Then she whispered, “Can they hear me? The alters?”
    “Can you hear them?” the doctor reflected back.
    Angie sighed. “Only a couple of times, I thought maybe I heard a voice and no one was around, but I figured it was just my imagination. How does that work?”
    “It’s absolutely fascinating,” Dr. Grant replied, her blue eyes shining with the enthusiasm of an expert. “In the memory centers of your brain, different sets of neurons hold the separate memory patterns of the alters, however many there are.”
    “However many?” Angie gasped under her breath, but the doctor went on.
    “The connections between them are few or nonexistent, which is how the alters can keep their secrets from you, the dominant Angie, and from one another. When you hear their voices, the speech centers of your brain are activated just as though you were hearing them from outside yourself. We’ve seen all this with functional MRI studies and PET scans.”
    Angie felt the dismay on her own face.
    Dr. Grant frowned. “Does it help you to understand this? The science, I mean?”
    “I suppose so.” Not really. She’d read a bunch of websites, a bunch of threads. It all seemed so weird and unlikely when other people talked about their own experiences. But it was real. It was her reality. Her life. And currently she was time-sharing it with someone who liked to shoplift sexy underwear.
    “Do you have questions?”
    “Only a million,” Angie said. “But the most important one is how to fix it. I don’t want to blank out. I don’t want to find strange clothes in my drawers or on my body. I don’t want to do humiliating things. I want my life back.
    “I want to be in charge.”
    “I understand. Of course you do. You want to control the gate, and that’s only natural.”
    “What gate?”
    “It’s typical to have a personality who stands aside, stays inside, observing and recording and deciding who needs to come out in different situations—a gatekeeper. Like a boss who stays in the home office and decides who gets to go out on the road.”
    “Great. How do I get that job?” Angie asked. “So I can lock the damn gate.”
    “Therapy, my dear.” Dr. Grant put down her notepad and folded her hands in her lap.
    “So talk to her. Tell her it’s time to retire. Time for a new boss.”
    “I wish it worked that way, Angie. But gatekeepers are