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them to write the occasional story in the style of
fill-in-the-blank
. This was a problem. Creative writing already weirded her out, and now she had to crawl around the heads of these guys, too? Seriously? Most of these writers ended up killing themselves. But there was no way she was getting sucked into making little Wilbur squeal.
    The Bell Jar
had been on this past summer’s reading list, and she’d decided to get a jump on it, starting right after finals and a couple days before her seventeenth birthday. Well … 
big
mistake. The book completely freaked her out. Somehow she got … she became
lost
, slipping into the story the wayshe might slide into a tight pair of skinny jeans, and then into Esther’s head. Started looking at the world differently, too, as if staring through a bizarre set of lenses that showed her phantoms no one else could see. And once or twice, swear to God, she heard someone call her name, only to turn and find no one there.
    Yet that feeling was … 
familiar
, somehow. Like,
I know this. This once happened. At some point, I was really and truly nuts
. As if by reading all about Esther Greenwood, Plath’s stand-in for herself, she was remembering what it was like to go slowly insane; to be trussed in a straitjacket and forced to gag back too-sweet medicines and then locked away beneath a bell jar to rave. Which was crazy.
    The Bell Jar
was bad: an infection, a fever raging through her body, burning her up. It got so awful she spent a couple hours studying a wickedly jagged razor of clear glass, filched from the discards bucket at the hot shop, and thinking,
What if? Go on, do it, you coward. You know you want to; you know this is the best way, the only way to pass through into …
    Through? Into
what?
What she’d found down in Jasper’s cellar years ago? (And nope, no way she was thinking about
that
, nosirreebob.) And go where? Who the hell knew?
    She hadn’t sliced and diced—obviously—but the temptation to cut, to filet herself, really hack those arteries and watch the blood bubble, still occasionally slithered into her mind like the black tangle of a nightmare she just couldn’t shake.
    Honestly, after that whole
Bell Jar
mess, the prospect of studying the work of insane writers, slipping into their skins, made lopping off Wilbur’s balls almost attractive. But she was stuck.
5
    THE CLASS HAD started with science fiction, which was okay, although Kramer was in love with the sound of his I’m-from-Cambridge-and-you’re-not voice:
To paraphrase the incomparable though deeply disturbed Philip K. Dick, whoever manipulates words manipulates the existential texture of reality, as we blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah
. But when Kramer began bloviating about quantum foam and Schrödinger’s cat and dark matter and more
blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah
, and everyone else was
oh, awesome, that’s like, dude, so
Star Trek … she just couldn’t help herself. Dark matter could only be inferred. In the case of Schrödinger’s kitty, collapsing probabilities through observation had
nothing
to do with massless particles popping out of quantum foam. And quantum effects
could
be observed on the macroscopic level at near absolute zero within the energy sink of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which therefore proved Hardy’s Paradox regarding the interaction of quantum and anti-quantum particles that might actually coexist in related timelines and alternative universes …
    A single death glare from Kramer, though, and she clammed up. Fine. Be ignorant. Mangle science. See what she cared.
    After that, the class drifted to horror, specifically Wisconsin’s Most Famous Crazy Dead Writer, Frank McDermott, who was originally from somewhere in Wyoming and lived in England a good long time, but who was keeping score? Besides writing a bazillion mega-bestsellers, McDermott’s claim to fame was getting blown to smithereens by his equally wacko nutjobof a wife. (Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Frank Lloyd