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and good friends and stability and a normal home life with my loving dad around, in which there are no auditions, rejections, dieting, constant focus on my appearance, my technique, and on and on with everything that is not ideal in my world. So-called actor friends who are insincere, competitive, actually adversaries. Men who either don’t realize or care about my youth, who want things from me that of course I will not give but make me worry I’ll be punished for not giving. A life so solitary that I need to fabricate friends by making up stories about every stranger I encounter.Meals alone. Walks alone. Movies alone (at least the R-rated ones). No boyfriend. And finally, finally, after example after example, the dreaded word
loneliness
. She goes on and on about how I’m deluding myself by pretending that I’m comfortable or even happy.
    It just pisses me off, so I try to flip it on her and bust holes in her snotty little theory. Why aren’t I Sloane’s fantasy? I’m an actress; doesn’t every high school girl want to dream of something like this? I live in Manhattan instead of Mystic, Connecticut. Which is the fantasy? My sister is adorable and my best friend and has her own set of cooties. My mom is never breathing down my neck, never trying to control me in any way. Most importantly, the whole world is truly open to me. I can choose to live in London or Paris or Rio or China, and I don’t need an escape plan to make it happen. I am the perfect fantasy for a girl who desperately wants to believe she has options but who has been rooted in one small town, one cozy home, one common life.
    “So tell me this,” I say. “Everything in Sloane’s life is a mess and is making her unhappy. You tell me why you think I’d want to invent that.”
    “You love to talk about the freedoms in your life,” she answered, “but those freedoms are all external. Emotionally, you have to suppress so much. You perform for your employers, you keep your sister’s spirits up, you can’t really confide in your mom, and you have no truly close friends. Sloane lets you be selfish, angry, even unfair, but all in the package of a basically decent person with a comforting support group. I don’t know why you’re so resistant to seeing this.”
    And then she smiles.
    “Of course I do,” she says. “You don’t want to give her up.”
    “Any more than she wants to give me up.”
    “You have to say that immediately out of your fear that if the balance were to slip for a moment, you might lose her. In a way, Sloane is a healthy fiction. It’s you as your own most intimate friend. Even more than identical twins, you know every secret of each other’s heart. While Sloane is in your life, you feel you will never truly be alone.”
    “That’ll be $300, please,” I say. And she laughs.
    “Maggie, the problem is that this is a detachment from reality. One you do everything possible to defend. But things like this, and I must I admit I’ve never seen one quite like this, can’t remain stable forever. Something will change. It may just go away, which could happen fast or slow. Or it could morph into a different kind of detachment from reality as you desperately fight to cling to it. I am talking about schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder. Maggie, there’s no cure for those types of mental illnesses. Once they take hold, there’s no way back.”
    She has never said this before. I’m so frightened I don’t even think of some smart-ass comeback. She really means this. She is really scared of it. She is really scared for me. Which means one thing more that I hadn’t really thought about. She actually cares what happens to me.
    “Maggie, if I could wave a magic wand and let you stay in this fantasy forever, it would be very, very, very bad for you. Can you imagine why?”
    I can’t. And in spite of my customary skepticism, I really want to hear.
    “Trying to live two lives keeps you from truly committing to anylife at all.