Bellamy’s brothers are overprotective - especially her oldest, Indy, who threatens anyone who treats her badly. He stands in the doorway of his duplex, bobbing the baby in his arms. Indy is twenty eight years old, and insists on date night once a week with his wife. Bellamy, who volunteered to babysit, is not really the motherly type. Riku is a doe-eyed ten month old, and moves very quickly, often sending Bellamy on a dash to catch him before he gets into something dangerous. “Thanks,” says Indy, plopping the toddler into Bellamy’s hands. He’s an organized and anxious man, and trusts almost no one to look after his son. Bellamy isn’t sure her sister-in-law likes her much. In any case, she’s not overly friendly, but follows her husband out the door quickly, locking it behind them.
“Okay, Riku.” Bellamy sets her nephew down, turning to ensure the stair gates are up. “You’ve already had your nap, so what should we do until your parents get home?” She has no idea how to deal with children, having none of her own, and spending little time with them. Indy never leaves her alone with Riku for longer than a couple hours. He’s the oldest child, and the legal guardian of their teenage brother, Asa. It’s a long story. Bellamy doesn’t usually tell people about it. “Do you watch TV? Your dad said you like Cocomelon.” Riku hasn’t learned to walk, but he crawls very fast, and never stays in the same place for very long. He plays with a plastic car, babbling at it, making no sense. Babies are dirty. Bellamy isn’t sure how she feels about them. Her parents should never have been married. Bellamy was married once, too.
She was born with a large port wine birthmark covering half of her face, and the backs of her hands. She hasn’t left the house without makeup since early teenagehood. Classmates weren’t the only ones who made fun of Bellamy for her skin.
“Do you need a snack, Riku?”
The cupboards are always full. Indy’s wife is a chef, which is fortunate because Indy can’t cook to save his life. Akari makes many healthy homemade snacks. Indy is too worried about feeding his child healthy foods. Riku crawls across the room to Bellamy, picking up a plastic ball, bringing it to his mouth. It’s too big to choke on. Babies chew on absolutely everything. Riku’s teething. This makes him irritable and tired. He likes blueberries and boiled eggs, as long as they’re cut into small enough pieces that he won’t choke on them.
“Here’s some berries. I think they’re your favorite.”
Bellamy doesn’t recognize herself in the mirror. She lives behind a thick cloud of fog, watching her body move of its own accord, with no say in any of it. It’s hard to explain how it feels to be disconnected from your body. Bellamy lives alone in a tiny house she helped assemble. She was married for six months, and Simon lived in the tiny house too. She loved him. She spent her entire marriage detached from her own thoughts. She doesn’t remember most of her childhood.
On bad days, she spends hours disconnected from her body: watching herself speak, move, and breathe, but really having no part in it. She possesses memories that seem to have been lived by her body, but don’t belong to her. Most days, it feels like Bellamy watches her life go by without participating in it at all.
“Mama?”
Like a lot of babies his age, Riku gets separation anxiety. He tugs on Bellamy’s pant leg, whining. He knows she’s not his mama. Indy is overly attached to his ten month old. Even Akari says he needs to teach him how to self-soothe. “Your mama will be home in a bit.” Riku doesn’t want to be picked up. When Bellamy tries, he screams loudly, wiggling away. “What do you need?” Nobody really knows how to raise a baby. Bellamy’s parents did a poor job, and she’s the one who has to pay the consequences. Riku sleeps in a crib next to his parents’ bed, even though there’s enough space in the duplex for a room of his own. He’s small for his age. At least, this is what Indy says.
Riku takes a few berries in his chubby fist, dripping juice all over the carpet. Akari won’t be happy about this. Bellamy is supposed to feed him at the table, with a bib. It’s not her first time watching a baby. She knows that they’re messy and smelly. Bellamy worked all day. A full day of activity makes her very tired.
Bellamy’s father died when she was sixteen and locked away in a hospital. This is one of her earliest memories as host. Nobody speaks about it. In therapy, she practices how to communicate with parts of her that hold different memories. She would look in a mirror, and wonder who she was looking at - hear stories from others of things she’d said and done, with absolutely no recollection of them. She appeared out of nowhere one day, and now she can’t leave. Classmates in high school would call her by a name she didn’t know, and ask questions about herself that she didn’t know the answer to.
You’re going crazy, everybody insisted. For years, this felt like the only explanation.
The tiny house was built for her and Simon, but it’s really only big enough for one person to live comfortably. Bellamy owns the house, and Simon was unhappy about losing his access to it after the divorce. For months afterwards, he tracked her whereabouts. She remembers being followed by him after work, and finding packages on her doorstep early in the morning. Somehow, the man memorized her schedule, and this was the most frightening part. Bellamy is a purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. She learned mostly to protect herself from her mother. Self-defense comes in handy a lot of the time.
“Hey.” Asa is fourteen years old. He sneaks up on her. He’s learned to be sneaky, living in fear. He sits on the living room floor, handing Riku a toy that’s fallen. “Indy didn’t tell me you were coming.”
Bellamy suspects her youngest brother is a system, too. He says things sometimes that are unlike him, and doesn’t remember conversations from days ago.
Voices rattle in her head. She often has very negative, abusive thoughts she can’t control. “Does he ever?”
Asa frowns, staring at the wall. “Not really.” It’s been six years since Indy adopted him. When Bellamy and Luca were teenagers, he adopted them, too.
Indy and Akari get home before dinnertime. Although Bellamy has been invited to stay, she’s got a date tonight, and it’s been a while since she felt comfortable around another human being. Indy always cares too much about what happens in Bellamy’s life. She hasn’t been on a date since Simon. All of Bellamy’s house is purple. It’s only a hundred square feet, but she loves the space. She loves the interior of her house, and towing it to different locations, and hanging plants. She never has people over.
“So tell me about your date.” Indy holds Riku on his lap, playing with his hair. Asa sits on the kitchen floor, rarely participating in conversation. “Who’s it with? What are you doing?” He met his wife online, as most people meet nowadays. It feels strange that she’s old enough to be married, too. Ciel is divorced too. He hasn’t spoken much about his past.
“I’ll tell you about it if it goes well.” Indy knows Bellamy’s policy on dating. No sex on the first date, no falling in love, and definitely no revealing of personal information until she knows if there’s potential. “I gotta get going. I’m going out in a bit.”
Bellamy never really knew the body’s father, but learns about him through her brothers and old journal entries. He was a victim of their mother, too. Bellamy has a hard time believing that her siblings suffer too. Even her younger brothers are more put-together than her. Bellamy isn’t pretty. When she wears makeup, nobody can tell. Where there’s no birthmark on her face, there’s skin marred with acne scars and scabs from picking. Some headmates pick a lot. Some have impeccable impulse control.
Bellamy’s mother used to say she looked ill without makeup. She’s pale, with splotchy skin and fiery hair, and she doesn’t tan in the sun. Nobody in the family has red hair, except her. Her mother used to hate her for this.
“Hi, Bellamy.”
Due to bouts of paranoia, Ciel doesn’t know where she lives. There are things he’s said in conversation that she doesn’t know about. He’s very cute; she loves his pink hair, and his short beard. She’s not outgoing. It’s scary and dangerous to let people know you. “Hi, Ciel.” Bellamy enjoys online conversation with him, but it’s so much different to speak to someone in person. They stand outside a mini golf course; Bellamy keeps her distance, trying desperately to focus on conversation. She’s lived an entire lifetime he doesn’t know about. He smells like smoke, and somebody in headspace dislikes this.
Everything looks make-believe. It’s like living inside a dream, or being a ghost. Sometimes it feels like, if someone touched her, they would go right through her. Ciel smiles, looking a bit shy. He responds to messages quickly and genuinely. “Mini golf was a good idea. I used to go with my family all the time when we were kids.” He has two sisters. This is information collected by somebody else. Bellamy read it in the system notebook. She has no tattoos. Ciel, who works at a tattoo shop, has ink on his arms and, apparently, in places she can’t see. He smokes when he walks, tapping ash onto the ground. Her head is very noisy.
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Nightmares are funny things. They come in the form of terrors, or vivid imagery that breaks Bellamy into a cold sweat. Sometimes, she wakes in the middle of the night to somebody inside her head calling her name. She keeps a notebook beside her bed, for journaling dreams or for writing down reminders. She’s had memory issues since childhood: her mother would call her lazy, or stupid, or unambitious. She hasn’t spoken to Rebekah in years. When she was eighteen years old, she found herself in the middle of a muddy cemetery, with no recollection of how she got there. It was rather strange; she remembered feeling odd in her classroom at school, and the next thing she knew, a search party had been sent out for her. Bellamy still can’t explain what happened. She supposes now that it must have been Zoya who brought her here; she’s always been drawn to the occult. Her head is wrapped in cotton. Other people’s voices are muffled and distant.
It took a month to build her house. Without the help of her brothers, it would have taken much longer. “How long were you married? I don’t think you ever told me.” Bellamy walks slowly, adjusting her fanny pack around her waist. It’s not the most attractive bag, but it’s practical, and just big enough to carry all of her essentials. They say it’s not necessary to know every little thing about a person. You can think you know everything about a person, and turn out to know nothing about them at all.
Ciel is nearly as old as her oldest brother. He drops his cigarette onto the ground, and then shrugs. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk about that. Maybe he’s secretive, too. “Six years.”
This isn’t a short time. Bellamy shouldn’t pry. Her curiosity always gets the best of her. “Why’d you get divorced?” She didn’t know he was divorced, until she read it. On the way to the golf course, she passed a Rolls-Royce Dawn Drophead - an extremely rare model owned only by private collectors. Bellamy would love to get her hands on one. She knows more about cars than the average person.
Ciel lights another cigarette shortly after putting out the first one. He walks like her brother: lazily, scuffing his feet on the ground. “I didn’t, really.” Aside from the two of them, no one else is near. This puts Bellamy on edge. “Looks like we have the whole course to ourselves,” says Ciel, holding out a golf club to her. When people move toward her unexpectedly, she cowers. There’s a phone in Ciel’s back pocket. Not long ago, his youngest sister moved in with him, and their parents aren’t all that happy about it. Aspen is fifteen, and sounds sweet. Ciel says she isn’t. He has another sister too, but hasn’t talked about her much. He seems like a person with a lot of secrets. He’s looking at her.
You’re pretty much the ugliest girl in our class! No boy will ever like you! You look gross.
Junior high was the hardest part of school. Kids are mean, and they only get worse with age. When Bellamy covers her imperfections, people pay attention to her. Even the most confident people have insecurities. Some headmates are better at acting confident than others. “You’re pretty,” says Ciel, careful not to stand too close. Men don’t compliment you unless they want something. Usually, they say she’s pretty for a big girl. You have to be careful not to trust too early - but sometimes, it’s not that easy. Maybe she’s pretty when she controls what people see, and when she dresses a certain way. Some people are pretty without any effort at all. Sometimes, Bellamy gets paranoid. The world is very dangerous, and people only look out for themselves. Maintaining relationships is very hard when there are parts of you who’d do anything to sabotage them. Bellamy has been seeing the same therapist regularly for a few years, and she’s made some progress, but understanding yourself is tedious and exhausting. She works in construction, and restores old cars for her garage.
“Do you ever feel like you don’t exist?” Most people have never dissociated. It happened to Bellamy for the first time in her preteen years, after quite a bad incident with her mother. It feels strange. For years, Bellamy had no explanation for it. “Do you ever look in the mirror and feel like that’s not your body? Like, it’s a body, but you don’t own it or control it.” There are large gaps in Bellamy’s memory. She looks forward to the time off work, and to meeting with her therapist. She always needs help explaining. Everybody thinks therapy is for “crazy” people. Everybody thinks Bellamy is faking, that she wants attention or pity or something else that couldn’t be further from the truth. She’d give anything not to have the attention on her, and to just be looked at the same as everyone else.
Bellamy has been hosting for nine years, and has few memories of the body’s life prior to this. Before her, there was somebody who’s since gone dormant. There are three frequent fronters aside from her, and others who show themselves once in a while, and others nobody has ever met. Outside of the fifteen she’s already met, Bellamy doesn’t know exactly how many exist.
Ciel is patient with her. He gives her endless tries to finish a course, and doesn’t get annoyed when she dissociates in the middle of a hole. Simon was patient at first, too. “No, but it sounds unnerving.” He eats Doritos, and tips the bag toward her. He has deep brown eyes, and a purple silicone wristband. Bellamy doesn’t know his ex-wife’s name, or how their marriage ended. She wants to trust him. It’s always the people you trust the most that leave you the most broken.
Mini golfing doesn’t take a long time. After sharing snacks and completing the course twice in a row, Bellamy feels overwhelmed and tired. The pets need to be fed. They stay in her bedroom, and they take up most of the space. Simon hated the pets. Zoya loves things that aren’t typical. Her mother lives in the psych ward - although she hasn’t referred to Rebekah as her mother for years. Any woman can have a child. There’s more to being a mother than just birthing a child. When Bellamy was a baby, her mother nearly strangled her to death during a particularly bad psychotic episode. She doesn’t tell people about this.
Guys don’t like girls who are insecure and uncertain. Bellamy’s therapist says it will help with her confidence to feign it. Every morning before starting her day, Bellamy writes a short journal entry and says some words of affirmation in the mirror. Every night, she sits down and speaks to each of her headmates individually. This is something that was recommended to her by her therapist many visits ago. Some days, her mental health is better than others. Some days, she spends eight hours straight in a dissociative haze. Nowhere is safe for her: not even the places that claim to be safest.
When Ciel drops her off at home, he asks for a hug, and leaves the smell of smoke lingering on her jacket. People touch her without asking. This brings her back to the worst parts of childhood. Rebekah once told her never to have sex with a man on a first date, because if you put out too quickly, nobody will take you seriously. There’s not many things Rebekah has said that Bellamy remembers. This pops into her mind at random moments.
“Bye, Ciel.” Her head is foggy. It’s impossible to control who uses the body at which time. Ciel says something, but everything is fuzzy, and Bellamy is detached. It’s not uncommon for children to have invisible friends. Bellamy had invisible friends too, but hers were different. Children don’t know how to explain that the voices inside their head don’t belong to them. Bellamy would lose weeks or months of memories at a time, and wake up in the middle of the night to voices speaking, without any clue of where they came from. It’s hard to remember most of her childhood, and the days have always seemed to overlap and mesh together.
Zoya hates purple. She likes crystal balls, and lace, and black clothing - but it’s Bellamy’s house, and she just lives in it. Shopping takes a very long time. Presentation is something that has to be agreed on by everyone, and sometimes, sacrifices need to be made. Inside the system notebook, there’s a note written in block letters on unlined paper. It’s so strange to look at. The writing came from her hand, but it doesn’t belong to her, and she certainly has no recollection of it being written. Until headmates learn to be co-conscious, keeping a notebook is the most efficient way to keep information organized. Without Jesper, there would be a lot more information left unknown. The room is a mess: boxes half unpacked, scattered through the small bedroom, random things that have been gathered over the years. They keep everything the headmates collect or make, for no reason other than understanding them better. Elara likes stickers and drawing. L likes ladybugs and pressing flowers.
It’s very hard to be taken seriously. It’s very hard to work an adult job, or have adult relationships, or manage responsibilities. Bellamy spent a good chunk of her teenage years living in a psychiatric ward, where she was sent for safety after attempting suicide. It was miserable here. It was miserable at home, too. They've been attending therapy for most of their life, although they switch therapists often. It’s very important to have regular conversation with headmates, but it feels frightening sometimes. Although Bellamy’s body has experienced many traumas, she doesn’t hold much of it.
“Hi, baby. Do you want a snack?”
A Manx rat is tailless from birth because of a mutation, so it needs to be bred properly and safely to minimize its health issues. Rats don’t usually live very long. Zoya has had hers for just under a year. They often crawl up her shirt or onto her lap. They eat snacks right out of her hands.
Bellamy’s ex-husband, Simon, found pleasure in forcing out headmates by triggering them. Her therapist, Moira, makes most of her system feel safe and understood. We’re all a part of this body and mind, Zoya told Simon once, so if you marry Bellamy, you technically marry all of us.
Not everybody sees it this way. Zoya spends a lot of time online. Bellamy is scared of strangers. Nobody wants to be known by those they don’t know well enough to trust. Some don’t want to be known even by the rest.
I think I’m going insane. I fell asleep in my room, and woke up in a part of town I’ve never been to before. I can’t remember my name or my childhood. I look in the mirror and can’t figure out who I’m looking at.
Bellamy has large, curly writing. Over the years, Zoya, like most of the rest, has mastered imitating her. It was Moira who suggested the implementation of a notebook. It was also Moira who suggested taking time each day to try and get to know each other. Their house is very small. Zoya hasn’t been around nearly as long as some of the others.