Part I

Kitten

Chapter 1

When Morgan Geyser was a toddler, ghosts would hug her and bite her. As she got older, colors melted down the walls of her bedroom like paint, and rainbows orbited her body. She heard voices that reverberated inside and outside of her skull, as if she were standing in front of a loud intercom system. One of the voices, named Maggie, became a dear friend.

As Morgan learned to read, sentences floated around the pages of her storybooks like animated cartoons. Characters stepped from the screens of her favorite anime films, fully formed. She became friends with a boy named Sev who resembled an anime character, with dark bangs swooping across huge, opalescent gray eyes. When Morgan pressed her hand against Sev’s chest, she felt his heartbeat. Sometimes he slept in her bed, and Morgan woke up with his drool in her hair.

At school, the visions and voices competed for Morgan’s attention. She stared into a rainbow mist, struggling to focus as a teacher droned somewhere in the fog. In private, Morgan preferred to talk to Maggie, Sev, and the others out loud—it felt more intimate. But in public, she spoke to them with her mouth closed. Other children found this strange and shrank from her.

Morgan’s unpopularity wasn’t lost on her parents, Matt and Angie Geyser. While other girls wore rainbow T-shirts emblazoned with words like LOVE and listened to boy bands, their daughter decorated her bedroom with a life-sized cardboard cutout of the Star Trek character Spock, a human-alien hybrid whose actions are ruled by logic rather than emotion. She named her guinea pigs Thor and Loki, after the gods of thunder and mischief from Norse mythology—allegedly enemies, though in Morgan’s case they peacefully shared a cage under her loft bed.

She spent a lot of time alone, but if anything, that impressed her parents. To them it signified strength and independence, not something to be pitied. They weren’t worried, because Morgan never seemed lonely.

And it was true that Morgan wasn’t lonely, because she was never really alone; she had Sev and Maggie. Rainbows followed her wherever she went.

But her parents didn’t know that. Only in hindsight would they see the warning signs and blame themselves—Matt, for his genetics, and Angie, for all the time she’d spent away, working and providing for the family. In the meantime, Morgan wasn’t hurt by her outsider status, and not caring what other people thought of her struck her parents as a rare and special quality, particularly in a girl—especially in Wisconsin, where midwestern conformity reigned.

Morgan’s mom, Angie, had grown up on a dairy farm. As a child, she named all the cows and dragged her doll into the barn to milk them with her dad. He was a strong man. But when Angie turned ten, his body became frail and rigid, gripped by cancer. For weeks, he lay unconscious on a hospital bed in the living room.

After he died, a crowd of strangers assembled on Angie’s front lawn, and she and her siblings hid inside while an auctioneer sold off their farm equipment and pieces of the property. Their mom, Dianna, closed the blinds, but Angie could still hear the auctioneer, rapidly selling her cows, one by one, without once mentioning their names.

Years later, Angie lay on her back in their new house, reading Stephen King novels. Her mother had remarried a nice man named Bob, a retired police chief from New Holstein, Wisconsin, where cows out-numbered people.

After Angie learned to drive at age sixteen, she was in a terrible car accident. To staple her scalp back together, doctors shaved part of her head. At home, Angie shaved the rest. But New Holstein was not the sort of place where women wore buzz cuts, and Angie’s neighbors were the sort of people to wonder why she had done that. They lived on an eerily perfect, quiet road where it seemed like no one ever went outdoors, and yet the yards were always immaculate, and when you stepped outside to walk the dog, you felt everybody’s eyes on you.

Angie wanted to live someplace where nobody knew her or cared about her hair. So she moved to the nearest big city and became a waitress like her mom.

Milwaukee was a nondescript city with a skyline dominated by church steeples. The heavy yeast smell of breweries wafted onto the highways, causing drivers’ eyes to water.

Angie got a job downtown, waitressing at the SafeHouse, a spythemed restaurant that had been in business since the 1960s. Diners entered through a secret entrance off the alleyway and stepped into what appeared to be a tiny, windowless room with a fireplace, where a secretary dressed like Moneypenny from the early James Bond movies subjected them to an interrogation, which included dancing, karate moves, and Hula-Hoops.

Finally, the fake fireplace opened, leading to the restaurant, where display cases contained spy emblems and real pieces of the Berlin Wall. At the Magic Bar, bartenders pulled dollar bills from oranges and doled out sugary drinks, such as the SafeHouse’s signature Great Spytini.

Like other waitresses at the SafeHouse, Angie wore a uniform of harem pants and was expected to memorize a spy-themed script.

Hello, spies, she said upon arriving at a new table. I’m going to be helping you with your food mission today, spies. Other parts of the act included:

Here’s your weapons of mass consumption. (Silverware.)

Can I clear the evidence for you? (Clear your plates?)

Here’s the damage report. (Your bill.)

Yet even when forced to address her customers as secret agents, Angie emanated a kind of regal sophistication. She had a Mona Lisa smile, huge eyes, and shiny light brown hair that had grown long since the car accident, falling nearly to her waist. For dessert, she served people goblets of ice cream that were bigger than their heads, speared with lit sparklers that crackled and popped.

When the SafeHouse bouncer, Matt Geyser, looked at Angie, his heart lit up, too.

Matt stood six feet four inches tall and weighed almost four hundred pounds. Most nights, his physical presence was enough to stave off fighting at the SafeHouse. But when customers drank too many Spytinis and got lippy, as Matt put it, he gave them a choice: they could hug each other or fight him.

People were impressed by Matt’s confidence. They didn’t know that he spent much of his life gripped by fear. When Matt stepped outside the restaurant, he saw patterns that floated through the air. Rainbow halos orbited the glow of city streetlights. When he caught his reflection in windows, he saw Satan standing behind him.

Unlike other girls Matt had dated, Angie was not put off by his schizophrenia diagnosis. She didn’t mind that he was a homebody, either, easily overcome in large social settings, and in return, Matt worshipped her. He pored over the photographs taken of her after the car accident, looking as beautiful in a buzz cut as Sinéad O’Connor. He was the first boyfriend to state the obvious: that Angie was pretty, and he won her heart by making her feel seen and accepted, by showing her that she was both normal and special and rare. On weekends, they stayed in to listen to Smashing Pumpkins albums and watch Tombstone, a movie about a couple of gunslingers who aren’t out looking to find any trouble, but trouble soon finds them.

Matt’s Mormon parents considered his schizophrenia a test from God, and instilled in him the belief that stoicism was the best medicine.

Grit and avoidance had served Midwesterners for centuries. In Wisconsin, winters lasted up to nine months. Night fell early and lasted well into the next day. Living in darkness could trigger mental illnesses; in the 1800s, newspapers printed stories about settlers walking naked into the snow or massacring their families in the middle of a hailstorm. Giant wolves prowled the prairie land. Those who survived with minds intact developed a high emotional threshold for isolation and bone-chilling cold. They learned to cope with the elements by repressing their feelings.

The horrid howl of the prairie wolf disturbed my sleep, Ole Knudsen Nattestad, one of the state’s earliest settlers, wrote in his diary in 1838, until habit armed my ears against annoyances of this sort.

When Matt was seven years old, he woke to see the ghost of his unborn sister hovering above him. She wore white and radiated love. Goodbye, she said, and disappeared. Matt ran to his parents, sobbing. He told them what he’d seen. He warned his pregnant mother that the baby inside of her was dead. She and his father told him not to worry. Go back to bed, they said.

But a few days later, a visit to the doctor confirmed Matt’s premonition. His mom apologized for not believing him.

God wants you here for some higher purpose, she said. Satan sends the demons after you because he hates seeing the light of God.

Years later, Matt sat on Angie’s couch, smoking a cigarette, when a familiar psychic sense hit him, and all at once he knew: they had just made a baby. Two weeks later, a pregnancy test proved him right. He was thirty and Angie was twenty-three. They were young and, although excited, felt somewhat unprepared. Matt worked only part-time as a bouncer, while Angie’s waitressing job yielded little income for all the time it took. They needed more money, a bigger apartment, and health insurance. Full-time employment put too much pressure on Matt’s mental health. So Angie hurried back to school to provide a better life for her family, and Matt prepared to be a stay-at-home dad. His schizophrenia became a distant concern compared with all the more pressing ones. Even if Morgan did develop symptoms, odds were they wouldn’t manifest until adulthood—and if her symptoms were anything like her father’s, they would be minor and treatable.

Even that possibility seemed so remote. According to the US National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders affect somewhere between 0.25 percent and 0.64 percent of people. NAMI has found that childhood schizophrenia is even more rare, affecting only 0.0025 percent of kids. Still, Matt and Angie’s optimism would turn out to be misplaced; studies vary, but research has shown that children who have one parent with schizophrenia are forty times more likely than the average population to present with the disease. There was a one-in-ten chance that Morgan would inherit Matt’s condition.

But for now, Matt and Angie’s excitement to meet their daughter overshadowed any anxiety. They needed to believe that her future would be bright. After she was born, they hung on to hope even more fervently. When children are involved, engaging with the worst-case scenario—kidnapping, child molestation, genetic abnormalities—fights against biology.

When Morgan was three years old and ran into their bedroom to say that hers was haunted—that ghosts were pulling her hair, biting her, hugging her—Matt and Angie reassured her that everything was fine.

They told her to go back to bed.

Morgan didn’t dream, at least not like other people did. Her nights were black, a respite from the voices and visions, while dreams, if you could call them that, consumed her waking hours, dripping through the ceiling of her classroom, where the walls seemed to fold in on themselves, and from their crevices climbed strange characters, some of them frightening. In the bathroom mirror, she saw the silhouette of a man standing behind her—a towering, shadowy thing, shifting in and out of corners, his body the color of smoke and ink. She named him It—Morgan hadn’t read the Stephen King novel at the time, she just didn’t know what else to call it. At night she woke to see bone-white faces flashing at her in the dark. They had black holes for eyes. Their features twisted in agony. But when she shined a light on them, they disappeared.

In 2010, when she was eight years old, Morgan woke in the night to see a demon girl crouched on her dresser. Morgan reached for her trusty flashlight, but when she switched it on, it only illuminated the girl’s distorted features. She peered down at Morgan and smiled.

The encounter marked a turning point in Morgan’s childhood. From then on, Morgan could no longer control her imaginary world or erase from it what scared her—and she began to experience an unfamiliar yearning for human company. In her bedside drawer, investigators would later find a clear plastic bag containing typed instructions on how to join a club, indicating that at some point Morgan had resolved to recruit someone new into her strange and increasingly lonely little world. She still loved Sev and Maggie. But she longed for a real friend—one that other people could see.

Chapter 2

Payton Isabella Leutner, nicknamed Bella since kindergarten, loved the color purple. She had brown hair, blue eyes, and a high forehead that lent her otherwise young features a serious, Elizabethan quality. Bella’s teachers would later describe her as a goodie-goodie, prone to telling on classmates for being naughty.

Morgan liked the way Bella drew kitties. In 2011, they started sitting together on the stairs at recess. They were both nine years old.

Other kids had considered Morgan weirdish since first grade. But Bella cared more about being nice than being popular. When Morgan raced around the blacktop at recess, playing tag with her imaginary friends, Bella took off running, too. She decided she would be there for all of Morgan’s adventures, even if she didn’t always understand the game they were playing.

It was a decision she would come to regret.

From the very beginning, Morgan and Bella’s friendship surprised those who knew them best. In many ways the two were opposites: while Morgan read books about serial killers for fun, Bella referred to scary stories as mean; while Morgan wore a black heart pendant and sneakers patterned with human skulls, Bella wore rainbows and butterfly wings. Both loved Harry Potter, baby dolls, Barbie dolls, American Girl dolls, guinea pigs, cats, and the color purple, but they practiced their devotion with varying degrees of intensity. When it came to cats, for instance, Bella volunteered at the local animal shelter. She liked to hold two kittens at a time, one over each shoulder. But Morgan wanted to be a cat. She pictured herself with fangs and cat ears, wandering around the earth, all confused and forlorn, like a lost kitten. Bella had a habit of caring for strays.

When Morgan told Bella about the voices, Bella pretended to hear them, too.

For the next three years, Bella became Morgan’s caretaker. When Morgan reached for the fire alarm at school, Bella swatted her hand away. When Morgan found a mysterious pill on the floor of the girls’ bathroom and threatened to eat it, Bella threw it in the trash. She invited Morgan to her hippie-themed birthday party. She watched Star Trek with Morgan, even though, according to her teachers, liking Star Trek constituted social suicide.

When Morgan practiced the Vulcan salute in public, Bella smiled. When Morgan dressed as Spock for Halloween, they trick-or-treated together. On a school field trip to Skateland, the local roller rink, Morgan thought it would be funny to skate holding hands with her Star Trek figurine, so Bella held one of the figurine’s hands and Morgan held the other. They circled the rink in front of everyone. When other kids whispered, they laughed.

Over time, Morgan became more and more of an outsider, while Bella blossomed socially. No longer so introverted, she was an advocate for herself and others, and she went out of her way to be nice to people other than Morgan. Bella’s classmates grew to like her. According to her teachers, she connected with others and was considered nice, sweet, and warm and normal, compared with Morgan, who seemed increasingly withdrawn, her teachers said, and very quiet. Adults who supervised the girls’ lunch period noticed that whenever Morgan and Bella sat down with other students, everyone around them stood up and left without a word. In class, when Morgan talked, other students rolled their eyes at her, and nobody wanted to partner up with her for group assignments. When teachers weren’t looking, Morgan’s classmates bumped into her on purpose in the hallway. They made jokes about whether Morgan’s weirdness might be contagious.

In 2012, the popular fifth grade girls offered to let Bella join their group if she stopped being friends with Morgan.

No, I choose Morgan, Bella said.

She wrote up a contract in her journal, promising to be best friends with Morgan forever. By way of signature, she and Morgan peed on the journal. They wanted to add footprints, too, so they filled a bowl with ink and set it down on Bella’s living room floor. But when they stepped into the bowl, it tipped over onto Bella’s mom’s favorite rug.

Morgan and Bella tried to clean up the mess using shaving cream and nail polish remover, and left the rug hanging in the laundry room. When Bella’s mom, Stacie, asked about it, they lied.

Stacie started to feel like Morgan was a bad influence on Bella. She encouraged Bella to make new friends. But Bella refused, knowing that without her, Morgan had no one.

We were friends, Morgan later said, and that’s the way it was going to stay until what happened.

Chapter 3

Prior to Morgan’s crime, Waukesha was considered one of the best places for children to grow up. Crime there was minimal. Less than one murder occurred per year. In the weeks leading up to the stabbing, residents phoned the police to report the following emergencies:

• A loud stomping noise in an apartment.

• The theft of one bicycle, which had been replaced with another bicycle.

• A broken accent light for an American flag.

• The discovery of a suspicious amount of dried blood (the caller was specifically concerned that there were not any animal carcasses nearby), which turned out to be dried paint.

Downtown, Germanic architecture dominated Main Street. Ten-foot-tall fiberglass sculptures of guitars painted by local artists commemorated guitarist Les Paul, Waukesha’s most famous former resident. Across from the Joke Shop, described by its owners as Good, Clean, Family Fun! Jokes, Pranks & Magic For All Ages! Gospel Magic & Christian Entertainment! sat the Little Swiss Clock Shop. The city’s total population hovered at seventy thousand. The median salary was $67,000. Most people worked in health care, education, or government—or at Husco International, a manufacturing plant—and could afford to buy their own home.

Growing up, Morgan took hikes with her dad through the nearby Kettle Moraine National Forest. Matt climbed Lapham Peak with her on his shoulders. When they rested at the public picnic tables, Morgan served him make-believe lunches. Back home, they crossed the street from their condo to David’s Park. Morgan played on the swings. She ran around the open fields. She loved the outdoors. Sometimes she wrapped her arms around tree trunks and squeezed. Matt called her a tree hugger.

When it was warm enough, Matt and Morgan sat on the beach at Minooka Park and built sand castles. On Halloween, they went to Spooka Minooka—where the park was transformed with fake spider-webs and jack-o’-lanterns—and stood in line for the haunted house, but whenever it was their turn to go inside, Morgan shrank back into the long queue of people and found some excuse to turn back.

One Halloween, an elderly Spooka Minooka volunteer saw Morgan bouncing in and out of line for the haunted house and asked if Morgan wanted to peek behind the scenes. She led Morgan and Matt under the haunted house, where the employees made their spooky entrances through trapdoors. That werewolf is my grandson, the volunteer said. And over here is my husband—at the end in the big witches’ cauldron. This is where he crouches down. We had to put a stool in here a few years ago for him. She hoped to convince Morgan that werewolves and witches were fake. But Morgan wasn’t so sure. She pulled Matt away to look at the Halloween decorations. Fake spider-webs that looked like gray cotton candy. Tiny plastic skeletons hanging from trees. Smiling jack-o’-lanterns and friendly-looking witches. All of it was just pretend.

At home, Morgan waited on the couch while Matt slipped outside to smoke a cigarette under the moon. She asked him where he was going, knowing he wouldn’t answer except to say, I’ll be right back. It seemed important to him that the cigarettes be kept a secret from her. So for his sake, she pretended not to know.

But Morgan knew her dad was different from other dads. He took good care of her, and she loved him. But he cried a lot, and sometimes he looked scared.

What’s wrong with you? she sometimes asked.

I’ll tell you when you’re sixteen, he promised.

It was like an arbitrary number, Morgan said later. Sixteen this, sixteen that. I guess when I turned sixteen they were planning to dump it all on me. She bowed her head. Obviously it didn’t work like that.

In Waukesha, summers were breezy and warm, all green grass and morning dew. Autumn crept through the trees like a fire, turning leaves bright yellow, orange, and red. Winters averaged two feet of snow, with temperatures plummeting as low as –30 degrees Fahrenheit with the windchill. But it was worth it for spring, when cranes nibbled the melting snow and badgers emerged clumsily from their river dens.

Matt was born and raised in Waukesha. His family believed firmly in the healing powers of Jesus. But after he received a schizophrenia diagnosis as a teenager, Matt’s mental illness occasionally became so debilitating that his parents supplemented God’s love with periodic visits to the psych ward. At the time, antipsychotics were crude, blunt instruments that left many schizophrenia patients unable to perform daily functions. When Matt’s mother came to see him in the hospital, her visit sparked about as much emotion in Matt as when the hospital janitor entered Matt’s bedroom to empty out the trash can. Whether to continue antipsychotics became a question of what kind of life Matt wanted to lead. On the one hand, when he did not take medicine, Matt feared his reflection. Satan stood behind him in mirrors. But to make the devil disappear also meant sacrificing joy.

Living medication-free promised a life of deep feeling. Matt experienced disabling social anxiety. Depression settled on his body like an avalanche of sand. But in between waves of panic and sadness stirred moments of such epic beauty. At nineteen years old, he stopped the drugs and moved into a trailer on his parents’ property to get back on his feet. He reassured himself that he knew the difference between hallucinations and reality. Anyone could see that he was not one of those men you spotted in big cities, stomping around and looking dirty and having conversations with the sky.

And Matt was lucky, in that sense. He felt everything. The ups and downs of human existence struck him with equal intensity. Stress consumed him, but so did love.

Matt’s parents owned multiple properties in Waukesha. But they were careful with money, keeping detailed ledgers of things they bought for Morgan as a baby—gifts that most middle-class parents would consider to be a standard part of becoming new grandparents. Like many conservative, religious men, Matt’s father expected to be in control, and his family catered to him. At dinner, he asked for a drink by commanding his wife with a single word, Milk! and she would fetch it immediately. Whether Matt was the first in his family to struggle with a mental illness was impossible to know, because the family never talked about it.

When Matt’s Mormon parents found out that Angie was pregnant two years into their relationship, they insisted the couple return to Waukesha and be wed as soon as possible. Matt didn’t need much prodding. He felt like a lucky guy. Angie was so beautiful that the cashier at the gas station near their apartment called her Matt’s New York City girlfriend. For Angie’s part, Matt stood out from her other boyfriends because he was kind and sensitive, with a larger-than-life sense of humor. The wedding took place in Angie’s parents’ dim living room, with the blinds partially closed, when Morgan was around three months old. Angie looked gorgeous in her simple gown. Matt’s beard was shaved into a chin strip. His long black hair fell almost to his shoulders.

After getting married, Angie enrolled in a technical college, and Matt became Morgan’s primary caregiver. Angie got a job as a neurodiagnostics specialist, monitoring machines that measured a patient’s neurological functioning during operations. She commuted up to one hundred miles on short notice to assist on brain and spine surgeries. To bring in extra income, Matt worked part-time as a janitor in one of his father’s office buildings. They purchased a condo at Sunset Homes for $78,000. Matt pushed Morgan’s stroller down familiar streets from his childhood. Later she brought home report cards signed by teachers who had taught him in school.

As the family’s primary earner, Angie often left the condo before sunrise and did not return until after Morgan’s bedtime. Over time, she became intimately familiar with the sight of the human brain. Yet she never guessed what was going on in Morgan’s head—all those voices, reverberating in her little skull like trapped birds.

Being a full-time dad gave Matt’s life meaning and acted as a stabilizing force against his schizophrenia. People with untreated mental illnesses can self-isolate. Their self-care and sleep hygiene fall to the wayside. But fatherhood forced Matt to stick to a schedule, to interact with the outside world on Morgan’s behalf. He made her healthy snacks, scheduled activities for her outside the home, and adhered to a strict bedtime routine that included lots of books. Every night, he sat on the edge of her bed and read Harry Potter novels upside down because he knew it impressed her. He drove her to school and helped her with homework. When Matt took her with him on janitorial jobs, Morgan pushed his vacuum cleaner down long carpeted hallways in empty office buildings, pretending to drive it like a car.

Matt had never expected to return to Waukesha. But he felt that it was good for Morgan—good for any child, really—to grow up in such a safe, idyllic place. At Morgan’s fifth grade graduation, he and Angie posed with her in front of a bunch of balloons and smiled for the camera. They were happy, and they thought she was, too.

But sometimes Morgan wanted to kill herself and didn’t know why.

Chapter 4

When Morgan was in elementary school, she overheard classmates talking about divorce. She had never heard the word before and was shocked by the concept.

What would you do if Mom divorced you? she asked Matt later.

I’d kill myself, Matt said.

The idea of suicide stuck with Morgan, and from then on, whenever she felt bored or upset, she pictured herself dying. After watching The Dark Knight, starring Heath Ledger as the Joker—a role that purportedly strained the method actor’s mental health, resulting in his death by accidental overdose—Morgan decided to cut a permanent smile in her face, like the Joker had, and to slit her wrists. But just as she was getting the knife, Sev talked her out of it.

Bella still pretended to see and hear Maggie and Sev and the others. But it was getting to a point where she could barely keep up. Morgan’s arsenal of imaginary friends was expanding to include unicorns, Ninja Turtles, and an abusive boyfriend for Sev named Geoffrey, who wore suspenders without a shirt and had what Morgan described as man boobs.

One day, when Bella and Morgan were changing out of their gym clothes in the locker room, Morgan stepped on an earring, and it stuck in her foot.

Morgan stared at it. Oh, she said. Pretty.

You need to take that out of there, Bella chided. Right now, or I’m going to get a teacher.

She was starting to feel more like a babysitter than a friend.

At school, Morgan drew pictures of herself running through