Silence Verses The Noise

Cassie Johnson is a seventeen-year-old artist who has recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia. After a period of spending time at the hospital, she is back at school, working closely with her therapist and taking her medication to manage her symptoms, such as auditory hallucinations and visual distortions. To stay grounded, she carries a notebook to write down the things that she can see verses what she thinks she can see. (and occasionally draws them out) One evening, while writing in her notebook at the park, Cassie sees a boy that she has ran into from time to time, Noah Shepard, being forced into a car by someone she recognizes-a person and her mind tells her is her psychotic monster. When she reports Noah missing the next day, the school and the police told her that Noah moved away weeks ago. Cassie is caught in a terrifying loop: Is Noah actually missing, or is her mind projecting a "mystery" onto a normal event? As she finds physical clues. Which include a dropped key chain, and a torn notebook page, everyone around Cassie including her concerned parents, assumes she is having a relapse. To solve the mystery, Cassie has to develop a rigorous "reality-testing" system. She uses her phone to record audio, if it's on recording then it's real if not, it's just a hallucination) and takes photos of evidence to see if it remains consistent when she looks at it later. She must learn to differentiate between a "delusion" and a "gut feeling."