Hello Sunshine

Kinsey

KINSEY

Phantom pain was a real bitch.

I'd be just laying in bed and be struck with the tingling, the tense swollen feeling where my foot used to be. In my half-asleep state, I'd throw back my blanket to massage the area only to see it wasn't there. I'd stare at the empty space for a terrifying moment resisting a scream until my brain caught up with my body. 

Every. Single. Time. 

I still didn't identify with my prosthetic, it didn't feel like an extension of me just a foreign body attached to me. On days where the pain was too much, I'd use crutches. It was as if the bloody amputation was weighing me down and I could do nothing but fall to the floor like a cinder block was tied around my knee. My crutches squeaked and clacked as I walked down the school hallway, Jess carrying my bag alongside me.

"Mum went crazy last night," Jess mumbled to me as we left the building toward the lunch hall.

Concern filled me, she hadn't mentioned anything in form. "Oh no, what about?"

"She found my instagram."

My eyes widened. "Oh shit, did she go through your phone again?"

She sighed an rubbed her forearm. "Yeah, I didn't have time to delete it she just grabbed it from me."

I stopped and reached for Jess though it was a little awkward with my crutches. She hugged me tightly.

"Well it's not too long until we finish college, which university are you going to again?"

"Mum made me apply for the local one thirty minutes away so I can commute back and forth."

"Jesus!" I cursed. "Well UCAS makes you choose other university's to apply to, what did you choose?"

She sighed. "It doesn't matter, mum will never let me go anywhere else."

"Just tell me where you applied to, Jess."

"Well there's one in Portsmouth that I—"

"Portsmouth? You mean where Hayden lives?"

Hayden, Jess's half brother from her dads previous marriage. He was older and worked and lived with his partner, Cal.

"Yeah, it's for biochemistry..."

"Jess you love science, you have to go there! And then you can see Hayden more!"

Her face morphed, her eyebrows furrowing and a frown appearing on her face. "Kins, mum will never let me go."

It was hard, Jess loved her mum despite every time she'd shed to me about what she'd done.

"She can't control you forever, Jessie." When I called her Jessie, she knew I was being serious.

"But she's my mum. I can't just abandon her."

Jess wasn't to the point yet where she could see what was happening to her, she was being forced into a corner by her mother, to a university she didn't want to go to and basically stuck with that monster. Something needed to happen, something needed to change...

"Well, you've still got time..." I tried to say with optimism.

The dining hall was barely filled when we got inside, with me on crutches I got let out of classes five minutes early to beat the crowds. We lined up and picked our food, I almost drooled over my pepperoni pizza slice before I'd paid for it. Jess swiftly moved the conversation onto something else, something trivial just to fill the silence she hated.