Hidden Behind Everything Happy

Loss

I put the phone down. It felt like my heart had shattered into hundreds of sharp shards scattering inside me making me bleed. I'd taken the phone into the hallway, sat on the bottom of the stairs as I spoke, happy to find that Lukas had taken time to call me back. 

"Could you come to the hospital Sophie?" I listened with a hollow feeling in my chest. I had the image of Lukas lying a the bottom of the stairs in a pool of blood flashing through my mind, I breathed deeply. I could hear Nicky in the kitchen making a chocolate sponge and singing along to one of my favourite songs, but it seemed a thousand miles away. Like I'd stepped out of reality and into a world where everything was the same but slightly different.The light refracting through the window was a little too bright for the tone of the conversation, and the carpet on the stairs a little too prickly against my legs. I felt uncomfortable.

"Why?" I didn't really want to hear the answer. I was terrified. Not only because he hadn't accepted my apology for my terrible behaviour when I was drunk, but that I knew he'd never be as close to me as he had been. That I could have lost my Lukas forever. 

"Lukas needs you. He's in the Leukemia department, and he wont wake up" I dropped to the floor fumbling with the phone. Leukemia? Leukemia! 

"Sophie?" I heard a waver in Lukas' mums voice. She was being deadly serious. 

"I'll be there" She replied swiftly as though time depended on it.

"When?" I hated the sense of urgency. 

"I said I'll be there!" I threw the phone up the stairs so it hit my door, where the front and back disconnected and the battery fell out. 

I walked into the living room with a hollowness playing in my stomach. My friend was in hospital, his physical presence missing from my life for such a long time that it felt somewhat catastrophic to think he'd been gone this long and I'd never noticed just what he'd been going through. 

"Mum, can you take me to hospital?" Nicky jumped to attention like something was wrong with me. 

"Why?" She continued watching the television. I watched as the towers loomed up through the ground, people pretending to make six iron rings that flew into the sky and sparked a million dazzling sparks. 

"Lukas is in hospital" I felt so vulnerable, everything had seemed to be going so well until now; it was like a hole had been ripped in the fabric of my life. I couldn't lose him too. 

"Is that the emo boy?" My Mum brushed it off as nothing, and I felt like reminding her how I'd nursed him back to health and how he'd saved my life but I didn't bother. It felt more like I would be wasting time telling her this when I should be on my way to him. 

"Can we go?" I looked desperately at my Mum. 

"Tomorrow morning, lets watch the opening ceremony" I could hardly believe she was brushing this off like it was nothing. 

"He's dieing!" Nicky choked on his mouthful of coke. My mum laughed like I'd made some destructive yet witty joke, I wished it was a joke. I wished I'd just sudden;y developed a sick sense of humour and that this wasn't really happening.

"Don't be so melodramatic, nobody's dying" My mother turned back to watch the fireworks. They were popping and zipping around the screen in three distinct and familiar colours to our country, blue, white and red.

"He's got Cancer, he's in the critical ward, he's been missing for weeks and nobody's seen him and I thought he was just being a recluse but something really bad has been going on" Nicky was holding my hand, I'm not quite sure how he got there and laced his fingers with mine without me noticing but I really didn't mind.