Issues [Frollie]

Chapter 1

Mollie was ill.

 That much was all she really knew for certain. She could feel the waves of heat that were radiating out from her body, like she was standing in front of a space heater, and yet her skin was standing up in gooseflesh at the same time. Her head felt like it was swaying on her neck, dizzyingly heavy and hard to keep straight. She could barely focus her eyes on anything in the dim room, and yet all sorts of shapes were cropping up in front of her vision – things that shouldn’t have been there, yet were.

“Frankie?” she called out, feeling her tongue flop dryly in her mouth. Her hand searched through the covers, but she couldn’t find anything. In her fever-addled state of mind, she didn’t think to look on the far side of the bed; she didn’t realise that she had been turned around on the mattress so she was facing the wrong way. If she had reached a little further she would have come into contact with Frankie’s wrist, but she didn’t know that at the time. All she knew was that she needed some help, or some water, because she could barely remember her own name anymore. She tried some of the others that came easily to her mind. “Vanessa? Una? Rochelle?”

Her voice sounded strangely liquid and bent to her own ears, like it was taking time to travel from her mouth to her eardrums to her brain.

Still burning, she resolutely kicked off the covers that bound her legs like a shroud, revelling and shivering in the cool air that wafted over her legs. It took some effort and it made her head spin, but she managed to push herself off of the edge of the mattress and onto her feet, where she stumbled and staggered over to where she thought the door was, feeling around in the dark. She had to stop for a moment, head pressed against the cold wood of the archway, before her questing fingers came into contact with the hard, icy steel of the door handle and she pushed her way out into the rest of the apartment, walking on numb feet that could barely hold her.

A few meters away, Frankie stirred and wriggled in her sleep as the soft light of the living room lamp flooded through the open door. She lingered on the edge of sleep, clinging to the lovely dream she was having about owning a bar with her friends, with a karaoke machine in the corner that played the music they liked, and their signature cocktail that had… that had vodka and…

She shifted again, moaning a protest in her throat as the details began to slip away and awareness began to creep back, brushing the fuzziness out of her sleepy mind. She felt a moment of disorientation as she awoke in a bed that was not her own, but that vanished the instant she recognised Mollie’s room – and, more importantly, realised that Mollie was not in it.

“Mollie?” she called in a voice that was thick with sleep. It took only a few seconds for alarm to descend. “Mollie?” She rolled off the bed and padded out through the open door, whipping her head around desperately. She rounded the corner of the hall just in time to see Vanessa shooting up from the couch, pure panic in her face.

Mollie was swaying in the centre of the kitchen, her feet unsteady beneath her and her hands trembling with effort as she tried to turn the cold tap on the sink. The other girls were awakening now – she could hear them in the other room – but her focus was only on Mollie as she and Vanessa rushed forward, hoping to catch their friend before she collapsed.

Vanessa got there before Frankie did, and she just managed to seize Mollie by the elbows before the older girl’s knees gave out. Mollie’s head lolled as Vanessa supported her weight, and they could see only the whites of her eyes as they rolled back in her head.