(Eng) Broken - Riverdale FF

31

Juliet's visit had reminded me of a time that my consciousness was only too happy to suppress. Just before my grandmother's death. I had fought tooth and nail to appear strong, to not let my grandma notice how much I dreaded being alone. To go on without her. But of course, everyone had seen how much it was eating away at me.

I felt a little ashamed that I didn't feel stronger than I did then. I had only become a better actress.
It felt good not to have to act with Juliet. She ordered us pizza and then she presented me - as if it were something quite trivial - with her huge bling of an engagement ring. We shrieked like little girls and celebrated as much as my foot would allow. Then she called her fiancé, Mike, to tell him she was going to spend the night with me and take me to the doctor first thing the next morning.

It was incredibly comforting to be reminded that I was not completely alone. Even if it felt that way at times.

The doctor who treated my foot was stern and unkind, as so many surgeons are. He splinted my joint and brought me crutches before putting me on sick leave for the next three weeks so I could rest my completely overused foot and fully recover. Obviously, dragging myself down from the Blossom estate and waiting nearly 24 hours before seeking professional help had not been a good idea.

But the three weeks off were not that bad. Pops and Miss Weatherbee came by in turns to make sure that I didn't starve. By the way, both were of the opinion that I had to eat like a hundred Vikings, because my refrigerator quickly overflowed.

And Jughead and Betty came regularly to bring me homework and update me on their investigation. They had found Polly. Pregnant. At the Sisters of Quiet Mercy. I shuddered at the memories of that place.

Kurtz didn't come to see me.

Even when my foot was healthy again and I was released back into everyday life, I didn't see him again. Not at the little kiosk, which I still visited regularly for a while. However, I tried to kick the habit of smoking, which is why I made the detour to Southside less and less often.

And when it finally turned out that Clifford Blossom had killed his son himself, Kurtz disappeared from my memory with a final stabbing pain. I had done him wrong. He had made drug deals with Clifford, but he was not Jason's murderer.

With that in mind, I was finally able to say goodbye to all the 'what if's' and it would be a full year before I would next waste a thought on the ghoulie.

In the meantime, it turned out that Jughead's father was the leader of the Serpents and for reasons unknown to me, Jughead joined the gang. I had never told him about the jacket in my closet before and now it seemed that the ship had sailed for it.

What could have been a great friendship slowly but surely fizzled out. Betty had to come to terms with the fact that her father was a murderer and her mother, who had always detested the Southside, was in fact from the Southside herself and had even once been a Serpent.

For me, it was all more than I could handle at that moment. I had returned to my job at Pops and even regularly wrestled myself into going to the grocery stores with the old man at four in the morning.

If restlessness really got the best of me, I still had my photography and I didn't have to risk my life for good photos anymore. It could have been a quiet, boring life, as I had always imagined.

But mental illnesses are more insidious than you think. Just when you feel safe, they tend to come out of hiding.