What If He Didn't Die?

Chapter 3: Back to School

"Have some Apples, baby." Says mom, handing me a shiny red apple. I take it from her hand, smiling, and keep it away.

I'm receiving this special treatment at my own breakfast table because lately, it hasn't been mine. I've not been on this table since that night. I've not left my room since that night.

Last night was my first step outside my room after I came back home that night three weeks ago. I didn't even walk in. I don't remember coming home at all. I just remember falling on the ground at the edge of that cliff, crying my heart out.

Dying there.

Next thing I know I was in my room with a sleeping nurse, tubes attached to my wrist.

Alive.

I woke up, removed the tubes and threw them away as I moved my hand to get the glass of water kept just a few inches away. It felt like a lot of struggle.

I could feel a huge number of muscles resisting my efforts. Somehow, I caught hold of the glass but as soon as I lifted it, it fell on the floor, shattering into pieces.

To my surprise, nobody came to my rescue except for the stranger lady who was supposed to be my nurse.

I only got off the bed to walk out when she caught me. She told me stuff that meant she was getting paid well to make sure I'm alive and that I'm not hurt, but I didn't need to hear any of it.

I pushed her away and walked ahead, while she stumbled on the floor. A few pieces of shattered glass may or may not have gotten into her palms, however not even a pang of guilt hit me.

She came running to me yet again and I noticed blood on her hands. Her pay surely would've been a lot since she did not seem to care about her wounded hand and kept trying to get me back to my bed.

"You need to take a rest please," She insisted.

"No, I don't. Leave me alone." I told her curtly, trying to shake her hands off. She was being too careless for just a random nurse, anyone and everyone in Drakedon knew better than to touch me without my permission.

"You are really weak please don-"

"I said leave me alone!" I pushed harder just like Easter Brown would, but she didn't seem to move. "Let me go, I said. LET! ME! GO! Get your hands off, right now. Let me go, you bitc-" I kept hollering but to no avail. She stopped saying anything but kept holding me tight while I shouted and shouted and it seemed she was not very wrong to say that I was weak because to my own surprise, I couldn't shake her off at all. On any other day, I could easily throw her off my terrace.

Mom came running soon, followed by Eric and they freed me. Eric calmed me down after a struggle that lasted minutes and took me back to bed. I told them I didn't need that woman and she was immediately dismissed.

I didn't leave my room since then. I hardly ate. I didn't take a bath. I just kept lying there on that bed like a dead body in a coffin. Bella visited every day, so did other people a few times. Jacob, my supposedly one-side-lover, came just once yesterday, but I didn't talk to any of them but Bella.

Only she seemed to understand me, if at all.

I cried every time she came.

To be honest, I was crying all the time. She hugged me and gave me a shoulder to weep, but just like everyone else, she kept trying to make me believe that I was alive, that I could live again. That I didn't need to make myself suffer.

But I wasn't making myself suffer.

I was just suffering.

Although it took me a while to realize that in the process of my grieving, I was making everyone else suffer with me. So I decided that I had to live again, for them.