Trust No Bitch: Part 2

Gemma Akintola: Thursday, 3rd December, 2015

There wasn't much Gemma could remember from the past 3 days. Pain, more pain, glaring hospital lights, the perturbed voices of her parents, tubes stuck into her arm (to administer anaesthetic, she was told by a solicitous nurse), and then to wrap it all up nicely, more pain. And her arm. Once she had finally gathered the strength to look at it, she almost recoiled; it looked like the limb of a patchwork doll that had become the unruly pet dog's favourite new chew toy. Everyone had fussed over her from the police that came in to take statements ("I didn't see their face. I have no idea who did this to me."), to the surgeons that had performed the skin graft just hours after she arrived in the hospital, to her brothers, mother and father who insisted that she would be better off going home for a few weeks. She had eventually won the argument; she just wanted normalcy, she told them. She would go back to St. Edmunds as soon as they discharged her from the hospital. See Alice, Lilly, and Clara, who had shown up at the hospital less than an hour after she was admitted only to be turned away, Josh, her roommate Ellie, Georgie Caines, even. Show them that she was okay, because she knew the whole fucking university would be talking about it and if that news got back to the Supplier, they'd think that they'd broken her and they hadn't.

They hadn't.

Even as Clara, Lilly and Alice walked into the hospital room to see her, she had to keep ingeminating it, like some kind of war cry. Like she was trying to indoctrinate herself into believing it. They haven't broken you. You are fine.

"Gemma!" Alice was the first to speak as they entered the room. She looked even more pallid than Gemma herself and was desperately trying to secrete a quaking hand, using the other, marginally firmer one to pull out chairs for her and the other 2. "How are...how is your...are you okay?" She finally said weakly, sitting down in the seat closest to Gemma, Lilly and Clara following.

"Christ, Gem, from the call Lilly made you'd have thought you were dead." Clara added, before Gemma had the chance to rejoin. Then, catching sight of Gemma's mouth, poised to make her response, Clara mumbled an apology.

"It's fine." Murmured Gemma, sticking her arm out for the others to look at, Lilly wincing, sucking the air in through her teeth. "It obviously hasn't fully healed yet but once it has it should...blend in more. And before you ask, yes, it was the Supplier." Gemma knew, however, that her revelation wasn't necessary. There had been something about the 3 others as they walked in that said more than them being shocked by what had happened to Gemma, another something, one, powerful invisible hand pushing them down from above. They were scared, surely, that if the Supplier was willing to do that to her, in order to scare her into giving herself up to the police, what would he or she do to them? It followed naturally that she reached to her bedside table and loaded up the text she'd found on her phone after coming around from the surgery, received minutes after the attack. With a grimace, she passed it to Alice to read.

"Sorry I lost my temper today, but my patience is wearing thin. There's more where that shit came from....So get busy talking, with the police of course, or we can see what you look like without a face to match." She murmured, before looking up from the phone, expression already imploring Gemma to accept what she was about to say. "It's an empty threat, Gemma, it wasn't really strong acid they used. I mean, I know it probably feels like hell but I spoke to one of your doctors and she said it was hydrochloric. If it had been sulphuric then-"

"An empty threat?" Gemma spluttered. Her irritated stupefaction towards Alice's pertinacious "pretend we're all fine" attitude that she'd managed to hold back since the night they went clubbing was finally growing so strong that she had to release it, like a pack of hounds so famished that she just didn't have the strength to tug at their leashes anymore. "This isn't someone waving their hands in my face and saying fucking boo! I can't keep doing this calm, level-headed shit, Alice! Just abandon your bloody pride for once! We are not in charge of this. Did them trying to strangle you in the middle of a nightclub not get it into your head that this person is not going to stop? They threw acid at me! It could've gone in my eyes, it could've-"