Trust No Bitch: Part 2

Gemma Akintola

It nauseated Gemma. Her patchwork skin. She would get used to it, she supposed. Maybe eventually find it somewhat beautiful, a mark of strength, some shit like that, but in that moment it was repellent. She did all she could not to throw up all over her roommate, Ellie Mengiste, who had scraped her dreadlocks back off her face just incase of a reaction of that strain, as they stood over the bathroom sink. Ellie was in the middle of peeling back the dressing; most likely regretting her decision by that time, she'd told Gemma she'd help with moisturising both the recipient site on her arm and the donor site on her thigh.

"Shut up, Georgie! I'm trying to concentrate." Ellie yelled out of the bathroom door as she finished lifting it back, Georgie Caines, their highly opinionated friend shouting at the television, ("Just eat the bloody kangaroo dick for Christ's sake and stop being so dramatic!"), engulfed in the previous night's particularly eventful episode of I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. Sitting in the hospital bed the evening before, Gemma hadn't been able to enjoy it. She was too busy thinking, thinking about going back to uni, the pity she would see in people's eyes in the hallway and the mortification that would bring to her. She hadn't been wrong.

"God, today everyone around this place kept looking at me like...I don't know. Like I'm a butterfly that just got its wings clipped off or some shit. It's embarrassing." She muttered biliously to Ellie, who rolled her eyes. She quickly softened, however, the second she caught Gemma wincing, each droplet of lotion that fell from the moist cloth Ellie held shattering and raining down on her skin like diminutive daggers.

"You're not a broken butterfly." Ellie countered so sharply, that it felt almost like a rebuke. "You're a fucking...lioness." There was something peculiar in her eyes as she said it, a momentary consideration that she rapidly either hid or decided was unimportant. With a final dab at Gemma's arm with the cloth, she then silently moved onto the wound on her thigh. So far, Gemma had managed to cover it up quite easily; the loose-fitting tracksuit bottoms that her brother, Isaac, had left to her before he went to prison, had finally fulfilled the promised he'd made that they would one day come in handy.

"A lioness? That makes me sound far more badass than I actually am. But I like it." Gemma said with a small smile, sitting down on the bath and turning her body awkwardly to the side so Ellie could get at the whole abrasion.

"You are a badass." She murmured, Gemma just grinning again, tucking a wisp of hair behind her ear and trying not to blench as Ellie pushed the dressing back down. Arm in arm, they made their way back to the living area where Ellie sat next to Georgie and Gemma took the other sofa, resting the laptop on her knees. Once she'd started it up, she went straight on to the internet, typing into the search bar the URL for Sasha's website.

"www.tumblr.wickedbitchofthewest.co.uk..." She murmured under her breath as she tapped away at the keyboard.

"What did you say, Gem?" Asked Georgie, pausing the television and staring across at her, vaguely uneasy.

"Nothing!" Gemma replied, tapping the refresh button as the words "not found" appeared at the top of the tab, nothing but the Tumblr logo and some gaudy GIF. But again, not found. Refresh. Not found. Refresh. Not found.

What the fuck?

She was sure she hadn't typed it in wrong. She'd even got Alice to text it to her just to make sure. One more time, she thought to herself, her confusion only mounting with each W she tapped out. She was repeating the motion only out of that same kind of fatuous hope that she experienced every time her favourite online clothing store was out of her size in the top she'd finally managed to gather the money to buy, thinking that if she reloaded the page enough times, out of nowhere, a miraculous 10 would materialise between the 8 and the 12, for no reason other than her really, really bloody wanting it to. Reaching across to their ramshackle coffee table, Gemma picked up her phone and dialled Alice, power walking into her bedroom, ignoring the nonplussed faces of Georgie and Ellie, and slamming her door behind her.

"Sasha's blog is gone!" She exclaimed, the second she picked up; fortunately, they had once again reached that stage in their friendship where greetings were tacitly agreed to be unnecessary.

"What?" Alice said, Gemma hearing her pad across her wooden floor and then, the familiar sound of her laptop switching on. This was followed by a taut tap, tap, tap and then a sigh of frustration. "I knew she would do this! She's deleted the page, obviously-"

"What?"

"It's fine, I took some screenshots and made some printed copies of the most important things on there so it's not all lost but-"

"You are such a bloody nerd but Christ, you are just great sometimes." Gemma said, relief spreading across her body as she collapsed onto her bed. It was a warm, pleasant sensation, like the feeling of sunlight hitting the skin after finally surfacing from behind an amassment of grey clouds. For a moment, despite having something, the knowledge of the footage of Alice's brother, Gemma had felt that jarring feeling of panicked loss. As if she'd reached into her bag to pull her mobile out only to find it not there, hands passing over every object but the one she really needed.

"Uh, thanks." Said Alice, the clink of the laptop monitor hitting the keyboard as she closed it down audible through the phone.

"Going somewhere?" Gemma asked her with an inquisitive rise of her eyebrow. Futile really, since Alice couldn't see her face.

"Yes." Alice replied incisively. "I'm going home to see my brother. He's just posted on Facebook about a last minute house party he's hosting tonight so he should be there too, preparing. I'm going to find out, Gemma, if he did it. I'm going to find out why George saw Cleo that night and-" before Gemma could say it herself, Alice did, "-if he's the one that killed her as completely ludicrous as that sounds."