Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Gemma Akintola

There is no greater argument for the existence of the soul than that feeling of something separate from your physical being, but still within you, sinking, extinguishing, that you experience as you realise you've been betrayed. It was exactly what Gemma had felt as she made her way out of the interview room, only to pass Lilly's on the way, and see the texts she thought had been from The Supplier projected from Lilly's phone up onto the wall.

I'm sorry, Lilly had mouthed upon noticing Gemma standing there, looking despondently through the glass. And Gemma had accepted it.

Because Lilly had been the one making her life hell; Gemma could see that. But she had been the one fucking up Clara's. She had been "The Supplier", to Clara, at least. And all that time, she had felt terrible about it, felt as if there was a perpetual fire lit inside her roasting up her insides, but she had persevered, because she had to make Clara see sense. It was only once she was stood at the end of the hallway, silently observing a dripping wet Clara dart out of Alice's flat, knife and mask in hand, later witnessing exactly what that knife had done, that Gemma fully realised. Realised that to have sense was too arduous a task for someone as reckless as Clara.

What was she doing? Gemma had thought, silently following Clara out of Alice's building, across the campus, out of the front entrance, towards the Ellisbury clifftop. There, she had watched from behind a tree, Clara, stowing the knife and the mask underneath a rock. It was upon following Clara back, and venturing into Alice's flat with her and Lilly, that Gemma saw exactly what it was that she had done.

Or was still capable of doing; it seemed as if although the music in Cleo's box had long since stopped, the Clara doll was still dancing, twirling round in circles.

That's why Gemma, the minute the police had let her go, had returned to where Clara had hidden the mask and the knife.

And to think that all Gemma had been attempting to do that whole time was protect Clara, ever since the night that Cleo had been murdered, the night of the party.

"Shit, do you smell burning?" Gemma had murmured, in between moans, Josh's head in between her thighs. Pushing it away, she had tugged the hem of her dress down and got out of the threadbare armchair that for some reason still sat in the corner of the dilapidated youth centre her and Josh had met in that night.

"Burning?" He had repeated. "Oh shit, yeah! Oh wait...That's just me. You get it? Because I'm smoking-"

"God, shut up, you twat." Gemma had muttered, hitting Josh lightly before striding towards the door of the youth centre. "It's funny, you know. They're called pick up lines and yet all they make me want to do is drop-kick you." She added, throwing open the doors and immediately cowering backwards at what she had seen; fire, a lot of it, and right in their pathway. "Fuck!" She had hissed. "Fuck! Fuck!"

"Quick, come here, out the window." Josh had yelled back at her, over the roar of the flames, using an old floor lamp to break open a window, and then giving her a knee up, allowing her to climb out. Falling on her hands and knees onto the forest floor, she had used the wood panel of the building to pull herself up, holding a hand to her mouth to stop the smoke from coming in as Josh leapt out of the window and landed behind her.

"You get back to the beach and warn everyone, I'll try and get to the road to call the fire brigade." He had then commanded, patting Gemma on the back before dashing into the trees.

"Josh, wait!" Gemma had gone to call out, but Josh did not hear and she did not want to repeat herself for fear of swallowing more of the fumes. It was as she stumbled through the woods away from the fire, trying the best that she could not to breathe in the smoke, that she had come across Clara's phone, lying seemingly forgotten on the forest floor. She shouldn't have looked; the texts were still there, still open, all Clara's private conversations ready and waiting to be viewed. But Gemma's curiosity got the better of her. It was instinctive, a silent, incessant prodding, telling her that by leaving the phone she'd be missing out on something revolutionary, despite the fact that she knew that most likely wasn't true; it was the "I couldn't help myself" defence, the same poor excuse her older brother had come out with after looking through the year 6 diary she'd left on the kitchen worktop one morning. But on Clara's phone, what Gemma did find was a lot more revolutionary than her 11 year old self's verbose description of why she fancied the boy who sat in front of her in PSHE or any digressive account of her typical school day. There were texts to Cleo, and whilst there was nothing peculiar about the two texting, it was the contents of the text themselves that really baffled Gemma.