The Teather

Okay. Let's do this one last time.

My name is Charlotte Matthews. I was bitten by a radioactive spider... two minutes ago. And for the first time in my life, I'm not sick.

My parents always said I was brilliant. Gifted. Perfect.
With a catch.

"She's emotionally unstable."
"She's hallucinating again."
"She's not like the other girls."

I was never tested on. Never experimented on. Just diagnosed. Managed. Dosed.

They called it schizophrenia. A disorder. A flaw they couldn't trace in blood, so they painted it on my mind instead.

But now?
I feel everything.
The air sticks to my skin like static. I see motion in slow frames. I hear truth buried under people's lies.

This isn't a curse. This is a correction.

I thought my mental illness was permanent. Turns out... it's completely gone.

I'm free.
Still trapped under the weight of their expectations. Still living in a house where silence is safer than truth.

But still...
free.