Bubblegum and Cigarettes

20

Shivering. I could hear the strange shaking of my breathing as my teeth chattered. Glancing down at my arms through my blurred, wobbly vision I could make out that every single hair on my arm was standing to attention. I looked grey. Why was I grey? I puked again and it went in my hair. Crying I let mum rub my back trying to be soothing but I ached all over. Every single minute tremor made my bones ache like I had been squashed into a cramped up ball for a thousand years and was only just stretching out.

"It's going to be ok, Jessica, it's going to be ok." Even she choked on her words, the lie biting through. How could anything be remotely ok ever again?

"M-Mum?" I managed, my stomach hurt from where it had clenched when I was sick. It felt as though I'd pulled every muscle to their very limit and even breathing hurt.

"I called an ambulance baby ok? Everything will be alright. Just stay here. You want some water? Try drinking this." She offered me a glass and I was about to take a sip when I hunched up and puked down the toilet again. Nothing was even slightly glamorous about this.

Still shaking I felt my chest relax and my breathing slowed down dramatically. I remained twitching by the toilet with strands of hair stuck together in my own sick while my skin shimmered in a cold sweat. Mum's forehead was creased into irrevocable lines of concern. She was talking to me in one long continuous sentence but I didn't understand what she was saying. I didn't get it. How did I get from my room to the bathroom? How did I get in this state? What was going on? What was even happening?

The paramedics came and all the neighbours gawped as I was wrapped up in one of those foil blankets that trap the heat in to stop hypothermia and I was practically carried into the back with mum following silently. I flopped around uselessly as the ambulance began to move.

I remembered the flashing lights. Everything was white and yellow and the smell made me want to be sick again. I was in a room surrounded by nurses and a nice lady with a baby voice tried to speak to me to explain what was happening. I felt tired and my jaw wasn't cooperating with my tongue. I was too drunk to really talk.

"-don't think there's anything else in her stomach to bring up." A woman with a deep voice said from somewhere. Someone replied and I let out a small moan as my body ached and ached.

My eyelids drooped and I fell unconscious. I woke up and there was laughing around me. I was in hospital and I felt like shit. My mouth was open and there was a tube sticking halfway down my throat which made my eyes fly open in terror. A nurse that was checking the drip beside me smiled and told me it was to help me breathe. "I'll fetch the doctor." She left.

I was unsure whether it was day or night. Everything was so sterile and artificial in here it was difficult to tell. I had a dream that I left with Dylan and we were trying to find a nice flat in London. He took my hand, told me I smelt of bubblegum and cigarettes and said that everything was going to be ok and for the first time in forever I believed it too.

I was dismissed four days later. I was weak and fragile, mum kept her hands up and ready to catch me in case I fell. I was forced to remember her vase I broke last year and how I was a lot like that. Mottled shades. Mum was busy. Hectic even. She was booking doctor's appointments and looking up decent rehabilitation centres although we lacked the financial stability Clarissa owned, and I lay on the sofa feeling like my insides had been scraped raw from my body. My hair was lank. Black eyes and no killa winged eyeliner I felt like a shell of the person I'd been before all this.

I phoned Dylan but he didn't reply. I got a call from Lily then Rachel and they chattered endlessly down the line gushing how they'd visit ASAP and they had never realised, they were "so totally sorry" and would never let me down again. Afia continued sending snapchats of all the cute boys at the beach oblivious to the drama back home while Clarissa was deadly silent.