Living a Lie

I regained my consciousness in a daze, hearing soft noises around me, it was all so surreal. My head hurt like a motherfucker, and I swear, I could imagine my mom whining about me going to be late for school if I sleep in. But I did not really hear anything except the constant beeping of machines around me.

Opening my eyes was much easier now, it took very little effort, like the feeling of just waking up after falling asleep in class. Calm, and yet so hard since you’d rather sleep than listen to another boring lecture about how humanity has evolved.

The room I was in was a pale white, a chair was next to my bed and there were flowers on the windows. But one thing stood out, it was like someone had gone to extra lengths to make sure I could not see outside of the window, or as if they prevented someone from looking in.
Just outside of the room I was in, I could hear muffled voices, one was frantic, so loud and obnoxious, and the other voice was calm, deep and strangely soothing. It was pretty weird all together.

“I must be SO high right now.” I thought to myself, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the bright light of the clinical lights hanging from the ceiling.

Right when I was about to call out to someone, I just let out a soft hissing sound, holy shit my throat was dry. It seemed as someone had heard me, since the muffled sounds of speaking had stopped, and I watched as the glass sliding door to my room softly opened.

“Emma? Sweetie?” It was my mom, my sweet, adorable mom. She would get me out of here, she would make everything allright. But there was one detail about her thin face that I could never miss. The tears running down her cheeks, like streams running down to a lake in a forest.

“Mommy?” I whispered, my voice still harsh from my apparent lack of water. I did not get a reply, she just stood there, her frown growing bigger until she started bawling her eyes out, practically throwing herself around my shoulders as I lay still in the firm, lemon smelling hospital bed.

“I am so sorry my sweet baby! I did not know what to do!” She continued, shaking me in my place, giving me quite a horrible headache in the process and a doctor rushed through the door to pull her away from me.

“What’s wrong mom? I feel fine.” I mumbled, and softly raised my hand to cradle my head back into its original position. My sweet mother looked at me with sorrow filled eyes. Why would she not say anything?

This time, it was the doctor’s tie to speak, and I seriously thought he was a real life Spock, the way he spoke with no emotions, and even had the same hair cut as the half-vulcan I had gotten to know since childhood.

“Miss Jennings, you see. You were quite badly damaged when you pushed your sister out of the way, and we are afraid your mother had to make some hard decisions to ensure your survival.” He spoke, a fake smile adorning his lips.

“It could not have been that bad, I feel just fine!” I laughed half-heartedly, not really sure what they meant by ‘hard decisions, but I rolled along with it for now. I felt so out of place, so startled at the news that I almost died.

“Emma, you’re an adult and I don’t need to sweet talk this anymore, you were completely crushed under that metal pillar that almost killed your sister. Luckily, your brain was in perfect condition.” Okay, this is some creepy shit going on right now. “You see, to save you, you needed a new body.

“What..?” I mumbled, fully understanding what he was saying, but quietly wishing I would wake up from this Nightmare. “What the hell do you mean ‘a new body’, am I not me anymore?”
I barely got any time before Spock picked up a small hand held mirror, and I was almost afraid to look into it, the eyes that looked back at me when I looked into the piece of glorified glass, were not mine. They looked where I looked, saw what I saw, but they were not mine. My once frizzy uncontrollable hair, was in a tight ponytail, which had kept me from seeing my hair earlier, it was so red and beautiful.

“Does this mean I’m not Emma Jennings any more? If I’m not me, who am I?” I was not sure if I wanted the answer to the question, but I asked it anyway.

"You were lucky, at the same time your heart stopped functioning completely, another girl, roughly you age died from a tumour in her brain. None knew it was there, it was like a time-bomb waiting to go off. Lucky you that it went off when it did, otherwise you would be dead now. He said it like he was proud of himself, and it made me sick to my stomach, he said I was lucky, because someone else had died?

"So what am I? Frankenstein's monster? What made you think, that any of the members in my family would agree to this?” I growled, furious as my mother would not stop sobbing. Yeah, because her life was the life falling apart, right?

The disgusting smug look on his face grew bigger, as he opened a drawer in the bedside table next to me. In it, was a huge pile of paper, at least a hundred pages. Spock showed it to me, and quickly went through all of the pages, showing my mother’s signature on every page.

“You see, Emma Jennings is dead. But miraculously, Annikki “Nightmare” Howard, survived against all odds. And each of these pages are signed by your mother, confirming that you died in a tragic accident at a concert.”

Notes

*Crawls on floor as I try to get back into writing*