FROSTBITE | S. Rogers/B. Barnes (FINISHED)

Goosebumps

Days turned into weeks without a word from Steve.

Janie had slowly but surely given up on the idea of ever seeing him again after two weeks of radio silence on his end. She didn't understand why he hadn't come by to visit her again after he had left so suddenly and it had taken a toll on her at first.

She constantly thought about what could've possibly happened to make Steve disappear, but nothing in her head made any sense. She hadn't said or done anything to scare him off, nor had he given any sort of explanation for his sudden departure when she last saw him. 

While she worried a lot at first, after she'd endured a second surgery, recovery finally began, taking up most of Janie's headspace during her waking moments.

The young woman went to physical therapy every day for two hours, which took up most of - if not all - of the energy she could muster. Besides that, she started going back to school again, only attending lectures and classes one day in the week at first - before building it up to two and eventually three.

Several of her friends helped her eventually make the decision to move closer to campus, where she was provided with an apartment on the ground floor of a three-story building so she wouldn't have to constantly climb stairs (a rarity in a city like New York). They helped her pack up all her things and moved all of her stuff the first weekend after Janie was released from the hospital and she couldn't have thanked them enough.

Setting foot in her old apartment had been jaw-clenching, heart-wrenching, and skin-crawling, with her fears of seeing blood caked on the fluffy carpet or broken shards of glass still lying around lurking around each corner. Janie's throat locked up the second she entered the place and she hadn't been back since, not even to make sure her friends had packed up everything she owned. She'd never been very materialistic and if she didn't miss anything after the move, she hadn't needed it in the first place.

Despite her continuous efforts to make small changes to her new house, the new apartment didn't quite feel like home, no matter how much Janie tried to make it feel that way. She hung pictures of herself and her friends up on the walls, bought brightly colored fluffy pillows to fit on her new, red couch, and purchased a variety of plants and succulents so she could keep herself busy by taking care of them when she wasn't studying or doing exercises to help her recover, but there was just something missing that she couldn't quite put her finger on.

She still had to walk around with crutches for supp after four months had passed since she first began to walk again, but at this point in time, Janie barely found herself reaching for the wheelchair she'd been using a lot in the beginning. The thing mostly stood in the corner of her study room, collecting dust and moth bites and she had every intention of keeping it there as a trophy of some sort. 

She made it clear to herself that she wanted to walk to school every dayugh the campus was only a block away. It could be hard sometimes, with classrooms sometimes being on the other side of the school and there had been many occasions on which she'd arrived late for a class because she had to take a break from walking. Of course, her teachers didn't care - she doubted they even noticed her to begin with, with the lecture halls being so big.