Silent Pantomime

Chapter 65 | The eternal present

Chapter 65🌌:

Get me out of this rehab.

Quite often when people leave a prison they reoffend, and when people leave a rehab they can quickly and easily spiral back into old habits. So when Rio didn't return, I thought that she was dead. She'd ran away from one dead end life into one that was much, much worse.

There was no evidence for it obviously, she didn't come up to me as a ghost shouting "look at me, I'm dead, I'm dead", but I had this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that just made me think so. Death had been around me for so long that I could touch it. Smell it. Hear it.

I could taste copper running down my tongue and into the back of my throat, and it just weighed down the ever-growing pit in my stomach. Without being told, that overwhelming dread was enough for me to know Rio wasn't usually one who went for midnight walks.

The more panicked Brody and Tanya got, the redder the world became. But I just sat in silence, not wanting to break their hearts, because I knew she wouldn't come back as I had driven her away too. She had even told me that she would never leave us, because we were her lot, practically her only life, so why would she have lied?

The thought of her being dead just brought back flashbacks to Annika's body sprawled on the floor after I had pushed her. The milky look in my mum's eyes when she told me she was better dead. The mutilated, bloody dog I had forced to be my friend. The pictures of Ally's wrists. The image of agony on Ollie's face that got more painful every time I imagined what it may have looked like.

The pit in my stomach grew very quickly into physical pain, to the point where I was scrunched up on the floor in the foetal position, practically whimpering like a baby. I heard Tanya screaming for help, because not only was her friend missing, but the other one was crippling under a belt of guilt.

Brody did nothing, not like I could judge him. We all deal with shock and loss in different ways, even if he didn't realise it was a loss yet. He sat on top of the wall, quiet. Silent. I wished I could have gone over to talk to him, but with my pain and Tanya's hysteria filling up my ears faster than the blood, movement was impossible.

I felt like a corpse.

And not a pretty one.

I had been so obsessed with my appearance that I had went along with being a ghost for my blackmailer. I stopped eating for a while just because I was so worried that a bit of skin would stop me from getting attention. But here I was, bloody and bruised, on the random ground of a random street, in unbearable pain, with the world passing by because I was merely a piece of dirt to them. Not a pretty scene.

Tanya gave up searching for her Good Samaritan, and got Brody to snap back into gear and helped me to my feet. I'll give her her due, I have no idea how she managed to do it. I felt covered in blood, and Brody didn't have any blood because his heart had been pulled out of his chest and stamped onto the floor. But I was standing up, still shaking, but up, and Brody was blinking again instead of staring into a starless space.

"We should go looking for her. She can't have gone that far," she prompted, although us all splitting up was clearly an idea of a dipstick, looking at the state of us.

I wanted to scream there was no point in looking for her because she was dead.

"She might have fallen asleep somewhere else. Or it might just be a joke she's pulling on us," Tanya continued, "Let's not jump to any conclusions."

"She knows I wouldn't find this funny," Brody butted in. He looked shocked that his mouth had actually uttered words, but I wasn't. His eyes widened momentarily as he saw me trying to gain his attention, but he just looked back at the ground and shut up.