Silent Pantomime

Chapter 27 | Enlighten me

Chapter 27🌌:

"Smile for me," he said and I chuckled so lightly that he probably couldn't hear me.

"Why should I?" I asked louder.

"Because I asked you to," he whined back.

"Well, what if I don't?" I asked again, purposely sounding as irritating as possible.

"Then I'll frown," he replied with an annoyed sigh.

"It's not like you can see me anyway," I groaned half-heartedly.

"Then you can smile for me."

I let a small quiver overpower my lips into an upward arch position, followed by them parting to let out a small whimper in annoyance.

"You win," I mumbled, not hiding the slight aggravation in my voice.

"I always do."

I clenched my fists as I thudded across my room. My knees were half bent and I was biting my tongue to not say anything that some people may deem as going too far. A troglodytic rasp escaped my throat in some way of my body showing that he was right - he did always win. Pausing for a moment, I trekked my head to think of a reasonable and educated response.

"Fuck you."

With that, I dropped the walkie-talkie on the floor and went to brush my hair. I was staring in the mirror, letting the brush sway in and out of my Marilyn Monroe coloured hair cut. I was wearing this sparkling gold eye shadow that screamed cheap, which my mum had loved to wear for special occasions. It did compliment my hair and the pink tinted lip stick I was wearing I suppose. I looked at the girl in the mirror and smiled, she was very pretty. But that was the point of make up. To cover something ugly.

As I was setting the brush down, the abandoned walkie-talkie let out a glitching sound of feedback.

"Hazel Fitzgerald, I am very sorry to have upset you, but I do have a very exciting story to enlighten you with," his fake posh voice rang around the room in the static waves. He only spoke to me through walkie-talkies, not anything else. He had told me that phones were so boring, as that was how everyone communicated, and we were different to everyone else. No one could track what you said through a walkie-talkie either, there was no way to save anything or redo a conversation by just hitting a delete button. The conversations were one to one with no one else in the world to know about it, and you didn't get a second chance with them.

To be damned, I did smile again. Without admitting defeat to him, I picked up the walkie-talkie. "Go on then," I demanded.

"Enlighten me."

He definitely did, he always had. He always had an interesting story of perspective to tell me about for hours on end. He was the only person who could hold a conversation with me without me getting bored. For a while anyway.

The problem wasn't him though, it was definitely me. I couldn't help it, normally my magic eyes always hid the truth, but with him it was different. Somehow he soon realised that the playful demands for wanting one-on-one conversations weren't so playful. Somehow he soon realised that I wasn't as bad as the rest of the world, but much worse, because I hid it for longer. He was the only person who had realised all of these things, but there was one thing he hadn't ever realised.

I did actually love him.

Actually, I loved him a lot. I just loved the attention more.

Somewhere deep down, I guess I had always hoped he would come back. Everyone else came back to me, sure no one had actually left, but still... I missed him.

But that feeling somewhere deep down disappeared when I heard the phrase, "Yes miss, an Oliver Beckett," next to the word "murder".

No one could enlighten me anymore, nothing interesting could happen without my head going "Are you bored yet?"

***

I woke up the next morning extremely tired, because I wasn't really waking up. My brain never truly shut off because Oliver kept flooding my mind like a tsunami, after I had tried to push the truth back for so long. I knew he was dead as well as I knew Mum and Ally were. But Ally had never actually met me in person, and my mum though I was just a pretty little angel that could get what she wanted just because she was pretty. Oliver knew me. He actually knew me.

And he was gone.

I had thrown out the walkie-talkie he had given me the day he had yelled at me. I had still wanted to talk to him, as I assumed he would come to his senses and come back around to my house to apologise. In my mind he would always apologise to me, do everything for me. All that night, all I could think of was when actually was the last time he had thought of me; was he in pain when he died; who would have killed him just because of me; what did his face look like when it happened? Those questions made me realise that I should have apologised to him for manipulating his time like that, because I did genuinely believe he was an amazing person, and I was never usually genuine. But no matter what happened, I never would have done it.

Apologising means defeat, and defeat means someone has something over you. I couldn't  have someone being above me, as I had to have control. What was life without me in control?

I didn't bother to try and rid my head of all of the images I had of Oliver either. It was all in the past anyway, so why should I have stressed about it?

I tiredly went to the mirror to brush my hair. As I was brushing my hair, I tried to smile. Once again the girl was beautiful. Oliver had always liked me smiling for him, even if he couldn't see it, because he knew I was happy. The lucky thing about a mirror is that it copies your actions, so you can be yourself in front of it, without it judging you. The reflection copied my smile but it knew it wasn't real.

I just wished for a day that I could live behind the glass to tell how everyone was feeling, know the inside of everyone's minds.

And with that thought, I dropped my hairbrush and walked out of my room. I was going to go to the police station.