Misreviewed

Jess knocked gently on the bathroom door once more.
‘Come on, Alison, can you please come out? We can talk! I will make it all better, come on bud! Open the door please!’
She pleaded with her best friend. Thoughts racing through her head made her fear the worst. Inside the room the other girl sat on the floor, watching the blood stain everything a violent shade of red.
‘Look, if you don't open the door, I will get Thomas to take it off. Please Alli!’
Jess was getting desperate, the slightly hysterical waver in her voice pleased Alison. She liked to feel as if she was in control. It helped her to feel in control. She enjoyed having her friend worry: visioning her death. Jess rapped on the door with her knuckles again, harder this time.
‘Alison, dammit! Open the damn door! I’m coming in, whether you like it or not. I’ll give you twenty seconds, if you haven’t opened the door by then, I am going to call your parents.’
Panic flowed through Alison. What would happen if her parents found out? She had lost control and this time she knew that it was out of her reach. From outside the door she could hear Jess’s nervously slow counting.
‘One… Two… Three… Four… Five…’
After what seemed like an eternity, Jess reached twenty. Surely by now Alison would have climbed out through the window or something, anything to avoid her parents! She turned and briskly walked down the hall.
‘Thomas? Darling, Alison has locked herself in the bathroom, can you please take the door off?’
‘Erh… of course hun.’
Thomas was hesitant to do as his lover wished but Jess set the rules and he was too scared of her to disobey. Thomas knew Alison; he wondered what had happened, what argument had caused it this time. What had Jess said to the beautiful young brunette?
‘I’m just going to call her Mum and Dad, this is getting to be to much for me to handle, she’s such a problem child! I think she’s just doing it to be annoying, attention seeker…’
The last few words Jess muttered under her breath and Thomas knew at once. It wouldn’t have helped that she was threatening to call Alison’s parents. Thomas wondered what he would find behind that door.

Jess picked up the phone and dialled Alison’s home number, she knew it by heart though she didn’t even live with her parents anymore. The phone rang out. The first, second and third time that she called. On her fourth try, she decided to leave a message on the machine. Alison’s cheery voice came through the earpiece.
‘Hi! You’ve reached my house but I didn’t pick up the phone. If I’m not ignoring you, someone will pick up the phone and call you back. Thanks guys!’
‘Umm, well hey Mr and Mrs Nelison. When you get this can you please come and pick Alison up from my place, she’s having some kind of fit. Oh, this is Jess. Thanks?’

Ten minutes pass and Jess sits on the couch with her coffee grasped between her hands. She could hear the rattling and hammering or Thomas with his tools, pausing often when his soft and gentle voice reassured the girl locked inside. Thirty minutes pass and she is about to give up hope, about to ring the hospital, when the doorbell shocked the silence of Ashe Manor. Flustered, Alison put her coffee down and answered the door, checking her appearance in the mirror on the way out. Putting on her most charming smile she answered the door, her voice matching the smile.
‘Hello, won’t you come in?’
It wasn’t them. A tall man in uniform greeted her with a grim glance.
‘Is there a Miss Alison Nelison here? I was told that I may find her here, I have some news for her.’
‘Well, yes, officer, she is here. We were trying to contact her parents at present because she seems to have had a fit or something. She has locked herself in the bathroom.’
‘Oh, ahem, well can you please take me to her then.’
It was an order rather than a statement. Jess instantly took the hint and gestured for the police officer to come in.
‘Thomas, there’s a policeman here to see Alison, have you got the door open yet?’
There was no reply to Jess’s question, which she thought to be a bit strange. She led the man through the sparsely furnished house, to the bathroom at the rear. She peered through the door and fainted into the arms of the officer.

The police officer was young, only just joined the force, and had been sent to tell Alison Neilson of her parents’ misfortune. Little did he know what to expect when he walked through the door of the old Queenslander. He followed the blonde through to the bathroom, not liking the spiteful edge to her voice. She passed out in his arms when the reached the bathroom. The scene that lay before him was like none that he had ever seen before. A teenage male wept on the floor, he guessed that this was Thomas; the girl had called out to him before. A toolbox lay outside beside the door, which was scratched and beaten. Inside the room, all was red. A different girl stared up at him blankly, a rather peaceful expression on her pretty face. Her dark brown eyes would haunt him for the rest of his life. Her clothes were gone, revealing a once attractive body scored with deep cuts. A knife clutched in her right hand was thrust deep into her stomach. He knew that nothing had been moved, that this woman, this young girl had ended it. ‘Suicide’ he wrote on the top of the report. Dead by her own hand, he thought to himself. He had almost forgotten the news he was sent to break. Alison’s parents were reported missing, the small cigar plane they were flying in had crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. They had never reached the American coast.

Later that night he returned to his home, late enough that his two children and wife were asleep. He went and looked at their peaceful faces. Michael first, the baby, his two-year-old son. Then Charli, his five-year-old daughter. He went and gently kissed his wife’s cheek. Catherina, the love of his life. Then he lay and wept, for the girl he had never met, the girl he had never known, but the girl who had changed the lives of all who surrounded her, forever.