She snipped lengths off her hair without a second glance, stopping frequently to skip whatever song was playing or change the station on the internet radio open on her laptop. She would let the song play for a few seconds, occasionally singing along, before apparently becoming bored and moving on. Chunks of her hair fell from her head onto her blanket.

A soft orange glow from the large window to the right of her bed cast the large room in a warm light. The room was a mess: clothes, papers, and random objects littered the floor and any open surfaces. Her desk wasn't recognizable as a desk anymore, it was so cluttered with art supplies, papers, and wigs stuck on lamps instead of wig heads.

The music coming from her laptop was suddenly drowned out by the sound of a remix of a popular Halloween song coming from her phone. She rolled her eyes and tried to continue cutting her hair, turning up her music and switching tabs from the streaming service to the open webcam she was using as a mirror, even though there was a floor-length mirror covered in stickers and post-it notes leaning against the opposite wall.

The phone persisted. She sighed and swung her legs over the side of her bed, blowing some of the hair she'd cut off onto the floor. She looked down at it disapprovingly before reaching to the table by her bed to grab her phone off a stack of files.

"Hey, Archie, why are you calling me?" she answered. "I thought I told you not to call this number."

She paced as she listened, moving first to the large mirror to ponder her new haircut, with some sections still needing to be cut. She made a face.

"Look, I don't care. This is the one job I give you, and you still call me with questions. Always like, 'oh, Charlie, help me, I can't do anything for myself'. That's what you sound like." She listened for a few seconds, but was apparently unsatisfied with the response.

"I gave you explicit instructions, Archie. There shouldn't be anything complicated about it." She walked over to the window, where the sunset cast the city skyline into a dramatic silhouette.

She sighed again. "You know you're the only one I could trust with this, babe. I don't know why you're stressing so much."

A voice could be heard coming from the other end, seeming to argue.

"Hey, look, you'll do great, okay? Okay. That's done. I gotta go, babe. Gotta prepare, y'know."

She flopped on her bed, throwing her arm out and glancing again at her laptop screen, which was still open to the webcam. She looked at her image and made faces.

"Okay. Okay, Archie. I'm going now." She hung up despite audible protests.

Charlie Jupiter flung her other arm out now that it wasn't in use anymore and made an annoyed noise.

#fiction #nanowrimo #crime #mystery