Jennifer Hudson's Boring Little Life

Episode 6: Jennifer Hudson and the Spider's Web

Jennifer grabs her desk chair and places it in front of the wall opposite her bed. She takes a seat and admires her work: a Sherlock Holmes-style mind map of events and suspects.

After she'd tidied the nursery, she couldn't sleep. Jennifer kept tossing and turning, decided to give up on sleep at about eleven o'clock and started with her mind map instead. Jennifer needs to make sense of her life, nothing makes sense anymore. If her story isn't a love story, which she's not sure that it isn't, then what is it?

There used to hang a picture of Tessa and Jennifer on the wall, but Jennifer removed it, placing it on her bed, to make space and used the screw as the center of her mind map.

Jennifer bites on a pen and reads through the sticky note titles – AA (Author's Advocate) Suspects being the center one.

Jennifer had decided that she needed to solve the single mystery that she could solve, without breaking the law, first and forget about hacking Angus' phone... it's not worth going to jail over. Jennifer taps her foot and looks at each suspect individually – first one is her father. She follows the red line from the screw all the way to where the other end is taped to a picture of her father. She's only shared her truth with the people she loves and he's one of the first people she told. Other than that, she doesn't believe that he would play such a cruel prank on his own daughter. There's a second thread taped to her father's picture, it leads to a photo of Shawn – he wouldn't be able to dream up a prank like this all by himself, but Jennifer doesn't know if her father would help him.

Her eyes hop back to the screw and follows another thread all the way to a picture of her and Angus. He does know about everything and has mocked it all in the past, that doesn't mean he's the prankster though. But, for some reason Jennifer still has her doubts about him and felt the need to add him to the list. Angus has been acting strange lately.

Enoch is a suspect too, but Jennifer doesn't have a picture of him so she just scribbled his name on a sticky note. She highly doubts that he is responsible, Jennifer even put a question mark under his name. And, lastly, Jennifer tore off the inside cover-page of the drama they're analyzing in class and stuck it to the wall too – the page has the name of the author and publishing company on it. The Author's Advocate note could be a direct note from her author, like the one at the start of their play.

After staring at the wall until her vision blurs, Jennifer decides to give sleep another go. She stands up and stretches her back as she walks over to her bed, as she nears she spots the photograph of her and Tessa on her bed. She'd forgotten about it for a moment, she removes it lovingly while looking at the two smiling faces. She wishes that she could go back in time to that day and relive it over and over again. Her fifth birthday, she remembers. Despite everything that had gone wrong that day, Jennifer's sure that she'd never get tired of it.

She places the photo on her bedside table and climbs into bed, her mind still not completely at ease.

***

"As you can see our main character has the tendency to fourth wall break. She usually does this through her soliloquies, but some critics say that she even does this through her monologues and speaks more to her audience than to the other characters present." Ms Knight says and points at her summary of the main character on the black board.

Jennifer stares at the board through her swollen and puffy eyelids, not taking in a single word Ms Knight is saying. Jennifer did manage to sleep a few hours Saturday night, but Sunday she couldn't sleep at all. Jennifer's so tired that she's barely in working condition.