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The next day was a bounty of unconventional events, to say the least. From broken glass to evening phone calls, things were starting to change.
For one, Virginia Curtis was awake bright and early and walking around her room in her underwear and a shirt that proved very futile in the chilly atmosphere of her room. Sometimes she despised having the surprisingly decent-sized attic turned into her room. But she'd have to remind herself that it gives her privacy and saves her from moving in with Sodapop and Ponyboy.
Luckily anyone downstairs couldn't hear a thing that happened up in the attic unless she suddenly fell or talked louder than she wanted to. So her pacing was of no concern to anyone else who may have been awake like Darry.
The tips of Virginia's fingers ached for something do so and since there wasn't much light to begin with, she scrounged around for a pack of long matches she left a while ago. Electric lighting would've spoiled her mood and interrupted nature's wonder but she did have a particular affinity for an old oil lamp she kept.
She lied down on her bed, eyes facing the slanted wall littered with little trinkets and many paintings and sketches. The sun couldn't have come at a better time than when she bolted back up and sprinted to her small desk. Virginia wished she could've found time to clean her textbooks and school supplies off the sides but she rummaged around for her sketchbook which was helplessly lost among other books.
Virginia's sketchbook was the most important thing to her by far. Soda gifted it to her with some of the money from his first paycheck at the DX and Darry and Ponyboy pitched in for the splendid, leather-bound beauty. It had a bounty of nice thick paper that wouldn't bleed through no matter which pen she used. Each leaf was bound together with golden thread looped elegantly yet securely around the holes. Years of work were stored as beautiful memories in the book.
Finally locating it among some random napkins she drew on, Virginia quickly but carefully opened to a blank page and turned it horizontally. She bit her lip at how little blank pages were left of it but removed the negative thought from her head with a shake of a head and snatch of a pencil.
And finally, the sun rose, filling the virgin sky with brilliant shades of orange and pink. Peach and magenta, amber and rose, radiating hope, a fresh beginning. The start of a brand new day. Under the sunrise, the apples glowed rosier than they do in the day shine as the gentle sunlight slowly crept over them. It was a party of colors, of chaos and order, of a beauty that sprung from simple seeds blessed with mud and rain.
Reflecting her muse was a skill Virginia embraced proudly. The desire to create something as gorgeous and fresh as a sunrise embraced her hand as her pencil moved thoughtfully across the grainy paper.
Along the way, the new rays would reveal silken webs and grass wands of many hues, the rich browns of oak arms, the silver-cream of the moon above. Mellow cerulean and violet blurred together in a silvery cloud to create another gorgeous scene. Even when the world was drowning in grief and hardship that she and her brothers see and experience every day, the sky remained beautiful. That was one thing that had kept Virginia's hopes up—if the sky remained vivacious and powerful, then so could she.
