PEARL

FIVE

TRACK 5
WHY DO YOU FEEL SO DOWN?
DECLAN MCKENNA

long chapter!! but i'd say it's worth it :)
also tw:
mentions of all the trigger warnings in the intro, but nothing too explicit

🚬

NATHAN GOLD led Ida down a multitude of morose corridors, past endless doors and broken locks and a sparse array of nonchalant-looking nurses, until they reached what seemed to be the hospital's version of a college common room. It was right in the failing heart of the red brick building and Nate paused outside its propped-open double doors, giving Ida her cue to sweep her bangs aside and take a look.

Inside the room, from which emanated a low and lifeless murmur, there was a sparse array of tepid-colored couches, water coolers and a single television playing what looked like cartoon re-runs. There were a few circular tables, too, surrounded by plastic chairs, and armchairs tethered to nothing in particular bobbing up and down on the gray linoleum like lonely, suspiciously-stained ships in bottles. Patients and pill cups were dotted on various surfaces and window ledges, the latter like shot glasses, along with several board game pieces (which, Ida thought to herself, were as great a safety hazard as her pearl earrings if not more), unexciting magazines, paper napkins and one tube of lip gloss.

This tube, as bright pink and subsequently out of place in its dull surroundings as Ida's dress, was sitting on a small table far across the room between two couches of patterned brown and unpleasant green. These couches were arranged in an arrow-head formation, furthest arms almost touching, and were in the same corner of the depressing, un-dynamic room that Nate was gesturing towards.

"Over there," Nate announced, nodding at that corner's group of four kids. "Those are my friends."

There was nothing particularly striking about the group, because only the lip gloss sitting among them had made them stand out from the rest of the room. Now that Ida paid them closer attention and distinguished them from their surrounding sludge (which was easy, due to the angle of the couches), she could see two girls on the green couch and two boys on the brown, each pair with contrasting hues of skin like milk and honey.

"Now," Nate prevented Ida from examining the four in more detail by saying, taking her left arm lightly by the elbow and pausing to see if she minded, which she didn't, "I'm going to do that thing you see in movies and TV shows where I give you an explicit overview of each friend. Age, name, gender, background, problem, sexuality, relationship status, anything. You ready?"

"Of course you are," Ida muttered, but leant against the doorpost all the same. "Alright. Go."

The first person to fall under the intensely blue spotlight of Ida and Nate's combined gaze was one of the two girls on the couch, with dove-white skin and unkempt ringlets of dazzlingly blonde hair splayed star-like on the back of the couch behind her head. Her curls shone like spun, wispy gold, and would have done the job the lip gloss on the table (which the girl was playing with, using a socked foot) by catching Ida's eye had she properly looked at her before. The milk-white of her skin ought to have, too, as its pearlescence prevented it from morphing into the medical white of the walls and her nightdress.

It was hardly believable that something burning bright white and gold had been drowned out by its backdrop of dreary colour, evading Ida's notice, like a moonstone buried in grisly gray sand.

"That's Lily," Nathan told Ida, smiling fondly at the wholly heavenly-looking girl. "Lily Rose."

But as she glittered with gold as well as snow-whiteness, the long-silenced, smoke-choked voice of Ida the Writer couldn't help but think that the girl was much more of a daisy than a lily.