PEARL

SEVEN

TRACK 7
CAN I CALL YOU TONIGHT?
DAYGLOW

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NATE was lying fully-dressed on his hospital sheets, which may have seemed strange, given that hours had passed since the meal that had as much appeal to every happy Highgate patient (especially Rowan) as roadside rubble had been served in the comfortless cafeteria, and hours since the moon had shown its bright white face on the other side of several suicide-proof windows, signifying said patients' bedtime.

Whilst watching his moon-white ceiling so intensely he swore it started to move and listening to the secret shifting of Micah and Rowan on the bed in the latter's adjacent room, Nathan Gold was thinking about Ida and her bluestone eyes, occasionally pausing his twinkling trains of thought (all of which shared the same destination, which was a childish fantasy of kissing her lip-gloss-lacquered lips) to half-smile at how nauseated the girl would be if she could see inside his head right then.

The train analogy alone would've made her greener than the nearby forest.

"I like her," Ro leaned over the side of his bed (although Nate couldn't see him, he knew that he was doing this due to the soft grunt of mattress springs coupled with past experience) to tell Nate through the hole someone had somehow managed to knock relatively neatly into the same wall that divided their bedheads. It was obvious what said hole had been put there for, by a long-gone patient evidently involved with their neighbour, but there was certainly nothing glorious about it.

For a start, it was ugly and hazardously jagged, constantly dribbling powdery white plaster onto both boys' beige carpets, and spent its time stoppered up with mouthfuls of wall-white toilet paper when not in use - for a means of conversation between Ro and Nate, that is. Not the designed use.

"Ida, I mean," the former continued, accompanied by another squeak of metal mattress springs and a sleepy-sounding sigh from Micah. "I like her, I think."

"Yeah," Micah agreed, although he sounded much quieter than Rowan for two reasons. The first was that Micah always seemed to sleep on the right side of Rowan's bed – the one next to the wall his bed was pressed against - and that side was the furthest away from the makeshift glory hole, meaning that it was harder for Nate to hear him. The second was that no matter what side he slept on, Micah wasn't supposed to be in Rowan's bed, so he needed to whisper in order to avoid blowing their over two-month-long cover. "I think I like her too. She seems pretty cool, if a little...hardcore."

"Hardcore?" Nate laughed, copying Rowan by momentarily leaning over the side of his own moaning mattress to put his mouth near the hole. "What does that mean, Micah? She's not pornography."

"I don't know," Micah replied, after taking a pause to presumably try and hide his laughter in Rowan's pillow. Rowan didn't bother. "I mean...she seems nice and all, but also kind of mean."

"Ro's kind of mean," Nate countered, slipping his hands behind his head as though he were lying on a sun lounger rather than sheets smelling of medical soap, "and you're in his bed."

"That's true," was Micah's muffled response, swiftly followed by what sounded like a slap on the arm. Nate smirked to himself and the ceiling, seeing as Rowan had just proved both their points.

"She's got this thing about movies," he told them next, after waiting for the faux-argument in Ro's room to fizzle out into a rustle of sheets, croak of springs and handful of hushed giggles from both boys involved. "Ida has."

"What thing?" Ro asked, after resuming leaning over the side of the bed. Nate did the same, and caught a glimpse of Rowan's green eyes through the hole, glittering against his gloomy backdrop of hospital room décor. Even though his light was still on, unlike Nate's, Rowan's room was still as dreary as the February sky earlier that day. "Like, she thinks we're all inside one, or...?"