PEARL

TEN

TRACK 10
DEEP BLUE DAY
BRIAN ENO

tw for some anorexia-themed content

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NICOLE HARPER stared at the expanse of star-shining water stretching out in front of her, the surface of which would swallow the three pastel-coloured (save one) pills Micah had placed on her earth-brown palm as soon as everyone else had fallen into a drug-induced sleep around her.

She'd secretly held onto her portion of pills for several reasons, the main one being that she wanted to make sure nobody overdosed or drowned during the night.

Nobody, of course, mostly meaning Lily.

"Come in here, Nicky," the girl giggled drowsily, reaching vaguely in Nicole's distant direction to grasp moon-white handfuls of cold night air and mirroring how Venus had looked when stepping out of her clamshell as she made her way towards the bank of the lake she was thigh-deep in, water droplets rolling from her skin and nightdress skirt like a thousand stars who'd lost their footing. "The water's so pretty, Nicky. Feels so lovely on my skin, and your skin is so lovely. Come in here!"

Nicole swallowed a wisp of a smile instead of the medicine Micah and Ro had provided, giving Lily a small shake of the head and hugging her brittle brown knees even closer to her diminished chest. She touched at a nearby dirty daisy with two paper-thin fingertips to avoid looking at her anymore, opulent and opioid-influenced and far prettier than she would ever look in the sketches Nicole drew of her nightly on an A4 pad pinched from the receptionist's desk, using a stick of smuggled charcoal.

"Everything's so sparkly, Nicole," Lily drew out her dreamy, drugged monologue, twisting the knife that the first sight of her lithium-lucid, butterfly-blue eyes had plunged in between Nicole's sharp shoulder blades as she fluttered said eyes shut and sighed in ecstasy, signifying that the pills she'd popped were doing their job. "So sparkly, so starry...so colourful, sweet Nicky. You're glowing violet."

As she spoke, utterly oblivious to the way she was making Nicole ache far more than eating nothing for Elle magazine ever had, Lily lifted her swan-white arms as if she was about to copy the bird and take flight, spinning in a circle as slowly as one would if wading through sticky, suffocating treacle.

"Violet," she repeated, humming in drowsy pleasure, dropping her outstretched hands to her hips and dragging them downwards in a way that made Nicole as light-headed as she had felt on her way to homecoming. "Glowing violet like my nana's lavender, lovely Nicky. Purple girl. So, so pretty."

Her heavenly voice hitched on the final syrupy syllable, as her hands followed the dip of her hipbones and hit the little pearl of pleasure that Nicole shivered feverishly to think about, seeing as years of conditioner and conditioning to hate her own skin and pose for boys on glossy pages had not only stripped the flesh from her fragile bones, but had crushed her love for girls like saffron under a Stiletto heel by side-lining it to such an extent that feeling it in her hated body made her stiffen like a board, and feel as though one of the many manicured hands she'd encountered was holding her head under the lake Lily was sparkling diamond-like in until she finally couldn't breathe.

"Glowing," Lily sing-songed, giving the moon a second gold-precious glance of her mollied Madonna face. "Like...God. Or lovely Ida. Lovely Nate. Pretty, pretty blue Nate...lovely lavender Nicky..."

Nicole may have drowned Micah's pills the first chance she'd got, for the paired purpose of safety and holding onto what few slivers of control over her own body she'd managed to maintain through one of the deadliest coping mechanisms, but had she taken them, she knew that Lily would've glowed pearl-white. She herself, on the other hand, ought to have been glowing as green as the grass she was tearing at with bitten nails rather than as purple as her dress, considering how envious she was of the moon and Lily's hands, continuing to trail down her ambrosial-white thighs.