Cry Until You Bleed

29- Eavesdropping

*Extra update because the Columbus Blue Jackets kicked butt last night and killed the Anaheim Ducks so Niles can suck it because my team is better than his.*

“We need glitter,” Desiree decides as she’s looking down at our large piece of craft paper with the beginnings of the Hollywood sign on it. Earlier in our Sunday meeting for the Halloween party, I sketched out what it would look like because apparently, I can draw well so they nominated me to be the artist. Anyway, I sketched it with a pencil and then we started working as a group to paint in the lines that I sketched out for us. I was painting the letters of the sign, Desiree was painting the dark blue sky, Katie was working on the mountain, and Mia insisted on supervising which is obviously her way of getting out of actually doing any work.

“There isn’t any glitter on the Hollywood sign,” I remind Desiree, looking up at her from where I’m painting the first ‘o’ on the sign.

“Well, no, but we don’t have silver for the letters so since you’re using white, we’ll just have to use glitter to make them silver,” She justifies and before I can tell her that the letters of the sign are really white, not silver, she’s already off to find Quinn to request some glitter.

“My hands are going to be green for days,” Katie says as she’s working on the grassy mountain that the Hollywood sign rests on. It’s a really dark green because we’re painting the sign as if it was at night, so everything is darker than it really should be.

“Free nail polish,” I grin at her jokingly. “But I know what you mean, only mine are just white which isn’t as exciting as green or blue.”

“I will gladly trade you,” She says with a long sigh. “And my butt hurts from sitting on the ground for so long. How much longer do we have?”

“About twenty minutes,” I say, looking up at the clock that’s caged on the wall beside the door to the meeting room where we were working.

“Okay, well I’m closing up early. Mia, can you take over for me?” Katie wonders, handing Mia the paint brush without giving her any time to respond.

“Where are you going?” Mia asks her, obviously not wanting to actually participate in the arts and crafts time but she dutifully gets onto the floor where Katie was working and starts creating a dark green mountain for the Hollywood sign.

“Darling, rules were meant to be broken,” She responds breezily. “And if we have to stay until two then I look at it as a small act of sticking it to the man to leave at 1:40 because that’s as rebellious as it gets around here. I’ll see you guys next week.”

We all say goodbye to her as she leaves the meeting room, looking like she doesn’t have a care in the world at all. I wonder why she’s here if she seems so careless about everything. Usually, the people around here care too much so it’s an odd change to see the complete opposite of that.

“I like her,” Mia decides. “She’s interesting.”

I nod in agreement. I liked her too. She was kind of mysterious and you don’t get a lot of that around here.

“I got glitter,” Desiree pipes as she arrives back at our group, fighting through all of the other groups as they’re working hard to get their tasks done as well. The group of three beside us was making a list of possible triggers that could set off somebody’s panic, which is something that they have to look out for around here. Things like flashing lights, some spooky sounds, monster masks. There’s a lot of Halloween things that can’t be implemented in a crazy house and it’s their job to make sure that we don’t stray from that idea. “Where’d Katie go?”