PEARL

FIFTEEN

TRACK 15
NOTHINGS GONNA HURT YOU BABY
CIGARETTES AFTER SEX

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NICOLE had always hated bathrooms, every one of Highgate's included – the pink-tiled one on the ground floor, the disused blue one on the second that a boy had cut his wrists in, the one on her own floor and the one on the fourth and final floor that she'd never been inside. If she had to choose one of the four go in, she'd probably choose the pink one, seeing as Ida had shattered most of its horizontal mirror. Reflections had proved a problem for Nicole ever since her disorder had materialised, whether it was at a dressing-room table or in a puddle of sidewalk rain.

But now wasn't the time to think of herself.

"Here we are," she announced quietly, silencing Lily's hum by flipping on the bathroom lights and immediately averting her eyes – not only to lessen the harsh jump from almost pitch black to sterile white, but to avoid catching her own gaze in the mirror. "Time to get you clean."

If anything, being around Lily made Nicole's hatred of seeing her own soil-brown body worse. She may not have needed to please her silicon-sweetened mother for magazines any more, but she could hear her voice in her head every time she fantasised about so much as holding Lily's hand, replacing countless contract signers with Lily's name. She could hear her saying that Lily would never want her because she was too skinny, just as she had used to say that Vogue would never want her because she was too fat, like a twisted version of the Goldilocks story.

In her mother's eyes, both the literal injected pair and those that haunted Nicole, her daughter would never, ever be "just right."

"Lovely Nicky," Lily smiled, fiddling with the metal door handle and out-dazzling the tiles as Nicole tore some toilet paper from the nearest stall and wet them under a tap. The unnatural light above the girls' heads exacerbated the paleness of Lily's lip-gloss-less mouth and skin, sapping both of their pearlescent glow and making her look deathly pale. It also made the blood on her look even brighter and more menacing. "So lovely...so kind...always so sad."

Nicole laughed hollowly as she turned off the squeaking tap and gestured for Lily to sit down on the closed toilet lid. She then knelt down (keeping her face on the floor tiles, so as to hide her knee-caused wince) and began to clean the dried blood from her swan-feather feet.

She prayed that no studio lights as white as the tiles and stall walls around her started shining and no cold sweat started beading on her forehead, because Lily needed her right then.

"I miss my Nana, Nicky," she said, after wriggling the toes of her newly-cleaned foot and making Nicole giggle like a little girl in a way she couldn't remember doing for a very long time. "Miss my Nana because she's dead, and she was so lovely and pretty. Miss my lovely momma too."

Nicole may have hated speaking almost as much as being touched and told to smile for the camera, but she'd been doing a lot of it that night for Lily's sake and was going to continue doing so, whatever the bored Bluestone girls had to say.

"Your momma?"

"Mhm," Lily nodded, rapping her fingers in her reddened lap. She looked like she wanted to try and braid Nicole's un-plaited hair again, and Nicole wondered whether she ought to offer, but common bashfulness stopped her – no studio lights or clam-like legs. "My lovely pretty momma. I wish she'd come visit me sometimes, even though I love drinking lovely sweet coffee with you."

That made Nicole giggle again, because Micah hadn't been lying when he'd told Ida that the hospital coffee was awful. If anything about it was lovely and sweet, it was Lily dipping her Lotus biscuits inside her polystyrene cup of it on the mud-brown couch and watching them fall apart.