PEARL

TWENTY

TRACK 20
VIRGIN
FLOWER FACE

gimme lotsa comments if ur pearl gang
tw - mentions of self-harm/scars

🕊

NICOLE was dreaming on her feet about the smell of low quality coffee on Lily's summer breeze breath as she crept down the stairs and started slipping through the ground floor's shadows and pale splashes of moonlight, making her sugar-level-slowed way to her favourite Highgate bathroom.

Because as much as she was still wary of Ida Bluestone and her sequin smile, she was grateful beyond measure for her smashing said bathroom's mirror to pieces with her fist on her first day.

However lovestruck she was by Lily right then, worry had been trying its utmost over almost forty-eight hours to make Nicole crumble in the recent manner of her beloved charcoal stick, the long-straggling stub of which she'd finally worn to dark dust and accidentally sprinkled Lily's sketched cheek with.

Said worry had not one cause but multiple, as rivers run into the rough grey sea, and as the little side-plaits Lily liked to weave into Nicole's limp hair with her nimble-nymph fingers and decorate with fantasy fuchsias and vague violets joined into one would-be thick braid at the back.

The first of these two rattling rivers was Nicole's sketched sweetheart in the tender flesh – Lily herself. Nicole had spent the remainder of the morning in whose early hours she's found her bleeding alone in a third floor corridor listening to radio static rather than her group therapy leader, picturing Lily lying in her bed at that very moment and cleaning the blood off of her legs under blisteringly white bathroom lights mere hours before.

Her worry had picked up steam when, on Thursday evening, Nate had asked Lily if she was feeling better, and Nicole had discovered that she'd been ill while she was fretting fruitlessly. But seeing as Lily had smiled brightly enough to out-dazzle a diamond for the rest of said evening and during the visiting hours she'd spent sipping sweetened coffee by her side in the communal room that afternoon, Nicole's gnawing anxiety about her mystery illness and whether it had anything to do with the blood and broken-bird-wing humming and big-eyed rambling ("something bad is going to happen...") had been side-lined into a shadow.

Maybe it was just her period. Periods can make you sick.

"Found something out that's happening now and isn't lovely and pretty and is going to be bad..."

And just like a shadow, although sometimes unnoticed or ignored, it was still-present.

The second of the bitten-lip-inducing rivers of Nicole's cold concern was Rowan's long absences and similarly strange sickness, both of which she'd been told about the previous afternoon while Lily had tried to make Micah's headache better by lacing imaginary irises into his curls.

What had made this particular worry worse was the news of his banned shots and shouting at his brother and Micah – the first she and Lily been informed of at dinner earlier by the teary-eyed latter, and the second their ears had caught harsh slivers of through the hospital wall behind the coffee-brown communal couch.

As a result, it was Rowan – not Lily – and his twice-locked bedroom door and evident (and far too familiar) bottling technique for an unknown reason that had been biting Nicole's bottom lip ever since she'd left her bedroom to replace her now-powdered charcoal with the second stick that the kindly Ryan had smuggled in for her a couple of weeks ago, which was sharing the same plastic hiding place as Micah's weed: the hollow space under a loose floor tile in the final pink-painted stall.