Read Online Color Me Pretty by C.M. Stunich - Free Book Online Page B

that makes me feel better. Misery loves company. It's a tired saying, sure, but it's true. But at night, the only company I'm allowed to entertain are my demons. And the occasional orderly. They pop in and shake me awake at random hours, so that even my fitful nightmares are interrupted.
    Talk about a living, fucking hell.
    At least I don't have to eat at night. During the day, most of my subconscious revolves around figuring out how to make the food disappear off of my plate without eating too much of it. Kylie helps, as do carefully folded napkins, but stuff still goes down and it doesn't come up.
    I think a lot about that when I'm lying in bed, trying to get my logical brain to understand what my illogical mind has decided about life. Is Kylie right? Is this not really about modeling at all? Am I truly trying to punish myself?
    I trace my fingers along the seams of the comforter, sliding them along the white stitching and wondering who thought burnt orange and green were good color choices to go into this otherwise pink bedroom. I think about the design I drew on the window and the girl that danced across those yellow notepad pages, and then on my last night there, I get up and I start all over again.
    There are no pens in that hospital, no pencils either, but I guess they figure if you can give a pack of crayons to a kid, you can give them to a person in the looney bin. I find them in the desk drawer with a small notepad, gray with a blue logo across the top. Crescent Springs, Where Recovery Means Everything. Recovery. Recovery implies that something lost has been regained. I hardly know if the thing I'm searching for is something I ever really had to begin with.
    I sit down on the floor beneath the window and wish there was someway I could go outside. Fat chance of that happening though. While there's a slim possibility that I could sneak out, if I get caught, I'll be stuck here for God only knows how long, and tomorrow morning, Emmett is going to pull into this parking lot in his little, red two-seater with a beanie on his head and a smile on his face. There's nothing in the world I'd do to risk missing that.
    I close my eyes and imagine the tree house, the way the beds seem to have grown from the wood itself. How the windows are free of glass. The way the sun streams in across the floor. I take all of that energy and that power and I put it into my heart and my hands. At first, I figure I'm just going to start drawing like I did before. This time, though, words come first and then art, twining together across the page like vines.
    It starts out off the same as before, but this time, the message is different.
    [Dear Me,/I want to be pretty while alive./Not on the outside, but/Inside where my heart beats fierce/And my soul glows brighter than the sun. ]
    I pause in my poem to draw a star, one that ends up warping in on itself and becoming a dress. It takes up the rest of the page and disappears off the edges of the paper, disintegrating into the darkness and taking shape in my imagination. I lean my head back against the wall, and I can just see it done up in a million different colors, draping a million different girls. When I flip to the next page and start to write again, I don't even look down. I'm sure my words are scribbled and hardly legible, but that's okay. I'll remember what they say. After all, it's my soul spilling out across this page.
    [Burn, burn brightly/so fiercely/that even/the sun can't compare, even the moon can't compete./And the smile that taints my full lips/Looks like the blossoms on the branches of our favorite tree.]
    I pause again and sketch a face. At first, I think it's just going to be a generic set of features, someone to dress up with my designs, but then as my hand grasps a red crayon and begins to fill in fierce, flaming hair, I know without a doubt that this is me.
    I get an intense craving for cake.
    I drop my art supplies and stand up, lurching towards the door like a person possessed.