Outer Space / Carry On | Michael Clifford AU

5.

I didn't sleep that great the nights following the dinner party. I kept dreaming of colours and waking up at odd hours of the night.

That first night, Joan was up too. "The baby won't stop kicking. Preparing me for all the sleepless nights ahead," she joked, cradling a cup of herbal tea over her huge belly. We looked at baby names for a while before I went back into my room and started a new painting. I didn't get back to sleep until almost 4am.

The next two nights I stayed in my room just incase Joan was up again. I didn't want her to worry about me, or worry why I wasn't sleeping well. There wasn't anything to worry about, honestly. 

This happened once before, after Mum. It was like a creative surge running through my veins so that even when I was sleeping, I was still painting, in my head, until it became too unbearable that I'd just wake up, turn on my lamp and start painting for real.

I started painting when my Mum died. Or at least, that's when I picked it back up again. 

I used to paint when I was little. I had this wild imagination where I saw the world around me painted in all the wrong colours, and I'd see people with animal heads, or unicorn wings, or their hearts outside of their bodies.

My mum said she knew I was creative from the day I was born. She said she stared into my blue eyes as she cradled me for the first time and saw something inside of them, a wild imagination; a wonderland. And so she named me Alice.

Though, she told me that story when I was 10 and she was on some pretty heavy medication by then, so maybe she made it all up. I'll never know now. Maybe that's why Michael's nickname struck such a nerve.

What I did know is that as I got older, the colours washed away. Pink skies became blue, lilac clouds of fairy floss turned back into white water vapour, and the people around me, my Mum, Dad, strangers in the street, they were no longer characters in a fairy tale or beautiful half-human, half-animal creations.

The world was as ordinary as it should be, and I felt ordinary too. At the time, I thought maybe that would be enough to pull my mother out of the darkness and dip her into a coat of ordinary, because to thirteen year old me, ordinary was just a skip away from happiness. If only it were that simple.

Even back then, I couldn't remember finishing a painting. I couldn't remember much about my art at all, except that I'd them to Mum and her eyes would light up, and when she laughed it sounded the way I thought rainbows would if they could sing. I guess that was before she got sick.

By Friday, the lack of sleep was plastered all over my face, right down to the bags under my eyes and my unwashed hair.

"You look like shit," Eloise told me at lunchtime. I looked across the table at her smeared lipstick and leftover eyeliner from the night before.

"I could say the same thing about you."

She grinned, "Yeah, but I look like shit because I was out until 4am. You just look like you've been brought back from the dead."

My insides winced, and then I stomped on the feeling like one would a finished cigarette. Not even Eloise and Kelsey knew about Mum.

"It's not fair, you know," Kelsey spoke from her textbook. She practically lived in her books. She wanted to be a doctor one day. "You party all night and practically sleep through school and still get better grades than me. Tell me your secrets."

"Sorry, Kels," Eloise said in her usual raspy voice. "Some of us were just born smarter than others."

"And with a thirstier need for attention," Kelsey teased back.

Eloise rolled her eyes. "Speaking of attention, what's with the badass new boy?"

"You're still talking about him?"

"No," Eloise told Kelsey before turning her attention to me. "I mean, why's he been staring at you all week?"

"He has?" I turned my head to the patch of grass he'd seemed to claim as his own. He sat there everyday, listening to music. Sometimes he laid down with his hands behind his head and his face to the sky. What are you looking at up there, Michael?

"Yeah, he has."

"Maybe he likes you," Kelsey said, her eyes still in her book.

"Michael doesn't like me."

Eloise's jaw dropped. "You know his name and you're only just mentioning it to us now?"

"I guess." And I definitely wasn't going to tell her that he'd been at my house for dinner with his parents, or that he said he liked my art. Or that he called me Alice in Wonderland.

Or, how you don't realise from a distance just how pink his lips are.

And I'd never, ever admit that the exact colour of his lips kept showing up in my paint palette all week. It wasn't my fault that I'd been working on a half-girl, half-flamingo painting and had been mixing a lot of pink paint.

"So, what's his like? Are any of the rumours true?" Now Kelsey was looking at me, but what could I say? He hadn't spoken to me since he left my house on Monday night.

"I honestly can't tell you anything about him except that my Dad is his parents lawyer," I hoped this was enough for them to just drop it.

"So he's not a scholarship kid..." Eloise said.

"Nope. Just another rich brat like you," I smiled sweetly and picked up my laptop bag. "I'll see you guys later." 

And then I walked towards that patch of grass that seemed to be reserved for Michael Clifford. I was going to go find out more him.