Beneath The Floorboards

Part 1-Before

"What makes something beautiful?" This is what Nina Vargas had playing over and over again in her head, chiming in her mind like a bell. Splat. Red is for all the anger welled up inside. Splat. Yellow is for all the happiness that can't be found. Splat. Blue is for all the sad days. Splat. Pink is for all the broken hearts. Splat. And black is for all the emptiness inside. Nina vigorously attacked the white wall with colors from paint buckets dripping with the thick, gooey substance.

If she could've, Nina would've take the entire world, turned it into a blank page, and colored it the way she thought it should be. But of course those are silly children's dreams, so until then Nina stuck to a blank wall. Nina flung another piece of physical matter at the wall. Nina tucked her stringy, brown hair behind her right ear. She glared at her hands.

Nina Vargas was the average girl. She did not like dirt, she despised it actually. She washed her hands a minimum twenty-three times a day and liked to keep everything perfectly parallel. Her nails were crisply painted at the tips with a cool white, and her hair was always in a ponytail when working. When she ate her bites were three point one centimeters in length. Her television set always had to be directly opposite her bed, but not too close nor too far. Her clothes were always perfectly symmetrical with one another, including her accessories. Her strides were of perfect "o" proportion, and her skin was always layered with a deep coating of cocoa butter lotion and Covergirl TruBlend Powder.

Doctors liked to call it OCD. She liked to call it perfection.

Nina blinked three times, studying her rainbow hands. That is exactly the thing that marks something as beautiful: perfection. If everything is always perfectly aligned, balanced, and clean then it is considered perfect, and perfection is beautiful. This is why Nina Vargas' work always had to be perfect, because it needed to be beautiful. Why? Because she was an artist, and artistry must never lag, otherwise no one notices it, and if no one notices it, it does not matter, and if it does not matter, then it is just a miniscule piece of acne marking the world unsanitary.

Nina's expression went from disdain to utter aggravation in a matter of moments. After mulling over her hands angrily, Nina sprinted her eyes back towards the wall. No, no, no, no! This is not what Nina Vargas wanted at all! The yellow splatter was supposed to be on the left hand corner of the red splatter, not the blue. Now she must start over again, and this is not something Nina wants to be doing over her weekend. Nina dug her nails animatedly into her hands, hoping to secrete some type of substance that might cleanse her hands forever.

Tisk, tisk. There went those silly ideas again. Nina's mind had been running ramped for the past several days, because that is what always happened. She rereads the Harry Potter series, easily devouring the wizards and magical creatures in a matter of days, and then her head begins to mound up. She begins to believe in it all again. The fairies, dragons, wizards, witches, and everything else that relates to magic. As I've stated before, Nina Vargas was not the average girl. She did not want to go to college, get a degree, get a career, find the love of her life, start a family, retire, and then die. Well at least not traditionally. She wanted to do it her way.

That's not to say she wanted to rearrange the order in which these events occured, of course not. She just wanted to do something different. Live a different life, see a different world! She wanted to experience something that she could not on planet Earth. By now you are wondering why such ideals came into her head. I mean, she must've grown up with hippies or something, right? Well you, my dear reader, are precisely wrong.

Nina Vargas grew up a normal girl. She had a mother and a father, one sister, and a dog named Louie. She was taught proper etiquette and went to an average Catholic school. Her father was a lawyer and mother a nurse. She had two best friends, one a boy and the other a girl. Naturally Nina fell in love with the boy, and naturally it did not work out. She was pushed from the very beginning to do all the traditional things a child should. Go to college, get a career, start a family, retire, and die while sleeping in her favorite room. But Nina wanted none of this. Her family pretended to be perfectly normal, smiling, hugging, going on tedious car rides, but in reality Nina could see through the cracks of her family.