PEARL

TWENTY-FIVE

TRACK 25
DISORDER
JOY DIVISION

Oh No

tw - literally every one imaginable i stg
no like seriously this one is intense
anorexia, attempted sexual assault

🕊

NICOLE, like the rest of Highgate's harem, had no mirror in her room. Usually she wouldn't complain, given how often her salt-earth eyes had February-shouldered car windows and rainwater galore, but after relieving her always-aching limbs of her hospital sweater and relieving her hair of its fraying plait to look like a less-gold, long-starved Rapunzel, Nicole needed a mirror to complete the picture.

Because beneath the lack of flesh and overexposure of bone, there was a faint glimmer of the suffocating runway sheen that she knew would never leave, having been battered into her ever since she was barely older than a baby and had been taught how to bat her eyes, and past experience had taught her that applying lipstick would brighten said sheen into the sought-for shine.

With no reflection or any of Lily's rose-pink lip gloss to sweeten herself up, Nicole sighed and hoped that biting her bathroom-mirror-cracked bottom lip with her tender-gummed teeth would revive some of the colour that both lips hadn't seen for what felt like decades. She wished that she had that lip gloss to wear, though, because if she had, it would've been sort of like a kiss from Lily.

Pathetic.

It would've tasted as sweet as the honey on toast that hadn't passed the mouth of Nicole's desecrated melanin temple ever since the cameras had started clicking and the bathroom scales had begun to gather even less dust, which was just as sweet as Lily was in every moonlit lullaby fantasy.

Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic.

Had Nicole had any mascara to keep her Lily-lacquered mouth company, her hollow cheeks would've suddenly been stained as black as the charcoal smearing her surrounding sketches, because the guilt she felt for what had happened to her – so great that she'd been bottling harder than she'd ever bottled before – swelled and popped its cap, and spilled out of both bottle and ash-brown eyes.

"Something bad is going to happen..."

Guilt for kidding herself that it was her period.

"Something not as lovely as you, lovely Nicky..."

Guilt for seeing the box of tampons bring tears to her night-dress blue eyes.

"Not lovely and pretty at all..."

Guilt for Nate telling her that she was getting sick, and telling him nothing.

"Nothing like Ida's pretty lovely eyes..."

Guilt for finding her near the store cupboard, and only now realizing that it was near his room.

"Something bad..."

Guilt for every time she'd waited by the back door, and gasped her name to the dawn.

"Something happening now..."

Guilt for watching her sleep on Wednesday night, and leaving her locked door on Friday morning.

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

"No," Nicole whimpered into the palm pressed over her thrice-bitten lips, squeezing her eyes shut until little white stars dotted the darkness momentarily blinding her to the truth. "No, no, no."