Color Me Pretty

promptly gets dropped. Other than our conversation my first day there, we do not talk about suicide or anorexia or depression again. Instead, we talk about nail polish and designer clothes and magazines. We talk about celebrities and movies and rock stars. We go to our counseling sessions and keep our lips sealed and the locks to our secrets shut tight. Nobody gets in; nothing gets out.
    At night, when I lay in bed, my thoughts consume me, and my disorder screams from deep, deep down, begging for light, desperate to claw its way up and out of my belly and into my chest. I push it back, but barely. My room is heated, but it feels cold. I think it's Emmett's presence that I miss most. Strange that, since he hasn't exactly been in my life all that long. Or maybe it's because the pillows smell like bleach instead of flowers, and the blankets are scratchy and staunchly utilitarian.
    I dream that I'm fat; I wake to skinny. When I switch out my clothes for pajamas, I'm always afraid that the items my mother packed – all baggy and oversized – will strain across the massive rolls of my gut and bunch at my hips. Instead, they hang loose, almost comically so. The one thing that remains consistent is this: people stare at me and they don't like what they see. So, I guess it doesn't matter whether I'm fat or thin; people are disgusted with me.
    And so I get through the days with my new friend because although she's gregarious on the outside, she's ten times more fragile on the inside and 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