Paint Me Beautiful

It's almost like Lianna and modeling and fashion are just these far off concepts that I dream about but that don't really matter. All I can think about is my body and how it looks, how fat and disgusting it is, how I really should be exercising more. The only time these obsessive thoughts stop is when I'm with Emmett and now, even that doesn't seem so important.
    I work myself hard, until sweat is dripping to the floor, until I'm stumbling from one exercise to the next. I do that until I collapse to my knees, breathless, shaking, but still numb. Numb, numb, numb. I wanted to be empty, weightless, free, but not numb.
    “ I want to feel something,” I whisper to the broken picture. My mother's smiling face looks up at the ceiling and stays frozen in a brief moment of pure happiness, captured forever in that bliss. I feel suddenly that I need to find a picture of myself smiling and I pull myself to my feet, fighting through white splotches and glittering stars that dance around my head and threaten to take me down – permanently.
    When I flop into my computer chair and pull up my portfolio photos, I feel sick to my stomach. Instead of reminding me of anything good, all they do is make me remember how fat I am, how disgusting. I pick up my external keyboard, and I throw it, hard , all the way across the room where it crashes into the wall and explodes in a spray of plastic parts. Still, I feel nothing.
    “ Claire?” Emmett asks, rapping on the door gently. “Are you alright?” I think about asking him to come in, to hold me tight, to breathe sweet words against my ear and fill my body with his warmth.
    And then I see the razor blade sitting pretty and shiny next to my laptop.
    It seems to call to me, to beg me to take it and press it against the pale skin of my inner arm where it's like tissue paper now, white and frail and dry. Even the vitamins aren't going to be able to help me with that.
    I take it between my fingers gently, reverentially, and touch it to my skin.
    I breathe in deep and I slice long and slow, drawing a hiss from my lips and a bubble of something deep down inside of me. Emotions fill me, drawn from my heart the same way I've drawn crimson blood from my arm. They bubble up seemingly out of nowhere and suddenly, I feel different, better, more like the real me. The physical pain of the blade is nothing in comparison to the emotional pain that's hiding beneath, waiting to consume me. I move the blade and I cut again, vaguely aware in the back of my mind that cutting my skin is not going to get me a modeling contract. It's just a little bit, just to get me through the next few days. I'm only tiding myself over; this isn't permanent. I make a third cut and watch the red stain my skin, slide down and plop onto my white leggings.
    “ Claire?” Emmett asks again, voice more concerned than before. “Are you in there?”
    “ I'm fine,” I tell him, and for a moment, my voice actually sounds like the old me, the one who studied clothes with an artist's eye, who loved fashion for the creative outlet it provided. She wanted to be a role model, not an idol. She wanted to be seen, but she wanted to make a difference. I'm afraid that Claire Simone is dead; Emmett is in love with her. What a conundrum. “In fact, I'm great.” I set the blade down on the desk and run my thumb over the wounds, just to tease a bit more emotion out of them.
    “ Good,” he says, voice soft. “Because if anything ever happened to you, Claire Simone, the world would be missing out.”
    And then he walks away from my door and leaves me alone with my newest habit, one that's horrific enough on its own, but in my case is so much worse because it's just a symptom to an even bigger problem.
    The piece of paper that Emmett pushes under the door is the only thing that keeps me from stepping any further into the dark.
    It's a map to the tree house and on the top is a scrawling of gentle words that remind me that no matter what it might feel like, there really is somebody on my side.
    This escape, it's all yours, baby.
    A drop of blood spirals down from my arm and hits the yellow paper.
    I swear to you, it's the loudest sound in the world: the sound of my own death ringing in my ears.

 

    The next morning, I receive a call from Lianna Cheung herself.
    She's doing fittings today and wants to see me.
    “ I know I said two weeks,” she tells me, making my heart warm with the fact that she actually remembers me. Not a lot of designers