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When I wake up on Saturday, Mom is heading to bed after her long night. I decide to paint my bedroom. The color in here is awful. It’s the worst green anyone ever imagined. No wonder I couldn’t draw the pear. I live inside of bile. It’s taken its toll.
I look on the computer for nicer colors and I find the perfect one. Vanilla Milkshake. It’s not quite white, and not quite yellow or brown. It’s warm. But it’s a milk shake so it’s cold.
That’s what color I paint my room.
I move all of my furniture into the center of the floor. I lie on my bed and start by staring into the southeast corner and I see myself on a step stool with a paint roller. This is too fake. I go to the hall closet and get the step stool and bring it to my room and I stand on it and roll my imaginary roller into the Vanilla Milkshake pan and then roll it onto the wall. I work my way around the room counterclockwise. Floor to ceiling. When I’m done I sit on my bed and I can see the truth: The truth is that you can’t paint over bile in just one coat.
I take a pretend nap and then when I wake up I decide the whole room is dry and I can put a second coat on. A Sarah is sitting on the end of my bed. She’s older.
“Forty,” she says.
“Oh,” I say. “Hi.”
“Do you want to talk about what happened in school?”
“No.”
“I know you walked in on Miss Smith kissing Vicky.”
“So?”
“So you can’t paint over that,” she says.
I think I can. I think I can paint over what I saw and unsee it and not tell anyone. I think I have to.
“You’re afraid to say anything because it would be your word against theirs?” she asks.
“You’re me. You know.”
“Well, you’re wrong. And she should be fired. Trust me. Vicky isn’t the first or the last one.”
I stop and stare at her. She’s calm. Soft around the edges. She’s nice and not here to mock me like twenty-three-year-old Sarah. This Sarah looks like she could draw a thousand pears. She doesn’t care about how cool her shoes are because she’s wearing beat-up hiking shoes. She’s telling me information about Miss Smith from the future. I think about how helpful it would have been had she brought lottery numbers instead.
“I don’t want to get involved,” I say.
“How much nasty shit has happened because people don’t want to get involved?”
“Mom and Dad would kill me.”
“Mom would respect you. Dad doesn’t matter.”
She’s still calm. I don’t know what to say. “How did you get in here?”
She gets up and opens the side window and climbs down the fire escape.
I look back at my ugly green walls and decide a second coat is needed. This time I work clockwise, and by the time night falls and Mom is awake again, I have painted my whole room. I have rid myself of the bile.
In my head, I now live inside a vanilla milk shake.
I put on new clothes on top of my five-day-old dirty self. I decide I am not going crazy. I do not need a psychologist. I decide I am an artist inside of a tornado that will not let me go.
Six days have passed. I still don’t want to see ten-year-old Sarah. I still don’t want to talk about Mexico. I want to do something fun, but I have no idea what fun is. I am the dull person who rubbed off on me. That can happen, you know.
Enough (More Tornado)
I leave the house through the back door.
Dad would flip out if he knew I was walking by myself up 17th Street at midnight. This is art. I don’t even bring my pepper spray. I didn’t bring my phone or wallet. Mom is patching people back together again twenty blocks from here. It’s a Saturday and the ER is probably busy. I walk to Rittenhouse Square and sit on a bench. I decide to sleep here tonight.
I find a good bench—well lit but out of the way. I lie down and try to sleep but every footstep I hear makes me open one eye.
I take a deep breath and then I take another one on top of it, and then another. I think: If my lungs burst, I won’t be able to tell anyone about Miss Smith and Vicky. I think: If my lungs burst, I won’t ever have to tell anyone about the headpiece and how I found it and how it made me cry.
I hear people walking in the park and talking to each other. I hope they don’t see me, so I become invisible. I blend into the park bench. Very quiet. Blend. Disappear.
While I’m gone, this is what happens: I remember the fighting.
I see Bruce standing at the edge of the water in Mexico. I see him throwing something into the water. Art.
When I open my eyes, it’s light, but it’s still night.
My face is sweating. I want to sleep but I can’t sleep.
I’m in Rittenhouse Square and this is not the place to sleep. When I sit up, I see ten-year-old Sarah standing next to my bench. She says, “Sarah?”