Hannah Vergult
Violet thought maybe she wasn’ t beautiful enough to be asked permission. No, that was dumb.
She allowed herself to look down. It was a mistake. A galaxy of freckles appeared before her. Constellations of blotchy spots and old scars. It looked like someone took a soaked paintbrush and whacked it over her. Splatter paint. She felt like a black hole.“ She walks in ugly like the sun.” She remembered the way she felt at the end of her ninth birthday party. All alone with a small pile of presents. Feeling bad for feeling empty. If Violet could go somewhere else, she would, but she didn’ t feel like it. Insatiable, her mom would say.
The last trickle of shampoo traced down her ankle and swirled away. The drain gulped the last of the water as Violet spun the shower knob to the right. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. A final drop landed on her eyelash and spilled down her cheek. She quickly wrapped a faded green towel around her body and looked at a blurry reflection in the foggy mirror. She breathed out steam. Wet hair stuck to her forehead and neck. She needed to brush it before it turned into a giant tangled tumbleweed and drifted out of control. She should’ ve used conditioner, but the bathroom always felt so suffocating and the water pressure was so pathetic. She wanted to supernova until she was dust. She went to her room instead.
She’ d barely memorized the first two lines of the poem and school started in approximately six hours. Violet knew she needed to feel a bit more panicked; she was going to humiliate herself in third period English. Maybe her classmates would mess up too. She could pretend she was sick and not go to school in the morning. The idea allured her, but she was fake sick last week. Her parents would suspect something.
She fed her arms and head into an over-sized sweatshirt, a souvenir gifted by her father from his most recent business trip to New Mexico. It had a blown up image of a Georgia O’ Keeffe painting— a skull accompanied by a couple flowers. The sweatshirt might’ ve been the first present from her father Violet actually enjoyed. She began to brush through her tumbleweed. Her mother used to brush her hair every night. She was too old for that now and always took showers long after her mom went to sleep.
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