Painting Sage

by Rachael K Hannah

  With my eyes cast downward, counting every step I took, I compulsively ran my tongue along the insides of my cheeks. They were rough and raw, a little bloody, and marked with tiny indents where I had chewed on them relentlessly. Not even the sun’s gentle glow on that beautiful spring day could move me—or end my pain. The sadness belonged to me. It was my melancholy, my infinite sorrow that—no matter how hard I tried—always managed to find its home within the ever-darkening corridors of my mind. A total wash.

  Then, just as I was ready to turn around and head back home, something interesting caught my eye. Someone had drawn on the sidewalk in colored chalk, which for the most part wasn’t that unusual. But this particular pattern was a little strange. It wasn’t the conventional menagerie of hopscotch boards, animal etchings, or figure-eight flowers that kids often liked to draw on the street, and it certainly wasn’t anything mind-blowing like some of the graffiti street art I’d seen before. This design consisted of an array of intricate, looping configurations; its multitude of colors perfectly blended into and intersected with one another. For whatever reason, I wanted to capture it, so I held up my phone and experimented with lighting and angles until I found the exact shot I wanted before clicking away. Examining the image I’d taken, I decided it wouldn’t fit in very well with my collage and would photograph better in black and white. I stood in the street for a few minutes, staring down at my phone, trying out different filters in frustration.

  “Hey, Sage, wait up!”

  I looked up from my mini project. It was Farrah, and she was running up the street toward me.

  “Hey,” I said, glancing down at the photo one last time. Definitely looked better in black and white.

  “What are you up to?”

  I slid the phone into my back pocket and shrugged.

  “Not much. Just walking around. How did the rest of the session go?”

  “Oh, it was fine. Everyone calmed down eventually, and the buzz died down. You know how they love drama. Believe me. You did them all a big favor by giving them something to get all riled up about. Personally, I’ve wanted to tell them off for so long. You can’t even begin to know.”

  “Oh, yeah?” It was good to know that at least someone wasn’t mad at me. “I didn’t even say anything that bad. Getting them all worked up was like shooting fish in a barrel. You should have seen some of the craziness I saw and heard when my mom sent me away to Darien. The kids at our group are too sensitive.”

  “Exactly! It wasn’t even like you were having a complete meltdown either. It’s just time somebody did something. God! They’re just annoying! I mean, what’s Dr. Shaw going to do about it? Call our parents?” Farrah was going about a mile per minute. “I’d like to see her try getting a hold of my mine. Dad practically runs this city, and no one—I mean no one—interrupts Mom during spin class, shopping, or whatever she does with her time. I don’t keep tabs on her. I mean, I’d stop going altogether, but my grandma is paying me to go along with it because it’s so important to my father that I go.”

  “I hear ya,” I replied—though, truthfully, I couldn’t relate. I think my mother could trace the origins of her employment history way, way back to her first gig as a supermarket cashier when she was a teenager. Dad… well, he did well for himself but not to that degree. Supervising a department full of super-trendy millennial writers was a bit different than managing a whole district of actual grown people. Everyone knew Farrah’s father, a city councilman, was well-respected within the community and tight with the mayor.

  Aside from wielding an insurmountable amount of political clout, Farrah’s family owned three houses outside their home on Sutton Place and traveled all over the world. She wasn’t exaggerating. Good luck trying to reach Mrs. Ansari while she was sunbathing in Bali. I almost had to laugh just thinking about it. Most of my new friends from school traveled in a completely different circle. Many had some sort of family situation like mine—nothing out of the ordinary.

  “I thought I’d do a little shopping before heading back up. Walk with me,” she invited. “No sense in standing out here all day.”

  “Sure, I guess.” I needed to kill time before heading back to Dad’s anyway, though I didn’t care whether I ended up wasting too much time. A little detour might not sit well with my family’s dinner plans, but so what? Would the sky blow up if we ate dinner at a later time? Shuffling my feet on the sidewalk, I stuffed my hands inside my pockets as I walked beside Farrah towards Avenue A.

  “What are you up to later?”

  I shrugged my shoulders. “Eh, I’m probably going to walk around in circles for a bit before heading back down to Brooklyn. I have this thing to go to tonight.” I made sure to avoid the word birthday, realizing how odd it would seem for someone our age to forgo actually doing something exciting to sit around with her parents.

  “Brooklyn? I wish I could trade places with you.”

  I laughed. It wasn’t worth getting into the details about my new home and how it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, but I also didn’t want to tell Farrah to get lost.

  “Williamsburg is all right, I guess. I mean, there’s a lot more to it than microbreweries and hipster coffee shops. I’ve been staying with my dad for a while,” I explained. “He works in the city… with his girlfriend. I don’t even know why they decided to live there in the first place… Now she’s trying to convince him to sell and move to some loft she found in Greenpoint. I don’t know. No one ever explains anything to me.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember you mentioning that before! That’s so cool. Personally,” she placed her hand over her heart, “I crazy adore HEDZ. I’m on it all the time. They have the cutest quizzes… oh, and there was this one post recently with these adorable hamsters wearing tiny little outfits! And their fashion section is always spot-on. Does he do any of that? I follow their tips religiously.”

  Judging by her outfit, it showed. From head to toe, right to her glittery cobalt blue gel manicure, Farrah looked like she walked straight out of the HEDZ app and into the Garment District. It didn’t take much to compare her perfectly polished nails with my own. Although I also prided myself in keeping up with the latest fashion, my nails were a mess. Somehow, I had managed to pick away at them, my cuticles and pieces of skin, leaving behind fingertips that were red, chapped, and raw. I didn’t even remember doing it.

  I shook my head. “No, he’s in charge of advertising,” I replied. “There’s a whole bunch of departments, and they’re trying to focus more on the news— fewer quizzes and adorable pics of animals. Although even I’ve got to admit, they’ve put out some great memes.”

  Farrah scrunched her face up a bit and looked at me, puzzled. “What ads?”

  “Well, you see, that’s just it. They’re technically called ‘advertorials.’ They’re featured stories where a product either gets mentioned or plays a prominent role in the text. So, when you’re reading it, it’s not that obvious that the whole thing is really a sales pitch. It reads like an actual short story. It’s kinda weird, right? Tons of publications do it,” I explained. “But, like I said, Dad says the company is moving more in the direction of digital news, features, opinion… in addition to the cute and trendy stuff. They’ll reach a larger audience this way and ultimately be taken more seriously, which is especially important since its established demographic is maturing and becoming more interested in political issues and social commentary. Not to mention, there’s more of a demand for digital-based news these days. I mean, who honestly reads the papers anymore?”

  Based on the blank expression slowly taking over Farrah’s face, I could see that I had lost her. She’d probably heard enough political talk from her father to last her an entire lifetime and didn’t need to listen to me ramble on. “I was featured in their fashion section back in March. It wasn’t anything extra,” I made sure to add.

  “No way!”

  “Yeah. It was all about crazy-colored hair like mine. This one girl looked ridiculously awesome. She had th
is lavender, seafoam, deep-blue thing going on, and all the colors sort of blended into each other. And her hair,” I said as I turned slightly to the side and pointed to the small of my back, “went all the way down to here. That was featured about two months ago, and as you can probably see, my roots are already coming in. I’ll have to do something about that soon.”

  “It looks good with the roots, actually. You should leave it alone and let them grow out a bit more—with the pink and platinum altogether. It’ll look good.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. Hadn’t thought about that one before, but Farrah could be on to something.

  “Anyway, my parents are divorced,” I said, quickly changing subjects, “sooooo, I spend half my time with him and the other half with Mom, and I rarely get to see them together, so that’s why I’m headed home in a bit.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “Bronxville.”

  “Very nice. My cousins live there. Sometimes I wish my parents were divorced.”

  “Huh?”

  Farrah laughed. “Well, they hate each other,” she explained, “and they have completely different interests, friends. They’re not even in the same house half the time. IMO, they should just draw up the papers and get it over with. They’d be much happier that way. My father is concerned about how a divorce might look to his family… and constituents, which is so absurd these days.” Her voice lowered bitterly, “Their arguing when they’re both home—it’s constant. It’s painful to listen to. I’m at a point where I need to break free if it doesn’t stop. Once I can, I’m going to find my own place. I’ve already put money away.”

  With that, I could empathize. When Dad left, I was old enough to understand what was going on. It seemed terrible to admit, but my parents’ constant arguing had gotten to such an intolerable point that their split had granted me a deeply needed sense of relief. Back then, the hardest part was not being able to see Dad every day. The times I did see him always felt more like one huge overcompensation, where we’d always go on these excessive outings, and I’d somehow end up with a ton of presents. That might sound great, but it wasn’t. It felt like he was trying to apologize for some wrong he had committed against me. And Mom, well, she was always angry about something—not a scary, aggressive angry but more of a quiet, inwardly turned anger that simmered in the pot. Somehow thinking about it all brought me back to that place where everything suddenly seemed motionless. The thick fog slowly crept its way back into my consciousness.

  “Enough about them. I was thinking of checking out a few places around here myself. You want to stick around, Brooklyn?”

  My head felt… heavy. I was struggling again, but I didn’t want to blow Farrah off.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “Why not?”

  *

  “Hold up! I need to get a pic of that!”

  “That’s like the hundredth picture you’ve taken so far! What’s up with that?” Farrah asked.

  “It’s just something I like to do. I said hold up,” I insisted, taking a few more photos along the way. I didn’t quite want to admit it to anyone yet, but I had looked into this photo essay contest Sheila had mentioned a while back and was seriously considering bringing something together for submission. There was something so calming, so soothing about viewing my world from behind a lens. I examined the photo I’d taken but wasn’t satisfied with it at all. Deleting it, I decided to try again.

  “Are you almost done? Come here.” Farrah laughed.

  “What?”

  “Come here!” she repeated, a bit more emphatically.

  I quickly glanced again at my phone to check the time. It was 2:30 p.m. A small nagging voice told me to text Dad, and I was a little bit surprised to see that he hadn’t texted or called already.

  “Farrah, not to be a downer, but I better start heading back.”

  “Just a few more minutes. Please. I’ve been dying to go in there.” She nodded her head toward the other side of the street. I recognized the place immediately Dyssph0rya, a typical Village hole-in-the-wall shop that sold just about everything from novelty shirts with wacky sayings to random, hard-to-find records that would send Dad and Uncle Connor over the moon.

  “Come on, Sage! Let’s go in there,” she insisted.

  “I don’t know…” I started to feel a little uneasy. With my belly full of BBQ pizza and a head full of dull, aching pain, I needed to go home and sit down. Mom was going to be furious. I could barely hold my head up, let alone eat her homemade red velvet cake. “My head is starting to hurt.”

  “Just real quick. We’ll browse around, and then you can go off to whatever plans you have. Come on!”

  What could I say? That I didn’t feel right? That everything appeared fuzzy? What did that even mean? Before I could offer another objection, Farrah fearlessly bolted across the street—and narrowly missed getting hit head-on by a black SUV. The driver slammed on his breaks and honked furiously at her while hollering a few choice expletives at the both of us, but Farrah happily ignored him anyway; she was well on her way down the short staircase leading to Dyssph0rya. She glanced over her shoulder and shot me a mischievous look.

  “Come on!” she waved me over.

  Making sure to avoid eye contact with the driver, who was still screaming at us, I scurried across the street and joined her. I held the side of my head protectively with my hand, partly to shield my face from the driver’s angry words and looks, but also to support my aching head. As I entered the doorway, I found that the fogginess had morphed into a powerful all-out migraine. I kept my hand raised securely against my forehead and attempted to gently massage the throbbing pain away.

  Farrah led me down a narrow, dark hallway as my eyes attempted to adjust to the shadows.

  “Farrah, I don’t feel so well…” I wanted to lean my body against the wall and tightly press my head against it—anything to numb what I felt inside.

  She stopped abruptly. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, her tone full of earnest concern. “I thought you were trying to bail on me. Maybe this was a bad idea. Should we turn around? Do you want me to call my driver?”

  “What?”

  “No, I’m serious,” she offered. “I can have him here in a matter of minutes, and we’ll be happy to take you back home.”

  I could tell she really wanted to check Dyssph0rya out, and the idea of putting a damper on our plans worried me. What if Farrah thought I was lame and didn’t want to hang out with me again? I liked Farrah. I didn’t want her to think I was a loser.

  “No. Let’s go inside.”

  She looked at me hesitantly. “Well… okay… but let me know if you want me to call him. Sammie doesn’t mind. I’ll even ride with you.”

  I nodded, “Okay.” Farrah and I then proceeded ahead.

  As we made our way down the hall, I could hear and feel the pulsating beat of electronica music as it grew louder and louder—actual music, not in my head like I imagined it earlier that day. Its raw, distinctive sound pounded away at my skull, and the pain grew even stronger. At the end of the hallway hung a long, purple velvet curtain. When we reached it, Farrah pulled the drapes aside, and we stepped into the small space illuminated in black light.

  “You go in,” I said, turning back. “I’ll stay out here.”

  “Are you sure? Sage, what’s up with you?”

  “Just go in. I’m good,” I insisted. “The lighting is a little weird for me. If I stay out here, it’ll be fine.”

  “Umm,” Farrah cocked her head to the side, looking completely puzzled over what to do. I could tell she wanted to go inside but was worried that might be a bad idea. After some more hesitation, she finally agreed. “I’ll be right back, okay?” she said before going inside.

  “Sure,” I said to myself. My voice trailed off as I slid my body down the wall to the floor, where I then pulled my legs in tightly against my chest and cupped my head into the palms of my hands. Something didn’t feel right; this wasn’t just a migraine. I pressed my body more firmly
against the wall, clinging to its support desperately. As I squeezed my eyes shut, I felt stinging tear drops drown the soft hairs of my eyelashes. When I rubbed my eyes, and then the rest of my face, I could feel clumps of mascara loosen and smear across the sides of my cheeks.

  I sat there for a few more minutes, avoiding eye contact with people as they walked in and out of Dyssph0rya. Despite feeling horrible, I was curious to see what the fuss was all about. I finally opened my eyes a bit and drew back the drapes so that I could pop my head in and look inside. It was hard to make out much of anything at first, though my eyes began to adjust to the darkness. This bluish-black glow illuminated the room, and the music rocked at its absolute highest intensity.

  In one corner, I spotted a display of Gothic-style corsets, skirts, and lace-up boots—some with chunky, clunky heels five, maybe six inches high. Adjacent to that section was a display of wigs in every color, length, and texture imaginable. Hanging on the walls were rows of novelty t-shirts: Some had funny sayings; others were a tad inappropriate. Looking around a bit more, I spotted the more expensive items—like jewelry—up front, protected in the locked display case located directly underneath the cash register. There was some birthday cash in my wallet, and I had wanted to buy a new choker to go along with my favorite black dress. I began to feel silly sitting there on the floor, so I slowly managed to stand up and prepared myself to enter.

  That was a mistake.

  Before I could take even a single step forward, my knees buckled underneath me. I stumbled forward, dizzy, my body slamming against the ground with a resounding THUMP.

  I slowly slid my hands and arms against the floor, trying futilely to lift myself up. But my arms and legs were weak, limp, like a forgotten overcooked pot of spaghetti that had sat on the stove for just a little too long. What had—just minutes earlier—seemed like a remorseless, deafening attack on my already throbbing head abruptly subsided, and then everything grew quiet, more… distant, like a soft echo that reverberates all around as you enter a tunnel… like the Williamsburg Oval Park… when Mom first walked me underneath, towards the… There were voices around me, but they grew dimmer… distant… Then, slipping away, I felt fear… darkness…