It’s a golden-hour sunset–
the Hollywood kind where light seems like a miracle
and you want to catch time in the palm of your hand.
But I am not looking at the outrageous sky.
I’m looking at them.
The baddest boy in Poets Corner,
and the saddest girl.
Except Minnie isn’t sad. She’s smiling.
I turn away as the sky burns down,
leaving behind nothing but ash.
Even my dunderhead-moron-doesn’t-understand-poetry brain gets it: Niko knows about Felix. Seeing it this way, in my sister’s unhappy, candle-smudged words, my guilt swells to astronomical proportions.
How could I be so cavalier with her heart? With Ash’s?
No wonder I can’t see in color. I’m not a girl who deserves green. Or pink, or yellow, or any of the rainbow. This is why this should-be-turquoise bubble above me is black.
I roll onto my back, thumping my fists on its glazed surface, wishing it would shatter into a hundred pieces, rain down clay, and bury me in dust. Every bone in my body moans and breaks as I think about Niko’s acute unhappiness and Emmy-Kate having sex with ten thousand boys.
Why has life turned out so awfully?
Here to answer that question is Felix Waters.
He’s prowling into the walled garden, giving off seriously intense caged-tiger vibes. Exactly like the first time we encountered each other, he goes striding past my bubble, then doubles back, staring down at me through disheveled hair, utterly overwrought. Wow, he’s beautiful.
“Minnie,” he says, all anguish. “You…”
“I’m sorry.” I shake my head back and forth in the soil. I’m not talking to him but to Emmy-Kate and Niko. The revelations are exploding like fireworks now, my family falling apart and the one person who could fix it, gone.
Felix comes closer, casting a cool shadow over me. As I stare up at him, this thought dawns: The connection between us is because we’re both walking around with our insides ripped out. We’re both half people, trying to be whole. That’s the love story for a girl who is broken: another broken person.
Part of me wants to give in to this idea. Give in to the sinkholes, to being damaged, because I am so effing tired of fighting it. But another part of me thinks, Holy Botticelli, this is depressing.
“Minnie,” Felix says, his voice raw. I start wriggling out from underneath the bubble. “I’m not okay. Look, I’m sorry, or whatever. If I did something…”
“You didn’t do anything.” I shake my head again. We’re standing opposite each other, surrounded by ridiculous roses and these impossible floating ceramics. There’s a paintbrush sticking out of his jeans pocket, smears all over his hands. Maybe there is more to us than misery—there’s art, too.
“So, then, why?” asks Felix. “I don’t understand, and…” He ducks his head, giving me one of his X-ray-vision looks. “You were supposed to be my grief twin, you know? The other half of all this crap.”
I’m enthralled by his batwing darkness, spiraling toward it. I don’t understand Mum’s choice to walk off a cliff, or let us think she has—who does that?—but I’m captivated by the idea of surrendering to misery the way Felix does. But then I think of Emmy-Kate and Ash and Niko and every reckless, stupid error I’ve made since school started, and say, “You don’t even know me. We’ve known each other, what, three weeks?”
“I do…,” he says, his voice sending shivers through my chest even though I tell myself to resist. “I do know you. I know you want to have a tea party inside a dinosaur, you own a surrealist house rabbit, and you wear those boots so often I think they’re glued to your feet.” I look down. My feet are back in their allotted footwear instead of Mum’s platforms. When I got dressed this morning, I wanted to look like me. “On the rare occasions you actually draw, you stick out your lips like Donald Duck. When you eat croissants, you close your eyes, like a little kid. Your hair always looks bizarre, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard you swear, you say ‘eff,’ and you have all these weird cardigans you’re constantly tugging down over your hands. And—” He breaks off, his shoulders hunching into a frown.
Meanwhile, I’m on the effing floor. Ash has never given me a speech like this. (But, Minnie, hasn’t he given you enormous pizzas, cheesy Valentine’s cards, astounding smiles, hundreds of love songs on his guitar?) Shut up, I tell myself. I don’t want to hear it. I want to stay in this single moment, with the clouds whizzing by and Felix’s mournful face echoing my own so exactly, we’re no longer mirror images but one mega-sad person.
That’s the crux of the matter: We are both so stupidly sad. I step forward and press my hands flat against Felix’s chest, discover the slow drum of his heart under my palms. His forehead drops to mine, and already I’m breathing a little easier. We fit. I don’t know why, but we do.
And I know that kissing him will break Ash’s heart and Niko’s in turn, like dominoes, but I do it anyway. I kiss him. And let him kiss me. Felix tastes of cigarettes and salt, and he’s the one stupid thing that makes this monochrome girl feel close to being understood.
“Holy Michelangelo.”
When I hear the words, I know it’s Emmy-Kate—only she could sound so cotton candy and so appalled at the same time.
Felix and I freeze, then inch apart. Our lips puffed, our faces panicked.
I swivel my head and discover I’m wrong; it’s not Emmy-Kate. Or not only her, anyway.
They’re all here.
Emmy-Kate. Ash, for once minus his guitar. Niko, with her hands pressed to her mouth.
My heart goes on display at Tate Modern. Pinned out wide like a butterfly behind glass, wrapped in a gold-gilt frame and spotlit, accompanied with a gallery-wall caption:
Minnie Sloe (b. 2001)
“I AM SO EFFING LOST” (2019)
Mixed media—muscle, veins, and blood
An ongoing performance piece
after the artist’s mother disappears.
Minnie behaves unforgivably.
I lift my eyes to Ash’s. Even if by some miracle he missed that almighty kiss, he knows. The truth is there in my every weird mood of the past few weeks, hiding under the bed, ignoring his texts, coming home with dirty feet and a song in my heart, pulling away in every conversation. It’s all over my Sloe sister can’t-keep-a-secret eyes.
But of all the things to say, I choose: “How did you know where to find me?”
Emmy-Kate stomps her foot. She’s close to tears, but signs what I said to Niko.
Niko snorts. “It was here or the studio. We were going there next. You went in Emmy-Kate’s room?”
I can tell by the unruffled way her hands move that she (a) doesn’t know what I found in Em’s room and (b) hasn’t yet noticed her missing poems, which are on the ground by my feet. Of course, the breeze chooses this moment to come to life, stirring the roses and rustling the paper.
“Ash deserved to know,” signs-says Emmy-Kate, her voice quivering. I glance at her. She’s cocking her head defiantly, and I know without a doubt that this is her showdown. She brought Ash along as witness, on purpose.
“Minnie,” Felix says behind me, his hand on my sleeve. “What’s going on?”
I ignore him, don’t sign what he said, and tell Ash, “I’m sorry,” taking a few unsteady steps toward him. My sisters clear a path, Niko with an unreadable glance at Ash before she fades into the background.
Ash doesn’t say a word. Stares at me with folded arms, face a brick wall, no way in. Not so much as an Elvis sneer. There’s no sign of the boy who is eggs sunny-side up, a winning lottery ticket, a human four-leaf clover. Only this angry version of my boyfriend—no, not even angry. There’s no revulsion. There’s nothing. Just, ugh, disappointment.
“I’m sorry,” I say again, pointlessly. “I … Me and Felix. He. We’re not. It’s not like that. We’re nothing, but…” I start and finish a thousand aborted sentences, none of them an explanation, because what explanation is there? “
He understands.” Then I bleat: “My mummy.” The closest I can come to the pathetic truth.
I try to step forward, into his arms, but there’s no space for me. Ash lurches away, as if he can’t even bear to share the same air. And the worst part is, even as I’m watching the realization flood through him, I’m also noticing Felix brush past me, his face a mask of disgust, storming from the garden.
“Felix!” I shout, but he only runs faster, and then is gone.
I shatter. The breeze is building, blowing around this last gasp of summer weather. Niko’s poems swirl at my feet. There’s this poem we had to read last year in school, about hope being the thing with feathers that perches in the soul. It probably means parrots, flamingos, Disney bluebirds—something cute, with rainbows for wings. I’ve got a crow perched in me. It sinks its claws into my stomach, pecks at my chest, flaps its furious wings against my ribs.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter again, to Ash’s continued stonewalling. I know I’m in the wrong here, but the silent treatment is beginning to grate. “At least let me explain?”
He stares, and stares, and stares, and still doesn’t say anything, and then this head-spinning-hell-beast roar of frustration emerges from me:
RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
And uh-oh, wait, there’s more, rage bubbling up after weeks and months of holding it back. I can’t stop myself, Monster Minnie opens her mouth and goes on a rampage, letting Ash really have it—all the rage that should be directed at my stupid baby sister for not knowing about the goodbye letter, for being happy; at Niko for bottling up her feelings into these poems, now flying through the sky around us like confetti; at the Professor for his bumbling intrusions; and most of all at Mum, for leaving us when she shouldn’t have, when she had a choice:
“Uuuuuhhhhh, why aren’t you speeeeaaaaaaaking,” I rage, sounding like Emmy-Kate at her absolute whiniest worst. “And what are you doing here, anyway? It’s like you’re always turning up at the house and acting as if I can be cheered up by you playing that stupid guitar, la la la la la, pretending everything’s okay, ooh, let’s go to Italy, are you aight Minnie? and no, of course I’m not all right, Ash, of course I’m not, so why would you ask such a stupid effing question and why aren’t you talking now? God.”
I stop abruptly, chest heaving. Equal parts exhilarated and aghast. Where in the world did all that projectile word vomit come from?
Strangely, shouting everything out has made me feel a little better—until I see that Ash’s head has drooped under this onslaught. For a moment it looks like he’s praying, then that he’s angry. His shoulders heave up and down like mountains. Then I see it: He’s crying. He goes stumbling from the garden, not looking at troglodyte-werewolf-Grendel me.
Remorse rains down on my head.
I’ve almost forgotten my sisters. I turn to see them both glaring at me.
Poems are snowflaking all around us, white against the blackening sky.
“You went in my room too?” Niko asks. “When Emmy-Kate texted me, I—”
Her hands part to say something else, then she stops, shaking her head, giving up on me, turning away without another word.
Emmy-Kate follows, spinning on her ridiculous platform shoe. Niko puts an arm around her shoulders, and the two of them walk away.
I drop my head into my hands, and the whole of me beneath the bubble, shutting out the entire stupid world.
CHAPTER 25
Every Single Color in the Universe at the Same Time
My sisters do not come back to claim me. I lie beneath the clay, waiting for a night that doesn’t arrive quickly enough. Sun ribbons across the sky for hours, chasing feathers of cloud.
Every bubble in the Rainbow Series I is black. Not shiny and reflective but matte, forming a hole in the world. And inside each one, a memory. Felix and me trying to outrun each other’s demons. Ash, defeated. Lonesome Emmy-Kate having sex the whole summer, and I didn’t stop her once. Stealing Niko’s private poetry—now littered all over Meadow Park—and worst of all, the fact that I pushed the self-destruct button on purpose. Why else would I ransack my sisters’ rooms and leave the evidence behind, kiss Felix in such obviously public places? Some part of me was pushing for this to happen, looking for a way out.
Then there’s this memory, over and over: Mum waving joyously goodbye without a single hint of what she was about to do.
I can’t bear to see her leaving, so I roll into a ball and close my eyes.
But that makes me feel like I’m falling, so I open them again.
Color slaps me across the face.
Click-your-fingers quick. Like God flipped a switch and blasted the world with full-on-lurid-rainbow-migraine-inducing-fluorescent-neon-highlighter Technicolor.
I screw my eyes shut again, bury my face in my hands, try to blank it all out, try to wish myself out of existence, out of this stupid garden, out of my life. Can’t. Blink open my eyes and see evil-nightmare-clown colors.
It’s a fauvist painting. Matisse himself has opened a packet of Sharpies and gone to town, coloring everything incorrectly: tree trunks are lime-green, the grass blue, and paths electric orange. The colors turn the air loud, a crash of cymbals. I can hear them.
Ash and Felix and Niko and Emmy-Kate and Mum.
How could you, Minnie?
The truth.
Eyes open: color.
Eyes closed: me.
And her.
This is what I’ve been afraid of for months, ever since I saw the locked kiln and the goodbye letter addressed to me alone, because she knew I of all people would instantly understand what she meant by Beachy Head and the words disappear into the sky.
I can’t escape it.
Stepping off a cliff isn’t the normal thing to do, is it? Nor is talking to imaginary mothers or seeing in black and white or walking around sometimes with a rock-heavy weight inside your chest.
I close my eyes again and see her, falling from five hundred feet.
In slow motion, her clothes fly off, launched into the clouds. Her smock, her shoes, her dress. Then her skin peels away. Each bone breaks free, then her luminous hair until, halfway through the empty sky, she disappears altogether.
My mother vanishes.
And without her, there’s only me and this horrifying truth: I’m as crazy as she was.
White
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Rodin’s The Kiss—a boner in Pentelic marble. The thick, textured Daler-Rowney paper of Niko’s poems. Porcelain splashed across a floor. New paintbrushes. Blank canvases. And paint and glazes: Titanium, Zinc, Transparent, Flake, Cremnitz, Iridescent, Mixing, Chinese, all these different whites, all of them gone.
Gray
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Sidewalks. Rain. The Professor’s conversational gambits. Drawing pencils. Sometimes everything everything everything. The color of forever. Loneliness. Waiting for her to come back. My vacant heart.
Black
(An Ongoing List of Every Color I Have Lost)
Hope. The sea at its deepest point. A coffin underneath the dirt. Night. Shrouds. Crematoriums. This endless endlessness. Me.
PART TWO
A Mad Girl’s Love Song
CHAPTER 26
The Color of Starlessness
After a few hours spent cringing in the corner of the walled garden, fear slowly relinquishes to calm. My breathing steadies. The topsy-turvy colors fade back into deep and dark monochrome. I wriggle out from my hidey-hole and look around. It’s a lovely evening: the gray sunset gleams, coaxing shadows from the roses. I’m not all right—I’ll never be truly all right again, or even aight—but I feel something like stable.
Niko’s poems are scattered across the walled garden: nesting in trees, floating among the flowers, clinging to the Rainbow Series I. I start gathering them up, my foot crunching on something. I lift my sole and see a hard pastel stick in a paper tube, crushed between the paving
stone and my boot. Felix.
But my thoughts turn to Ash, and how we’re finally, truly over. Irretrievably, irreparably doneso. There’s a whoosh of relief, like jumping into an enormous pile of crunchy leaves, followed fast by regret so strong it knocks me sideways. Ash is so lovely and so kind, and I’ve played yo-yo with his feelings, his kisses, pushed him away, bawled him out. I’ve severed all hope of reconciliation, of ever speaking. And he’s one of the few people I know outside of my sisters who knew Mum—it’s like losing another part of her.
Briefly, I consider hiding out with the Rainbow Series I for the next, ooh, forever. But I’d rather face the music than have Niko stomp back up here and drag me out, so I start walking home. The sun is sinking rapidly, and at the bottom of the hill, the Full Moon Inn is radiant against encroaching night.
Felix Waters. Yearning tumbles through me as I recall that tumultuous cyclone of a kiss. His speech, the way he’s seen the details of me and possibly fallen in love with them. But I broke him too. Two boys’ hearts in one night, it must be a record—I bet even Emmy-Kate and her millions of condoms hasn’t managed that.
A train passes by below with a donkey hee-haw honk, pulling me from my thoughts. This is when I see the Professor standing halfway up the hill, à la the grand old Duke of York. He has one hand to his brow, scanning the horizon; the other holds a flashlight. Oh—he’s sending out a search party for me. Knowing that the Professor cares enough to come looking gives me an inkling of belonging, of safety. How weird is that?
I plod toward him, and he coughs into his fist, sticks his hands in his pockets.
“Come along, come along,” he mutters, like Alice’s White Rabbit. I trail him home in shameful silence.
The Professor ushers me into my own kitchen. There’s no sign of Emmy-Kate and Niko, but the lights are on and the room is a cocoon of warmth and welcome. It smells like pizza, and there are boxes folded up by the trash can. I’ve missed dinner. The Professor motions for me to sit, then makes tea in a slow, ponderous fashion. He places a mug in front of me, then sits opposite, resting his hands on the table, on either side of his tea.
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