Color Me In

She sits. She draws. She waits. Because the one thing that a gray girl without a soul can do is want, and his soul is so beautiful.

She is a pale shadow against her four black walls, curled up on the floor as she desperately grinds her crayons into the orange peel texture of dried paint. Sometimes she draws Noel, slight smile bathed in warm light, music notes swirling around in graceful patterns like fluorescent fireflies. But mostly she draws the unfathomable, mixes every bright color into something fierce and fragile and beautiful, something that can rip open the sky and make it bleed rainbows. A soul, imprinted on four black walls. But she knows that there aren't enough colors to capture what she never had. She knows that the black will always overpower the reds and the greens and the oranges. She knows that crayons are nothing but wax.

In the end, her world is just as blank and leeched and echoing as she is.

Sometimes she scrabbles to color herself in, to complete what almost was, but the crayons leave nothing but faint waxy smears on her alabaster skin. She hates her hair the most, limp and liquid and leaden. It slips through her fingers before she can even make a mark. And so it remains gray, the color that is not a color.

She is the girl who is not a girl, a hollow husk. The emptiness throbs through her bones. Neither happiness nor sadness will touch her because a gray girl without a soul is wanted by no one, not even her own breath. She lacks that which is eternal and so she is nothing. And when her body rots in the throes of death, there will be nothing left, nothing, because she was born without a soul and all the crayons in the world cannot change that.

She knows that she would have just given her soul to Noel anyway. Merry Christmas.

Sometimes, along with the usual delivery of food and new crayons, he brings her flowers because that's what girls are supposed to like, and she's almost a girl. And when the bouquet's plastic sheath crinkles under her fingers and she inhales its fuchsia-streaked scent of life, she smiles because she almost cares.

“What was the color of the sunset today?” she asks dreamily.

“Squash soup, with a cloud shaped like a dinosaur.”

Then he sits cross-legged on the floor and chatters on about the questionable meatloaf he had for lunch or the gaping wound he got last Monday from falling off his skateboard. But mostly he talks about music, about lyrics and melodies and how carpal tunnel syndrome is death to an artist, all the while a guitar solo screams from his headphones.

She nods along, not really listening to his words. She only wants his presence, and the one thing that a gray girl without a soul can do is want. Once, exhausted from their one-sided conversation, he fell asleep and she spent the entire afternoon drawing him from every angle, memorializing his banana yellow headphones and the thick fan of his eyelashes and his long, graceful fingers on the walls. His colors soften the hard, black edges of her world, milk and honey pooling on the floor. She wants to drink him in, to let his colors seep into her veins, to be whole and beautiful and real.

He leaves when the shadows fade into dusk, leaving her with nothing but lingering echoes. And the gray girl draws.

“Come with me,” he says one day, blinding radiance gushing in from the doorway. She cringes, submerging back into the soup of darkness, clutching her crayons to her empty chest.

“Outside?”

“What, you have something more important to do in here?” He chuckles, and she glares at him in contempt because it is important, because he doesn't know what it's like to be a gray girl without a soul, because music can be heard no matter how black the walls are. She gives him no answer, and when he walks out and doesn't come back for a week, she isn't surprised. She spends those days scribbling out his face on the walls until her black crayon is reduced to a half-melted nub, glad that she isn't a real girl because a real girl would be crying. When he does come back, it's all music and sky and laughter threaded with sunshine as if nothing had ever happened.

Noel fascinates her.

She can feel him tangling within her hollow chest, messy gnarled knots tightening with each day, and she thinks maybe, just maybe, she can catch a soul in this web. In between visits, time is no longer measured with crayons, but with yearning. She stops drawing. Because when she watches him from her black corner, singing and wildly gesturing and glowing, it almost feels like being alive.

“What are you listening to?” she asks, hugging her knees.

“Hm?” He traces the contours of his headphones as if he forgot they were there. “Oh, it's number six.”

“Huh?”

“One, three, six, seven. There's eleven songs on this album, but I really only like those four. Sometimes I program number six to play every other song, it's so good.” He grins. “Oh, listen! Here's my favorite part.”

He lets his headphones dangle from his neck, volume on full blast. She inches closer, venturing out of her corner, straining to hear the opening chords of Noel's song. It's a love song, like so many others. But this one is so much more crazed and desperate and bittersweet, one voice on the verge of breaking. A heavy love, one that can crush you if you're not careful.

“Dance with me,” he whispers with a hint of mischief.

She doesn't bother to mention the fact that this isn't exactly the type of song that people dance to, no, because he's wrapping his skinny arms around her and his breath is on her neck and she can feel something fluttering about in her empty chest, a hummingbird beating against its rib cage. It would be so easy for him to crush her, to shatter the brittle shell. But she clings to him anyway, their steps clumsy and lumbering. Soon the dull roar of music becomes secondary to the rustling of clothes, the sweat sticking their hands together, her intermittent giggles of apologies for stepping on his foot --sometimes on purpose.

He smells like the color orange, like poppies and citrus and sunsets. She smells like nothing. But she hopes that, maybe by holding him this close, some of the orange will rub off on her.

Lying in abandon, her crayons watch them dance, sharp and unbroken.

He kisses her for the first time in the spring. She knows this because there's a streak of green in his scent, and a bit of pollen trailing behind him that makes her sneeze. There's a certain lilt to his walk, and instead of saying hello he crashes his lips into hers, deep and warm and urgent.

“Damn hormones,” he dismisses it later.

But he doesn't pull away when she kisses him back, gently grazes his lips as she inhales his essence. He tastes like the color red, like blood and earth and the flickering edges of flame. And when it's over, he holds her like she's a delicate thing while she tries to cry because she feels nothing.