As seen in minimag
Red is the colour of my lips when I smile. I smile so hard, so wide, so big that my molars pinch the inside of my cheeks. So big that they pinch the skin until it bleeds. My lips are wet and they’re red and they’re salty. The camera man, with his grey goatee and trench coat of green, asks me if I’m ok. I smile wider. No, he says as he pulls the camera from his face, I mean, you’re bleeding.
In the nurses’ office she tells me she hates photo day too. I lick my lips and keep them shut. Salty and red and wet with silence. She asks me, again, didn’t you notice they were bleeding. I shrug, again, and wordlessly wish she’d let me get to class. She sighs and says I can go. I hear her roll her eyes to herself on my way out.
My locker permeates the smell of old bananas. Ratchet, I say, when I open the door. The girl before me forgot her recess in here over summer. For two entire months, yellow became brown and life became death. My death is finding the soft brown corpse here this morning.
Banana girl, the year twelve standing at the locker above me sneers into my scalp. It’s not mine, I don’t say. I do the math in my head and decide I like Banana Girl better than most alternatives that could be on option. My locker smells yellow and brown and now I do too. I throw my books on top of the corpse and shut the coffin door with a clang. The older girl huffs through her nose with the relief that she’s nicknamed the weirdest of the year eights. Turquoise is the colour of the booger that becomes unhinged as she huffs pity in my direction. I huff the same back.
The year twelve swings her ponytail back down the hall and I watch the others watch her. The ponytail swings like it knows it is being watched. It swings like hot pink and bright blue and all the other highlighter colours she’ll overuse in every textbook.
Stepping into math class late, all I can see is the blinding colour of mean girls. When they’re in the room no other colour dare competes. Mean girls and emerald green girls and girls the colour of ruby red shoes. Sit down please, the teacher says because I’ve been standing by the door for too long. The only spare seat is the chair with graffiti and the table with gum, right at the back. It’s grey and bare and the colour of all the lonely fourteen-year-olds that have sat there before. I take my seat.
The teacher talks of recurring decimals and irrational numbers and all I can see is the recurring irrationality of how I feel. I see ash grey and stone grey and every other shade of grey. Charcoal and taupe and the colour of my face.
Are you ok, the teacher probably asks. I’m unsure because my face is as knotted as my stomach and looks the colour my intestines feel. Grey becomes green and the world becomes colour. Colour of the worst kind. The kind that smells like vomit.
Back again, are we? The nurse is the colour of annoyed. I hold a plastic sick bag under my chin and hold the sobs under the lump in my throat. The lump grows and moves and then my whole body is lumps. I am a lump. A lump that sees the world the colour of terrified. A lump that smiles so wide, so hard, that red is the colour in the sick bag now. Oh honey, the nurse says, but she won’t dare come near me. Red is the colour of this lump when it smiles.