She lived in a small apartment, with rooms that each wore two faces. The kitchen was also the dining room, and the living room also served as her father’s sleeping quarters.
The air was rank with the musky cologne of unwashed dishes and unfinished arguments, and so she sought refuge by the window, through which whitewashed sunlight surged like the tide.
She would draw there, because she had never been very good at words. They tasted funny in her mouth, and they didn’t fit right in her hands. So she drew.
She had but one sketchpad, dogeared and worn down by the rubbery touch of her stern-faced eraser, and she drew everything that she saw. She drew the red-hot anger of her parents upon those snow-white pages; she drew bursts of city lights like fireworks; she drew her thoughts that could not find words.
But most of all, she drew the girl.
There was a girl who walked by her window each day, a girl hovering right around her age – perhaps a bit younger.
This girl was carelessly beautiful, in the way some girls are allowed to be; not arrogant, but effortless, floating through her day like a feather.
She had long dark hair which flowed from her like a waterfall, and icy eyes which drank up the sunlight in small crystalline sips, and an angelic nose, the kind of nose with a delicate silhouette.
She wore a white button-down sweater like a swathe of cotton clouds, and dove-grey jeans which fell gracefully above her ankles.
It was so very pleasant to look down upon her.
The girl in the apartment much preferred to look at this girl than at herself. So she looked, and she drew.
She ignored the crooked slant of her own nose; the murky, basement quality of her own eyes; the faded silence of her own secondhand clothes.
She simply looked at the girl on the street instead of worrying about these other things.
Each day, she would wait for the girl, and she would capture this new, fleeting image upon a fresh page in her sketchpad. Sometimes she would experiment with a soft, absent-minded hum, to try and blunt the razor-sharp words thrown by her parents, but mostly she sat and she watched.
She envisioned a story for the girl, a story which wore many layers: perhaps the girl was immensely wealthy, and went to an elite academy, and lived in a lovely house on a steep hill, with a nice set of parents, and a younger sibling or two, and perhaps she had a window too, a window from which she could see the sunset each night, and she surely had a perfect fairytale romance with a boy from her school.
In fact, sometimes the girl on the street did bring a handsome boy along on her walk; she would tug him by the arm, and she would laugh, her dark hair unraveling like a roll of silk in the wind, her smile bleeding light into her face. The boy seemed to have eyes only for her. The rest of the street did not matter; there was only the girl in front of him, and she was his, and everything was just right.
Then there came a day when she was tardy.
The girl in the apartment waited, and waited, even as the sun stumbled in the sky and her mother burnt dinner and cast the ashes of blame upon her father. The fire alarm roared in protest. Frail-boned plates were shattered on the stained tiles. And still, she waited.
Finally, her subject arrived.
She was alone today, in an oversized sweatshirt that did not belong on her slender frame, and baggy blue jeans.
She did not walk briskly by, as she so often did.
No, she sunk to the ground, beside a dented metal trash barrel, and from deep in the folds of her sweatshirt, she extricated a lighter. She then began to smoke a cigarette.
The smoke shrouded her heart-shaped face; it made her look very tired, and very old, draping her in silver-toned illusion.
The girl in the apartment had picked up her pencil to draw; her fingers now hung limp, dull, and purposeless. She was not sure what to do.
Meanwhile, the girl on the street had finished with her cigarette; she had stamped it out with beaten-down Chucks. Now she sat quietly, hands twitching slightly in her lap like bird wings. Then she withdrew from her pocket a slim, long-necked bottle; wasting no time, she uncorked it and began to take swift, deep guzzles. When she was finished, she stood slowly, swaying a bit, and let the bottle fall from her thin, perfect fingers. She watched it shatter on the pavement, and then she turned on her heel and walked away, her head buried in the hood of her sweatshirt, her back hunched, her stride crooked. And she was gone.
The girl in the apartment saw the last dregs of liquid tumble from the mouth of the bottle, mottling the pavement. Her sketchpad was silent in her lap.
And that was the last image she would have of the girl – a pallid face, and a broken bottle, and a skeleton walking off into the night.