The Last Hope

02 - Revelation

Song for this chapter - Skinny Love, Bon Iver. Linked above! 

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The sun was blinding her, searing into her eyes from between the cracks in the dorm room curtains. Mercy groaned and rolled over in bed, the effort making her head spin in a very uncomfortable way. Her stomach lurched.

"Never again," she said out loud to the empty room - since Devin had surely gone to class by now. She clawed her phone from its nest under her pillow and glanced at the time 11:37 am. "Fuck!"

Her class was at twelve. Mercy jumped from the bed, bracing a hand against her desk, and taking a deep breath to stave off the simultaneous roiling in her head and stomach. Her insides felt like they were doing the mamba, and she couldn't catch up. Glancing down at herself, she realised she was still wearing last night's dress and still covered in neon paint. Of course, most of it had rubbed off on her bedsheets. She groaned when she saw that some of it had also smeared itself across the white wall her bed was pressed up against. Goodbye, security deposit.

Luckily, she'd managed to wrestle off her shoes last night, otherwise, she'd be crawling to her class. Mercy wiggled her toes, and whilst her feet were sore, they'd survived with minimal injuries. Though her ankle hurt like a bitch, she must have rolled it. Mercy ripped off the dress, flinging it onto her bed and yanked up a pair of jeans from the floor.

Devin's side of the room was completely flawless, bed always made up, countless fluffy pillows and throws lining the wall, sheets changed at least every 5 days, and hundreds of fuzzy toys standing guard at the top end of the bed. Lining the windowsill, which was regularly dusted, were various snowdomes, collected from different family holidays and day trips. Devin never dusted Mercy's side of the room, despite the pleading, bargaining and straight-up bribery she had offered. Above Devin's desk, laid neatly in colour order was textbook after textbook, on all things biomedical. Just looking at those books gave Mercy a headache worse than any hangover she'd ever encountered.

If Devin's side of the room was a showroom, by contrast, Mercy's side was a crime scene.

Rumpled sheets on her comforter - coming up to three weeks with no wash in sight – spilled onto the floor. An open pizza box occupied the bottom half of the bed, crusts still sitting in the puddle of grease at the bottom of the box. Strewn across her desk, besides the many open magazines and few pieces of literature she actually owned for her classes, lay many, many discarded cans of diet coke. Crinkled candy bar wrappers and single socks that had long since lost their partners sprawled limply along the floor, which was barely visible beneath several days' worth of clothes.

Distracted by the state of the room, Mercy accidentally forced both feet into one pant leg. "Goddamnit!" She hissed, hopping as she shrugged the jeans on correctly and shimmied them up to her waist. She grabbed a long sleeve striped shirt, far too big for her - it was definitely leftover from a boy who had been here, but there was no time. She stuffed her feet into her sneakers, ignoring the slight pain in her right ankle and ran to the adjoining ensuite.

"Goddamnit!" Her face was still full of neon paint, she scrubbed furiously at it with a hot pink towel that was certainly not hers, Devin would be mad when she saw the yellow paint residue that now stained it. Glancing at herself in the mirror, and looking only slightly like she had jaundice, as some of the yellow paint was more stubborn than the rest of the colours, she sighed. Last night had certainly done a number on her. Her hair likely had things nesting in it, a tangled black mess curling down her back. Her blue eyes were bright but looked bruised underneath, stained purple from the poor nights' sleep, and smudged slightly with leftover black eye makeup that had survived the vigorous scrubbing. Her lips were pale, like the rest of her, and the dark freckles were a stark contrast to her pale skin.