Heart of Glass [ON HOLD]

Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Arielle

When I finally came back home, I was absolutely sweaty and disgusting. The minute my mother saw me, she ushered me upstairs and into my shower. I lathered, rinsed, and repeated until I ran out of hot water. Wrapping my towel around myself, I opened the bathroom door, which led to my bedroom. Where my mother was digging through my drawers. 

"Mom, I can dress myself, thank you very much," I sighed in exasperation as she abandoned the drawers and moved on to my closet. 

"There it is!" she exclaimed, pulling out a simple purple sheath dress. "It'll bring out your eyes, sweetheart."

"Thank you. Now can you leave so i can get dressed?"

"Curl your hair, okay?" 

"I will. Now leave!" I laughed as I shut the door. My mother was getting more worked up than I was. 

I dried my hair and plugged in my curler. As it was heating up, I slipped into the purple satin dress. I looked at myself in the reflection. It didn't look too bad. After rummaging through my jewelry boxes, I found a simple pair of purple crystal studs. I curled my hair and pinned it up Juliet-style and secured it with a lavender rose pin. 

With my luck, I couldn't find any heels, so I settled for a black pair of ballet flats. Giving myself a quick once-over in the mirror, I went downstairs to the living room where I could already hear voices. 

Sitting on the couch were three people that I didn't know, so I assumed they were your family. Your sister saw me first. She smiled at me shyly and got up.

"Hi, I'm Katherine Elizabeth. You can call me Elizabeth, though." She was wearing black slacks and the exact same banded silk top I had been begging my parents for. 

"Nice to meet you," I replied, glancing at my mother, who nodded approvingly. "I'm Arielle. By the way, I absolutely love your top!"

She smiled wider. "Thanks, my sister, Victoria, got it for me." Elizabeth ran her hand over her perfectly set hair before saying, "You can borrow it any time you want. What's mine is yours, right?"

There was a slightly awkward pause as both of us smiled at each other. Elizabeth cleared her throat and smoothed out her shirt. 

"Do you want to see my room?" I asked, sounding like a five-year old. 

She glanced at her parents, then nodded. I gestured for her to follow me and started upstairs. When we reached my room, I placed my hand on the knob and warned her about the slightly terrifying condition of my room.

With that, I pushed open the door and let her in. There were clothes strewn all over the room, my bed was unmade, and some drawers were ajar. She walked around, looking at the different paintings I had hanging up on the walls. As she went, she pushed shut the drawers absent-mindedly.

"Arielle, these are amazing...did you paint these?"

I glanced at the painting she was looking at. It was a painting of a girl in a wedding dress. She had her back turned to the painter, as though she was running away from something. The background was a collage of people, places, and objects. It was impossible to tell whether she was running away from them or toward them. Her entire figure was blurred. When my teacher asked me what it was supposed to mean, I told her that the bride was unsure about her identity, even when she was getting married. Because she was getting married. I guess it was the one painting that I put all of myself into. The girl in the painting was, in essence, me.

"Yeah, I painted this one two years ago." The day I found out about you.

"I'll trade you two of my clothes for a painting." She turned to stare at me. 

I turned red. "No, it's fine. Which one do you want?"

"Can I have this one?" She pointed to the painting of the runaway bride. 

I hesitated, which Elizabeth noticed right away. "It's fine, not this one, then." She walked around the room once before stopping in front of another painting. It was the first and only landscape painting I ever did. 

"It's all yours. You want to leave it up here and I'll wrap it up for you before you leave?" I offered. 

She accepted, still looking at the painting. "You have a lot of talent, you know. Are you going to go to college for art?"

I pushed some clothes aside before sitting on the bed and patting a place next to me for her. "No, actually...I'm taking a year off before I go to NYU for business."

Elizabeth crinkled her nose and sat next to me, leaning back on her hands. "Lucky...you get to relax for a year."

"I don't know about relaxing," I snorted. "I'm going to spend that year living with a complete stranger."

We were both silent for a while. 

"He's a good guy," she said quietly. "He comes off as a complete douchebag, but he's not. Victoria says that he's just afraid of getting hurt." She looked at me with a look that I could only describe as pleading. 

"I don't want to hurt him," I promised. 

She bit her bottom lip and grasped both my hands in hers. "Just give him a chance. I know I only just met you, but there's something about you that I like. Give him some time...I'm sure you'll like him once you get to know him a bit."

With a sharp exhale, I turned to look at the painting of the bride. Maybe she wasn't running, after all. Maybe she was being forced away.