Sweet Charlotte

「 four: sparked encounters 」

The only bad thing about Willow's room was the way sunlight entered it.

The next morning, just after 7am, Willow's eyes cracked open from where they had been so peacefully shut. Once upon a time, Willow had been nestled in a nook on the main floor overlooking their backyard and the crab apple tree that sat there. When she was a kid, whenever she was hungry, she could pop open her window, reach out, and grab some to snack on. She always needed to take off the screen door to do it, and her Dad always yelled at her for it. Every time, it was worth it.

Sighing, her peach-head heaved itself upright and glanced around, allowing the blood to rush past her tired, dry eyes.

It was fun sleeping on the main floor, but after months of being in the hospital and only being home for a few days at a time, her parents decided to move her to a room of the second floor: the one with the slanted roof overlooking the street.

The room was bigger, and her parents had told her that it made more sense for her room to be in the space opposed to their office. "You deserve to have a bigger room since you'll practically be living in there," her dad had joked. Somehow, she hadn't found it comforting.

It was during one of her hospital visits that they moved everything. By "moved," they'd set the furniture against the walls and left her belongings in boxes scattering the room. It took weeks before Willow had the energy to move around, let alone start unpacking her things. The first of her memories in that room were of barren white walls and the smell of stale wood.

It was also during that time Willow learned the real reason why her parents wanted her on the top floor: lighting.

Because of the awkward window shape, seeing as it was meant to stylize the front of the house, it was nearly impossible to find blinds for the circular window that didn't look ridiculous or fail at keeping out light. Because her parents were always writing on notebooks or computers, sunlight hit all of their things in every which way not only making the room practically boiling in the summer, but blindly impossible to work in. Seeing as Willow was "never home anyways," they took it upon themselves to swap everything.

Her room was okay at best. She didn't hate it, but she did miss the childhood nostalgia of her old room. The memories embedded in the walls of her new one didn't have the same flare.

On the slanted roof, she had pinned up posters, pictures, and Polaroids. The slope above her bed held her bi pride flag — pink, purple and blue — that she had been given at pride as a gift by one of the passing floats. She had been given a lot of stuff that year. Apparently, looking scarily sick and having your bald, cracking scalp exposed to the world granted you a lot of free things.

On the left side of her room is where her bookshelf and scrawny 'desk' sat. She also had a dresser, albeit tiny, beside the infamous window on the left side. It couldn't be too close to the wall, however, otherwise the roof's slant would cause Willow to be trapped away from it.

Her bookshelf was brutally packed. Surprisingly, when one had a lot of downtime in hospitals, books were a comforting solace. If she tried, Willow could plow through 2-3 books a week. Normally, though, she booked out a week and a half to read any one book. Her bookshelf was so stuffed that she had taken to stacking books on top of her dresser — wedged between a junior volleyball trophy and a rock cut in half exposing the crystals inside that had been a birthday gift from her grandma — and where ever she could find space on her makeup table-desk.

Other than the books, her desk was gloomily bare. She had a laptop and her Polaroid camera on it, although she'd been missing pictures for it for months. She had a tiny bag for her makeup and a small cup for her makeup brushes.