فصل 22

FINCH

Days 23, 24, 25 …

Last night is like a puzzle—only not put together: all the pieces are scattered everywhere and some are missing. I wish my heart wouldn’t beat so fast.

I get out the books again and read the good words Decca left behind, but they blur on the page so that they don’t make sense. I can’t concentrate.

And then I start to clean and organize. I take down every single note until the wall is blank. I shove them into a trash bag, but this isn’t enough, so I decide to paint. I’m sick of the red walls of my room. The color is too dark and depressing. This is what I need, I think. A change of scenery. This is why the room feels off.

I get into Little Bastard and drive to the nearest hardware store and buy primer and ten gallons of blue paint because I’m not sure how much it will take.

It takes many, many coats to cover the red. No matter what I do, it seeps right through, like the walls are bleeding.

By midnight, the paint still isn’t dry, and so I gather up the black comforter and shove it into the back of the linen closet in the hall, and I dig around until I find an old blue comforter of Kate’s. I spread this on my bed. I open the windows and move my bed into the middle of the room, and then I climb under the blanket and go to sleep.

The next day, I paint the walls again. It takes two days for them to hold the color, which is the clear, bright blue of a swimming pool. I lie on my bed feeling easier, like I can catch my breath. Now we’re talking, I think. Yes.

The only thing I leave alone is the ceiling, because white contains all the wavelengths of the visible spectrum at full brightness. Okay, this is technically true of white light and not white paint, but I don’t care. I tell myself that all the colors are there anyway, and this gives me an idea. I think of writing it as a song, but instead I sign onto the computer and send a message to Violet. You are all the colors in one, at full brightness.