PEARL

THIRTEEN

TRACK 13
CAROLINA
HARRY STYLES

long chapter again!
to make up for lil break!
also this song intensely makes me think of ida because i am in love with her

🚬

IDA, aside from media massacring, showed strong feelings for only one other subject. It was the same subject that was waiting to walk onstage as she sat in another of Highgate's dully decorated rooms on a patronisingly plastic chair, surrounded by the smell of watered-down coffee and faces she'd never seen before – although thanks to Micah and Nate's work earlier that morning, she was able to hop over any voiceover assumptions (as the latter had put it) and put names to a handful.

Contrary to popular initial belief about twins, Ryan and Rowan Emery were not identical. The only thing they visibly shared was the same pair of peridot eyes, as Ryan had fawn brown hair instead of feathery white-blonde, seemed taller and friendlier, and had skin that was more peachy than moon-pale. Even the positions they were sitting in either side of a round table identical to Ida's was different – while Ryan's Conversed feet were casually crossed at the ankle, Rowan's grass-stained legs were slightly apart, and there was something far less at ease in his stance and general air.

The boy opposite him didn't appear to the cause of that marginal uneasiness, though, because although another difference between them was how often Ryan smiled, whatever he was saying to his brother soon put the rarity of a tooth-showing smile on his face, and did justice to the nutshell of their good relationship that Micah had given Ida as she'd coped with her still-persistent comedown.

Ida would've most likely been able to identify Mr and Mrs Angelo had she not been told that they were coming for a number reasons – namely, the warm sheen of their cinnamon skin that contradicted the hospital's lack of heating, the aura of Rowan's-smile-rare (Christ) kindness that one didn't need long-neglected perception to see and the matching gold crucifix hanging around his mother's nutmeg neck, catching the dull daylight like the eyes he'd inherited from his father. Micah's mother was also sporting the same head of rich copper-curled hair, and her expression was a mirror image of what her son's had been after learning who'd stolen his lighter and for what pyromaniac purpose when she glanced down at his sand-papered hands on the surface of yet another identical (although more rickety-looking) table and took them in her much softer own.

Unfortunately for Micah, Ida saw no face to assign to Dante Angelo, but he didn't seem to mind. Likewise, Lily and Nicole didn't seem to mind that they had no one to sit around a monotonous table with, although Nicole had seemed to mind the hangover she was nursing when the two girls had slipped into the room at the start of visiting hours. Lily, on the other hand, had appeared dove-feather light of any half-siblings or pounding vodka-and-pill-induced headaches as Ida had watched her steal as many stale biscuits from the pathetically boasting paper plates as her hands could carry to shovel into her lotus-lipped mouth later. She'd left with Nicole soon after, and Ida presumed that they were now either in their respective rooms or lolling on the couches in the communal room, whose car crash of a color palette was no less attractive than that of the room she was currently in.

Outdoing Rowan's small but striking smile and coming close to matching Micah and Lily's blindingly-bright pair was that of Nathan Gold, whose table was the closest to Ida's of the whole group. His mother looked about as downtrodden and church-mouse-meek as Ida's (which was hardly a shock, given his foreseen fractured family), but unlike the Bluestones, the Golds were talking and smiling.

The former two were stuck in silence as if it was syrup, although the subject that could brag that it had Ida's strong opinions on it (an accolade that was far rarer than any blue moon or alliterative pearly-white smile) was eagerly awaiting its cue: the mislabelling of sadness as sickness.