PEARL

SEVENTEEN

TRACK 17
NATHAN
FLOWER FACE

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NATE offered to brave going after Rowan for two reasons. The first was because he knew that Ro sometimes needed space, like Nicole often did, and knew that as much as Micah loved him, he didn't always know how to give him that – or rather, because he loved him.

Nate, meanwhile, had a much more sensitive eye and ear to lend. He could tell when someone felt like they were lost in a sea as silver-blue as Ida's eyes and needed clear instructions or a shoulder to cry on rather than concern or comfort, and through the green acidity in his eyes, Rowan had looked like he was nearing the ocean's horizon.

The second reason was because Ida had reminded Nate that he hadn't seen Lily nearly all morning, and he wanted to go and check on her too. Wherever she was.

It wasn't odd for Lily to wander the hospital corridors in search of imaginary seashells or to sweeten the entire second floor with song – quite the contrary – but something about that sunless Thursday morning wasn't sitting right with Nate. His uneasiness was hardly surprising, given how one of the first friends he'd made behind the rough red brick blocking out the rare sun would be gone in two days' time and one of those he'd made soon after was unwell and upset, but those weren't the only factors. There was a third – a feeling, or something of its kind, which Nate couldn't easily explain.

He could describe it, though. Said feeling was as dark and dreary as the sleet-bearing sky outside, sitting heavy enough on his shoulders for it to be uncomfortable and whispering inaudible yet somehow unsettling things to him after he'd given Micah a promise to try and talk Rowan around and given Ida a kiss on the top of the head that she was bound to have hated.

It was an altogether ominous feeling that Nate Gold carried with him into Highgate's ground floor hallway to hunt for Rowan and Lily, and he figured that if he was wearing the Mary Janes that were responsible for the mud stains on his bedroom carpet and sheets rather than a pair of hospital sneakers whose laces had been banished to the same place as a pair of pearl earrings for the exact same reason, one word would be circulating his blue-beautiful, sharpened-stone mind.

Foreshadowing.

The sound of someone coughing and crying in the bathroom whose pink tiles had borne witness to Nate accidentally giving Ida's silver-screen escapism a helping hand by falling for her outside the second stall a week ago affirmed that assumption, and the weight on his shoulders increased.

"Ro?" he called softly, giving the ajar bathroom door an equally soft knock. A repetition of the pitiful sound was the sole response, and Nate's shoulders started to ache. "You want me to get a nurse?"

Putting Ida's would-be sneer and his inner self telling him how funny that suggestion was (seeing how all the nurses did was their nails and jackshit) to the side, Nate was one hundred percent serious about going to get some help, and was about to drop the door handle and do so when the sickened sobs became a whimper and cry he recognised...but not belonging to Rowan.

The tears being shed behind the closed door of the third stall sounded the same as those that had watered the communal room linoleum at the thought of never seeing the forest flowers again.

"Lily?"

Scapulae and clavicles now crushed by his shoulder-hefted sense of foreboding, Nate dropped the door handle but went inside the bathroom instead of out, and nudged the door of the aforementioned stall open when he found that it wasn't locked.

"Oh, Lily..."

She cried more previously flower-fuelled tears as soon as she saw him, the saltwater surely making the porcelain sides of the toilet she was hunched over shimmer under the spasmodic ceiling lights, and Nate knelt by her side to hold her swathes of hyacinthine hair away from her flushed face.