1 Chapter 1

~And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life is delivered,

even though you can't read the address~

Thomas R. Smith

Shining streaks of conflicting hues, running errand, blending to form a palindrome , on my canvas of emotions. One being the most prominent was trust, with a characteristic shade of crimson red. Laura always chastises me for it. "Red is the color of love, Grace", she says every time her gaze falls on my gaudy canvas kept at the corner of my room.

And I understand what she means by it, that love is flamboyant like a gleaming red tint. And any other emotion can't bear to adhere to such a remarkable shade. But what she fails to acknowledge is, red is a bewitching peril. Alluring to eyes but a token of danger with a potent threat that can be lethal than thousand explosions tearing skins and bones apart, just like trust.

When you trust someone, it gives a tranquil bliss that makes you dizzy enough to let your guard down. Let yourself be vulnerable. It appears so enthralling, that you are desperate enough to have at least a single person in this whole wide world you can trust on, and let your colors flow like the streams of a creek going down a steep hill without second-guessing yourself in front of them.

And that's when the disaster happens.

"Grace!" knocking on my door followed by Laura's yelling brought me out of the la-la-land I was in. I didn't even recognize that I had been staring at the canvas idling in my room, something I have done a lot of times in the two months of moving to Bay Shore.

"Graaaaaaaace!" Laura's voice started becoming frustrated along with her pounding on my door.

Gosh! I swear she wants to make a hole through that one today.

"Coming!" I yelled the response in an attempt to curb her incessant pounding. I pushed my laptop in my backpack, grabbed my phone from the nightstand, secured the zip in place, and checked in the mirror beside my bed to check if there were any stray hairs sticking out before opening the door.

"Yeah, what's up?" I asked in my regular syrupy and extra chirpy voice to a very sweaty Laura, which means she must have returned from her morning run right now.

"Cassie is waiting for you at the door. Says you're late for your class," she said with a shrug and started walking towards her room opposite to mine, completely ignoring my over-enthusiasm as always.

I was in a luck when I came to apartment hunting in Bay Shore. Laura's roommate had just bailed out on her without any notice and she was as desperate for a roommate as I was for one, and threw out the prospect that she will pay two-thirds of the rent if I agree to stay out of her hair and not object to her bringing her "friends'' over on occasions–which was always. I had leaped on the offer so quickly that I had just barely managed to tackle Laura on the ground along with the possibility of ever getting the apartment, as there is nothing other than money that I need more right now. Like any other college student, I am broke with a capital B. And true to her words, apart from the occasional Good Mornings and Hiis in a day, Laura has never so much as acknowledged my presence in the small matchbox apartment we rent in the campus dorm.

"Late?" I asked, confused, to her back as I scrambled for the options. "How---wait, what day is it?"

"Friday," Laura threw over her shoulder before kicking her door close with her shin.

"Shit!" I yelled and then hurried across the room to pick my bag. I tossed a purple hoodie over my loose tank top and ran like a bat out of hell to the front door. "Sorry, I----"

"---Forgot what day it was," Cassie completed it for me, standing on the other side and looking like a GQ model who has come fresh out of a Michael Kors photoshoot. "Yeah. One day, Gracie. One of these days, maybe you will start looking at the damn calendar for a change," she said feigning annoyance as I pulled her across the lobby to the elevator door. Fridays are the only day when we have morning classes from eight instead of nine in the morning. And clumsy as I am, I always forget it.

"No, seriously it makes me wonder, what the hell do you do holed up in that depressing-as-shit room of yours," she said, almost to herself.

"Oh, nothing that the stack of papers lying on my table can't explain," I replied, referring to the stack of songs lying discarded on my tabletop. The same ones that I never got the courage to let anyone hear and put their thoughts on.

Cassie casted a disapproving glance in my direction, her eyes screaming, "Girl, you are better than this. It's been two months already, let me hear those damn things or I am seriously going to unplug some serious strings of that damn guitar of yours!"

"Don't," I said, before she can even start. "You know there is no point. I will let you hear when I'm ready, but, as of now, I'm so not ready and nothing you will say can convince me otherwise. Now tell me, do you forgive me or not?" I said giving her my best puppy dog face, that I know she can't resist just as the elevator pinged its arrival. Although I know she is not really mad at me.

"Ohh, shut it", she said, giving in and letting her own smile slip. "So what's the plan for today?"

Cassie and I met in freshman year's inaugural function two months ago. And we clicked right away even though we are the polar opposites of each other by all intents and purposes. The differences are so obvious that even a person with the worst eyesight can tell them from two blocks away—a bit of exaggeration, but still sometimes it feels like that.

While I have blonde curly hair, almost ashened at the ends, hanging to my hips, she has jet black hair, straight as a rod, just a few inches below her shoulder. Something, she didn't fail to point out to me in the first line of our very first conversation.

Cassie is like a thunderstorm, a whirlwind, all loud with a presence that you can't help but notice and ultimately get whisked away by it regardless of if you were prepared for it or not whereas mine is like an unnoticed breeze, always around the corner but veiled so thick that it doesn't really exists in the real world. While her personality is all bright, jittery and vivacious, mine is stoic, dark, pretenses adorned with forged smiles that she likes to refer to as cupcake smiles. Don't know what that even means. But she always refers to them as parting rays of sun and the first bite of cupcake, no matter how much of a bad mood you are in, it will never fail to make you feel better.

I huffed out a sigh as the elevator doors opened to let us out on the ground floor, exasperated by the same song and dance. She knows damn well what my plans are, but it's like an itch of her, to ask me and then persuade me to change them, that she can't help but scratch. "Same old, same old," I said non-committedly, not wanting to get into it with her.

I would rather stay in my room holed up with my guitar, than go to a loud party where people still play truth and dare like they have just entered their teenage years. Yeah, I am an introvert through and through.

"Girrrrrrll," she groaned. "I swear you need to get out more. I can count on one hand, how many times you went to a party, and with a fist, how many times you let loose. I seriously worry about your sanity and sometimes I think that spooky-as-hell painting kept in your room is having an impact on you."

"Hey! that isn't spooky," I said, defending my canvas of emotions as I got into the driver's seat of my very rusted and dilapidated black Toyota.

"Is too."

"Well, it's still better than your wardrobe worth of terrifying, little, and menacing creatures that you have stuffed in every corner of your room. I swear some of those bean dolls look straight out of that horror flick Annabelle waiting for you to sleep so that they can go out on their hunt. And I can bet my right eye that one of those spooky little things winked on me the other day when I came to your room," I said, mock shuddering.

Cassie tsked. "Now, now, Gracie, I know that you're making shit up. She was just trying to be friendly with you. Atleast she can tell that she tried to be friends with you before she sucks your blood in the middle of the night. And say all you want, but you also have to agree that cute faces of my bean dolls are still better than that painting you have kept in your room for some godforsaken reason."

I rolled my eyes at her to show my dissent while on the inside I can't help but equally agree with her. It kinda is. Not that I am going to admit this but there have been several occasions, when I woke up in the middle of the night from a vicious nightmare and the painting scared the living daylights out of me.

I would have thrown it out long before had it not been a gift from him.

Something that I am still not able to deal with.

Some contours in that painting made by the sporadic sprinting of colors are so eerie, that they seem like an outcome from the murky dismantled places of the brain of an artist. Dark, twisted and isolated even though it is chock-a-block with different tinctures.

Just like me.