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White is such an inoffensive color, and that must be why hospitals must be slathered in it, Hailey concludes. Creamy, eggshell, warm, cool, off-white white. White that doesn’t quite look like white but still circles back to being white. The white of pause before action, the white of potential energy thrashing into shiny whip-crack kinetic as the swing of the monster’s arm came straight towards her. Though the monster was really more of a lovely lilac color, she thinks dimly, a color that might’ve paired nicely with her spring dress.
Beauty. Who would’ve thought that the monster was immune to beauty? Who or what the fuck out there would be immune to beauty? Mint had yelled something about it being immune to abstract concepts and Hailey just blanked.
Anyway. It doesn’t seem like she was still in her magical girl form, but maintaining her secret identity had never been that big of a deal. Her body feels groggy and weighed down, so turning her head takes some effort, but there’s such a large stack of flowers and get-well-soon cards and stuffed teddy bears teetering against a wall that it lifts her spirits. Thank god her hospital gown was a mint green and not white, even though she doesn’t think much of mint green. She’d have to get some dry shampoo for her hair, though.
“Miss Hailey,” a nurse comes into the room. “Someone’s here to see you. Are you up for it?”
Hailey waved her hand dismissively. “Send them in.”
She expects it to be Sue or Terrie. Maybe some of the girls from school, maybe her boyfriend or one of her exes. It’s not.
Dull blonde hair, droopy face, thick around the waist and legs, but her ruby-red eyes shine with so much worry. Hailey’s heart drops through her stomach and for the first time in a very, very long time, she feels like the ground has disappeared beneath her and she’s left flailing in the aether.
“Darling,” her mother says, soft and sweet and sad. She has a basket of fruit in her hand, apples and pears and grapes that look dull in the white light. She places it on her bedside table. “Are you alright?”
Yes. No. What’s it to you? But Hailey opens her mouth and finds nothing. A sticky, ink-splatter clump of resentment threatens to crawl up her throat and pour out through the gap.
“I know you said that you didn’t want me to contact you,” her mother (mother, as though Hailey wasn’t born from sea foam, raised naked in a clamshell) continues, hands wringing. “But, well, I watched the news. I saw you falling. I just couldn’t take it, Michelle, I had to know if you were…how badly you were injured.”
“Hailey,” she finally croaks. “My name is Hailey.”
Her mother pauses. “Right. My mistake.”
A tremulous silence settles. A nurse’s footsteps echo through the hallway outside, but it’s like there’s nothing but the two of them, and the rest falls into the white void.
It’s an incredibly simple truth: Michelle cut all forms of communication with her mother, moved to the city when she was 15, and got plastic surgery at a shady clinic that was designed to operate on high school girls like her. She changed her name, got a new ID. After she booked her first photoshoot, she didn’t need to rely on her mother’s money anymore.
“Well,” she says. Tentatively places a pudgy hand on Hailey’s slender one. Could something so ugly be so tender? “I’m glad you’re okay. It seems like you have a lot of friends at school. Are your studies going well?”
Hailey wants to tell her that she couldn’t give less of a shit about her studies. She would be a full-time model after she graduated. But all of it remains stuck, so she nods her head mechanically.
“Good.” Her mother pats her hand, and that face, those eyes, crease into a watery smile. “I’m glad. I’m happy for you. I won’t ask you to come visit me, or talk to me. But, darling, I just wanted to see you again.”
There’s usually a script for everything. That was never the case with her mother.
She gets up clumsily, clutching her purse. “I’ll be leaving now. I don’t want to take up too much of your time. Please don’t forget to eat the fruits, and if there’s too much then you can always share. I love you.”
Her shoes slap against tile as she goes to the door. She slides it open, steps into the white void, slides it closed. It makes the lightest tap against the wall.
Hailey’s hands have yet to adjust to the temperature and there remains a lingering warmth. She can’t get it off, even though she starts scratching it. She looks at the basket of fruit, and slaps it off the table. Apples and pears roll onto the floor, clumps of grapes drop with an unceremonious thump. It’ll probably leave a bruise on the fruit. It’s not a very loud sound, but it rings in her ears all the same.
Once, Michelle had sobbed into her mother’s arms about being fat and ugly and whatnot, and that none of the girls wanted to be friends with her and none of the boys liked her. Her mother scooped her up into her lap and told her in a low, gentle voice, about how beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and that it was more important to find beauty in the things we do for others, in the things that give us joy, and that beauty was not the end-all be-all.
Hailey scoffs at the idea. All that talk about finding your own inner beauty and how it’s the little things that matter, the tiny inconsequential things, but who cares about all that when you can look at the great tapestry of one’s life and see something magnificent instead of a string of frivolities?
And how was beauty abstract or subjective? Michelle had gone down an internet deep-dive into the philosophy of aesthetics one night after trying to discern exactly why she was ugly. Most of what Hailey had absorbed was that there was a ruling class that determined objective taste, and then that would trickle down into the peasant population, so after they were done raking the fields in their coarse linen shirts and shawls they could sit around the family table with a copy of a fashion magazine spread out on the table like a supermodel in lingerie, and there was only one copy because they were too damn poor to get another one, or even worry about fashion at all, and maybe just milk the cows and yell at your neighbors and stick to your own ugly little lane, but beauty is enticing. Michelle was the peasant; Hailey’s the supermodel. And there was a third one, the liminal one, stuck in the light years between ye olden days and illegal online porn, or between the liposuction and the recovery. Beauty was never in the eye of the beholder. Beauty is Botox in a 32-gauge needle.
In the case of her magical girl powers, she fought with rose petals and flairs of skirt and lip-gloss kisses. If some divine force on Earth decided that this was the manifestation of beauty, then wasn’t it? Kant didn’t live in the age of multi-billion dollar beauty empires and aesthetically pleasing eating disorders.
Her face is literally, mathematically, perfect. She’s basically the golden ratio personified. God, people should be kissing her feet right now just for existing, but she wouldn’t dare thank her plastic surgeon.
The monster fight comes back in flashes. Mint says that the monster, some strange lilac humanoid that lacked a face and had tentacles for arms, is immune to abstract concepts. She can’t do much more than read its weakness, so she sits out for the rest of the battle. Coil goes in with lightning and Sue with water, Sophie prepares an ice attack and Terrie flits around with her fire, and Sarah never does anything anyway, so she frets quietly in the background. And Hailey was supposed to…do nothing? The ending was always hers. Beauty was not an abstract concept!
So she charged, or rather she delicately flew, into battle, maybe shot a string of petals at the not-face of the monster, and was immediately struck with a massive tentacle that left her spinning ungracefully into the side of a skyscraper, and then she emerged from the other side and continued to fall.
Glass shattered, wind blew, and her heartbeat pulsed through her entire body, and there was the sky and the clouds and all the buildings with tiny little streets cutting across, with tiny little cars dotting the land in bits of silver and black and blue.
And there were children. There were children playing in the street, and she thinks that one of them was Michelle, a little piggy in a dress who scrambled to catch up to the others, and who said that children were pure and innocent? Maybe there is that seed of inherent evil that roots in every child, and only those who are pure of heart can stop it before it blossoms into a terrible, beautiful flower. Or it’s just that children are easily influenced. If a mother gives Michelle a dirty look, then so does the son and daughter.
Michelle is the glass that shattered. Michelle is the cloud that coasts along unbothered, untethered. Michelle is the children and the color white and the fruit basket that Hailey just knocked over, and there’s this feeling welling up inside her chest, large and ugly, god help her.
She peels the covers off her body. Lets her feet touch the cold tile. Her mind blanks into white, and she picks up the fruit one by one, putting them back into the basket. She climbs back into bed, swaddles herself in the blankets, and tries to forget everything that happened. All things eventually fall into the void, and this will too. This will too.