Bleeding Violet Read Online Free

day.
    Fucking manic depression.
    I shuffled into the bathroom, and by the time I’d showeredthe hitchhiking grit from yesterday down the drain, I’d made my choice for the day.
    Sanity.
    I took my pills and pulled on the lavender eyelet dress I’d made right before Poppa had died, well before I’d gone into my all-purple phase. Like every dress I made, it had princess seams that highlighted my curves, a high bodice, and a knee-length skirt. And because frustrating boys was one of my great passions, this particular dress had a row of tiny, jeweled buttons down the front that had stymied many ham-handed Romeos.
    I stood at my window, watching the rain try to drown the world. Rosalee and I could still get to know each other, but we would have to spend the day inside. Surely I could convince her not to go to work today; why would she even want to? She could tell her boss to give her retroactive maternity leave or something.
    Surely she wouldn’t leave me alone and spend the whole day wondering whether I was destroying her house.
    I went downstairs to the kitchen, my rumbling stomach as loud as an engine in the silent house … and saw Rosalee. She was hunched over the dining table, scribbling onto a yellow sheet of paper. She raised her head when I came in.
    Even in the dull rainlight, even in her tattered red sleep shirt, she was still too beautiful to look at, and so close I could smell the lingering scent of Dove on her skin. Weird knowing such an intimate thing as what soap she used after years of cluelessness.
    A glass bowl of mixed fruit, mostly apples and bananas, sat on the counter separating the cooking and dining areas. A whiff of cleanser, something lemony, hung in the air.
    As I grabbed a banana, she said, “Go get your pack.”
    “Why?”
    She went back to her scribbling. “Just do it.”
    I got my empty pack, reluctantly, and went back to the kitchen.
    The key on Rosalee’s bracelet jingled as she held out the sheet of notebook paper to me. “Take this.”
    I took it.
    Rosalee had written directions to a school called Portero High; she’d even drawn a map. I looked at her in disbelief. “You want me to go to
school
?”
    “You only got two weeks to fit in. School’s the easiest place to start. Gimme that pack.”
    I gave it to her as a mild case of first-day-of-school jitters struck me, an absurd sensation this late in September. The rainhad seemed so cozy a moment before, but now that I had to go out in it …
    I eyed the map dubiously, then watched the perilous sweep of water—framed so beautifully in the picture window—rush along the street, and I couldn’t help but imagine myself being swept along with it … into a drainage ditch.
    “You don’t expect me to walk, do you? In this storm? I could catch pneumonia.”
    “I don’t mean for you to walk. There’s a bike in the garage.”
    “A bike?”
    I went to the back door and peered through the glass panel. Torrents of white water streamed down the driveway from the garage to the street. Waiting to capsize me and Rosalee’s alleged bike.
    This had to be a test. God tested his followers, didn’t he? Cruel tests of faith and devotion? Rosalee wanted to see how far she could push me, see if she could make me snap before I won the bet.
    “Here.”
    Rosalee stood behind me, holding out a shiny black raincoat and a pair of galoshes.
    “I don’t wear black.”
    “You’re the one don’t wanna catch pneumonia.” She shoved the rain gear at me. “
Take
’em.”
    I took ’em.
    “You need lunch money too.” She tucked a five-dollar bill into my dress strap—like I was a stripper!—and shoved notebooks, pencils, and pens into my pack. When she was done, she zipped up the pack and turned to me. “Put on the raincoat!”
    I did, feeling drunk on the attention.
    “Galoshes too.”
    Even when a mother’s child bashed someone on the head, that mother still wanted her child to be protected against the rain. This was what I’d been missing