Black and white. The colors glared at Alaska, slighting her silently with beady eyes and a voracious appetite for her failure. The shades were soldiers in a line, alternating with revolvers all pointed at Alaska with unresolved bitterness. She stared down, eyes trailing up and down the slick keys who glowered back at her tauntingly.

The piano became a personification of every disappointment Alaska had grown to be. Her life was reflected on the keyboard, it was a sequence of each misstep she'd taken. The ivory keys dawned an abstract insight into the passion Alaska had, which was so grand it ravaged her other thoughts. This sentiment manifested as roots growing through the keys, promising Alaska a rich future. The ebony ones depicted the gradual decline of her fervent musical escapades. Listless charcoal outlines of a withered flower to showcase an atrophying formerly gifted kid.

All the years she had poured into a forsaken penchant were worth less than a dime.

Alaska's fingers stretched towards the piano at a sedated pace, while her foot traveled to it's pedal. The stationary pedal she placed the tip of her boot on could have been a metaphor for Alaska never getting far. The tiles zapped her fingertips cooly, running a jet of cold up her arm. She traced circles across the elder instrument, but didn't allow it to groan under her hands.

The school's piano was old, if Alaska had to guess it most likely predated the ban of ivory use in keys. The base was sturdy, yet wore splatters of paint on it's head like a toupee. It reeked of moist wood and dust slipped between the cracks of the keys. The graffiti was apropos to the art room the old piece dwelled in.

There were also little carvings lacerated the oak, wounding it with what seemed like a pencil knife.

Alaska's internal chord was struck with a swift blow of shame and regret. It was the type of unsettled that festered under your nails, or in the back of your mind, just out of reach to scrounge away. It had created calluses on her heart by now, but the built up layer of protection diminished when she was face to face with her failures.

She puffed out her cheeks before exhaling. She gave her stare permission to travel, and they took it in stride. They flitted from the portraits clipped to the walls, eased with the same grace as a butterfly's wings. Watercolor and acrylics hung all around, covering every inch of the walls aside from the thin cracks of pale yellow paint Alaska could see in between the paintings.

Her voice could have echoed on loop, unheard by anyone outside the abandoned room. It was her lunch period, but alas her stomach was twisted by unwelcome anxiety as opposed to hunger.

A smirk twitched over her lips when she noticed one of the paintings crested by the name Thatcher Rhodes. His name lived on the corner of a painted woman, who's shoulders were draped in a silk gown stained a myriad of watercolors. The pales hues blended on her face in abstracts bursts of beige, pink and orange. While the colors elected were beautiful enough, what caught Alaska's attention was her expression.

The woman Thatcher had formed with his hands wore a smile on her plump lips, but the depth lurking in her eyes was hauntingly sorrowful. Tragedy lived in the margins of her sleepy gaze and complacent grin.

"Hey, Alaska," Birdie's steps dragged into the art room as her knuckles rasped on the hollow door. "What are you doing in here?" She peered at Alaska curiously and inched a little closer.

Alaska swept her curtain of dark hair to the side in order to regard Birdie with a thin smile. Her fingers danced in a small wave, then beckoned Birdie over. "I'm avoiding the lunch rush," she joked.

"Oh, well scoot over and I'll avoid it with you!" Birdie flicked a limp wrist at Alaska until she moved over to allow Birdie a place to sit on the piano bench. Alaska tilted her head at Birdie's backpack that had been tossed lazily to the side. The base was pale blue, the handle braided yarns in an assortment of colors, and sewn into it were little bumblebees.

Alaska couldn't have come up with a more fitting bag to belong to Birdie Maye.

"I like the bees." Alaska nodded to them, just now noting the little smiley lines they had for mouths. She couldn't stop the warmth radiating from her smile- it was hard to see something so innocent without cracking a grin. "Are they hand stitched?"

Birdie's eyes zipped down to her bag, lighting up like fireworks crackling in the night. She snatched it up by the strap to point a long and slender finger at one of the happy bees. "Yes!" She said excitedly. "It's actually been my backpack since the fifth grade," she chuckled. "I begged my mama to sew them on then, and haven't been able to part with it since," she fondly explained, running her thumb over one of the insects before lowering it back onto the ground.

Alaska cursed herself for the spike jealously ringing through her chest. Hearing Birdie bring up her mother was the same as hearing someone talk about their home. Her voice brimmed with so much sincerity, and love it made Alaska want to rip out her still beating heart. Instead, she straightened her shoulders and matched Birdie's smile.

"That's so sweet," she said in return, and was thankful to completely lose her lilt of bitter envy.

"My mom is the sweetest. You'd love her, everyone does." Birdie had little strands of hair renegading over her face until she brushed them back behind her ear. "Do you play piano?" She inquired. Birdie's head tilted down at the keys, allowing Alaska to get a better view at the soft curvatures of her jawline.

"I used to," Alaska answered almost mournfully.

Inquisitively Birdie shifted her attention back to Alaska. "You stopped?" Her doe eyes inspected Alaska, searching her face as though it was a complicated map. Every detail down the to the thin white scars were roads scattered along her tan skin. And Birdie was determined to find the one which led Alaska here.

Alaska shrugged, losing enthusiasm for the subject by the second. "When I was younger, yeah." The light overhead basked the pair in a sterile, white gleam so bright Alaska's eyes were a little fuzzy. The bulb's humming buzzed in her ear annoyingly, she did like the way it brought out hickory speckles in Birdie's stare though.

"When you were younger?" Birdie teased with an incredulous laugh. "You're sixteen! How much younger could you have been?" Alaska rose her hands in defense in amusement, thankfully appeasing Birdie enough to not require an answer. "Why'd you stop?" Birdie's tone drifted into the realm of pensive ramblings, escorted by a hum calm as autumn leaves floating onto cracked cobblestone.

Alaska huffed an uncomfortable chuckle and began to sift her brain for an appropriate answer. Someone paying attention long enough to ask why she'd stopped evoked an onslaught of unspoken words. These words clamored to the forefront of her ming clumsily, begging her to betray the walls she kept them in. In truth, Alaska supposed she didn't have an exact answer.

She picked up jobs instead of sheet music and was introduced to the world's swim or drown rhetoric. Passions became a distraction, they held onto her innocence which in turn held her back. She'd been forced to shed the weight of her goals in favor of doing what she could to keep water in her old home. She untethered herself from the anchor that was who she wanted to be, in order to be who she needed to.

Alaska put her hands on the bench beside her in order to lean back. The roof in all it's water damaged glory became a rather interesting sight in the moment. She tried to focus on anything else, the minty taste left in her mouth from the gum she had chewed, even the scuffing shoes outside. She swallowed back, revealing the intricate makeup of her collarbones.

"Nothing lasts forever," she murmured under her breath, once again sounding like she was recalling the name of a lost loved one. The words strayed from her tongue in a deluge of languishing grief. Next time she decided to pay a visit to her talent's grave she'd bring flowers. A burdened grin slinked across her mouth to dissolve her own melancholy.

Birdie sent Alaska a differing, unimpressed eyebrow raise in return. "C and L disagree." She firmly pointed at one of the carvings on the piano, where two students had carver 'C&L forever' in a jagged heart.

"C and L don't know the divorce rates of high school sweethearts," Alaska snorted.

Birdie let out a high pitched gasp and shoved Alaska's shoulder gently. "My parents are high school sweethearts!" She retorted with arms crossed over her chest. "And call me a dreamer, but I think some things can last forever," she sternly said. "Besides, you have piano player hands."

"Please elaborate."

Birdie cleared her throat. "Gladly," she nodded towards Alaska's hands. "May I?" She didn't wait for a reply before putting her hand over Alaska's to carefully inspect it. She lifted each finger, making Alaska feel like a show cat. "Your hands are elegant, and graceful, aside from your horribly bitten nails, and your fingers are long-"

"Hey, Birdie?" Alaska interjected, pursing her lips to keep her smile hidden despite the corners of her mouth twitching.

Confusion furrowed Birdie eyebrows at Alaska. With Alaska's hand still draped on her own, Birdie tilted her head. "Yeah?"

Alaska's chest was a furnace roaring inside her ribcage, blooming a long lost heat in her. "Is your favorite color yellow?" She asked out of the blue, for a reason she was unable to explain. The question rose to her head and nothing could stop her from getting it off her chest.

Birdie breathed a giggle like wildflowers in the spring breeze. "Yeah," with her confirmation came a down-titled smile that Alaska couldn't take her eyes off. "Why do you ask- and how'd you know?"

"Just had a feeling."

It was fitting for Birdie, after all. The girl was an ardent, luminous being crafted of bursting sunlight. Everything about her composition screamed gold, like she had been sewn by threads of the stuff. Birdie was kindled in a kiln of pure, exuberant light, it was the only explanation for the vibrance she breathed.

Alaska was nothing of the sort. In comparison, she was the shadows who lived in the light's cast. She wasn't all dark, of course, but pieces of her life were scattered arrays of darkness only Alaska could chart. Or so it felt anyway, in her isolated stretch of the world where she became the moonless figure parading around on it's lonesome.

"You know, it's funny, when me and my sister were little I couldn't stand the color yellow," Birdie began. "Everything of mine used to be purple. Purple socks, purple walls, purple lunchboxes, basically a lavender apocalypse," she shook her head with a smirk. "But, my parents one time bought me a little keychain with my name on it, and it was yellow. It's really silly to say, but that made me start loving the color."

"It's not silly... it was something special, and memorable to you that stuck out, it makes sense." Alaska actually found it rather sweet. "How many siblings do you have? Is it just your sister and you?"

Birdie began counting on Alaska's fingers. "There's Jennifer, Louis, and Felicia," she said, forming Alaska's fingers into a sign for three before finally relinquishing her hand. "You know what topic is more interesting than my siblings?"

"What?"

"Melissa Garth's birthday party!" Birdie's excitability didn't quite land the way Alaska had guessed she wanted it to. Instead, Alaska frowned in mild confusion.

"Who is that?" She asked. Names tended to get lost in Alaska's head, and that coupled with the fact that she'd only been going to this school for about a week made it hard to keep track of everyone. Therefore, she had not the vaguest clue who Melissa Garth was.

Birdie waved off the question by literally waving a hand in front of her chest. "The details of that don't matter, what does matter is the fact that there's going to be free booze and really attractive boys..." Birdie paused, glancing over Alaska with a careful glint glimmering in her irises. "And girls?"

Alaska went back to her tried and true method for dealing with discomfort. She picked at the skin around her nails, digging at the same places she always did until they bled. Two options stood on opposing sides of Alaska's mind, arguing back and forth about which route to take. Similar to the black and white piano keys, the possible answers fought against one another.

Sheepishly, she forced a nonchalant ease to her attitude. She relaxed her shoulders best she could, and tried not to move too move as she took a deep breath. The truth could unravel things, in this town she was sure a girl liking another girl wouldn't be readily accepted. Hell, even in New York things weren't so easy for people who lived outside the norms people expected.

When she'd told her mother she maybe had feelings for a girl, it had gone further south than Alderwood. She didn't see a point in scraping away at that scab. Then again, why lie? If Birdie had a problem with it, did Alaska want to trap herself in a cage with that secret for the rest of high school?

"I'm not surprised you'd ask, but I'm afraid I don't have a sure answer for you," Alaska eventually landed on saying. It wasn't a complete lie. She'd never slapped a label on her sexuality, mostly because it the... intimacy she'd had with other girls had been kept well under wraps. She never saw a point in exactly identifying her sexuality if she couldn't bring it up anywhere besides behind closed doors. Plus, she'd been with boys too, so where did that leave her?

"I get that," Birdie said, making Alaska raise an eyebrow. She shook her head hastily, repeating her little hand wave gesture. "I mean, not like that for me. I just mean in general not being sure about exactly who you are." Birdie shuffled her hands together awkwardly, before sucking in a breath. "So, are you gonna play me something, or what?"

Alaska hummed quietly through a smirk. "I would, but there's just one problem," she said, while moving a finger gingerly onto one of the keys "This sorry bastard is horribly out of tune." She pressed down her finger, creating a distorted groan of a note that made Birdie cringe, much to Alaska's amusement.

~what do we think of Birdie and Alaska in this chapter?~

Hello lovely readers! How are you guys doing? I hope you enjoyed the chapter! The next few ones I have planned should be... interesting, to say the least! I hope you'll stick around for them! If you did enjoy the chapter by the way, please leave a comment and consider leaving a vote! Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful day/night!