Chapter 2

The school's art room was my favorite place in the world. It was a wonderful, glorious mess.

Paint jars lay open everywhere, brushes stained in every shade were scattered across the tables, and crumpled drafts formed little mountains. The air always smelled of turpentine and creativity.

Ms. Diana Stone was a plump art teacher. Whenever she smiled, her eyes narrowed into thin crescents, and even her belly jiggled with laughter. She wasn't thin like Mom. Her hugs felt warm, soft, and wonderfully reassuring.

"Eddie, you have an incredible sense of color," Ms. Stone always told me.

After I won first place in the city's children's art competition, she presented me with a flat metal case. When I lifted the lid, I was met with a rainbow—48 watercolor markers lined up like soldiers in brilliant uniforms.

They were colorful and beautiful, but to my parents, they might as well have been illegal.

If I took them home, Dad would call them excessive, and Mom would dismiss them as visual clutter. To keep the peace, I never brought them through the door.

Every day after school, I hid the case behind the fire hose cabinet in the hallway. It became my secret studio.

Before my parents came home, I'd crouch under the dim light, drawing on scrap paper I'd fished out of the trash.

I drew rooms bursting with furniture, beds drowning in stuffed animals, floors covered in thick carpets. I drew chubby dolls in bright, mismatched clothes.

Page after page, I filled them with crowded, cluttered spaces that felt warm and alive.

It was the fallen, imperfect world I imagined. And to me, it was the most beautiful thing I could picture.

For several days, I stole little moments of happiness like that. Then one afternoon, I got home later than usual because I'd spent extra time collecting scrap paper.

The moment I stepped through the door, I knew something was wrong.

In the middle of the living room floor, where there should have been nothing, sat something foreign. My heart skipped a beat when I realized what it was—my marker case.

The lid was open, and all 48 markers were on display. Against the stark black-and-white palette of our home, they looked painfully out of place.

Mom sat on the only chair left, staring at me expressionlessly.

"Our neighbor, Ms. Emma Sawyer, told us you've been making a mess in the hallway."

"It wasn't a mess," I mumbled, blinking back tears. "Ms. Stone gave them to me as a reward…"

"A reward?" Dad let out a cold, mocking laugh. "Eddie, how many times have I told you? Material possessions breed impurities in the soul."

He pointed at the neatly arranged markers. "Look at all this. Red, green, purple—they throw off our home's balance."

He stood and walked toward the case. "To cleanse your soul, I must help you remove these distractions."

He picked up a red marker.

"No! Dad, please!" I cried, lunging forward.

Dad simply sidestepped, and I went tumbling onto the hard floor. Pain shot through my knees.

Just then, a sharp snap echoed through the room.

The red marker broke right in half, and its ink spilled out across the floor like a little pool of blood.

"How filthy." Mom frowned and wiped it away without a second thought.

I watched helplessly as Dad snapped each marker in half. With every break, he dropped the pieces into the garbage bag.

I lunged for the bag, trying to rescue whatever I could, but Mom grabbed me before I could get there.

"Because of you, we had to get rid of the armchair," she said coldly. "Now you want to hold onto this garbage? Are you trying to make me throw out the one chair we still have?"

I stayed on the ground, paralyzed with fear. With every crack, I felt like I was the one breaking, not the markers.

Even the beautiful metal case didn't survive.

Dad picked up the garbage bag and looked down at me.

"You've disappointed me, Eddie. Your obsession with material things has gone too far."

That night, I had a dream that I was one of those markers, lying in the case with all the others. Dad broke me in two and threw me away like I was nothing.