The perfectly polished.

"What the heck is a nail strengthener?," Lu said under her breath one Sunday night.

To her, nail painting is a tedious, pointless task. She has only engaged herself in this vanity shenanigan (that's what she calls it--including make-up and daily beauty regimens and age-defying blah blahs) for only a few times--she could count them in her two hands. She hated it because she couldn't get the painting quite right, which is truly frustrating for a perfectionist like her.

That Sunday night was a different and strange day for her. It was a boring night. Lu entered the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed and gazed around the dimly lighted room, as if waiting for something to happen. Something to take her out of boredom. Something to stop her from wasting her time. She could've gone to bed but she wasn't sleepy yet. And she knew something else--more interesting, more challenging--should happen.

There was a curious little box which, like her, seemed bored to death on the bottom of the book shelf right beside the bed. She stared at it for almost a minute while occasionally tilting her head from side to side, trying to think whether what she was thinking was really what she was thinking.

Turned out, what she was thinking was really what she was thinking. Even she was dumbfounded.

She reached for it--the nailpainting 'toolbox'. It belongs to her sister who was also in the bedroom that night and was lying on the bed behind her and was imperturbably talking on the phone with her boyfriend. She placed the box on her lap and looked at it as if she was looking at some absurd human invention which she still couldn't quite decipher the purpose of existence.

"Could you paint my nails? I'll pay you," she said to her sister. Her sister returned an insulted look which, for a brief moment, ironically seemed like she was considering the offer in her mind. She went back to speaking on the phone while Lu tried to figure out whether she should just paint her nails herself or offer a higher job fee.

Her eyes gazed again around the room and the bag of the new designer shoes she recently bought caught her attention. She imagined how the new shoes would look better on her if she were to match the shoe color with a sexy nail paint.

Nail painting is a process--which she thought was just downright wicked. She would interrupt her sister every now and then for the 'next step', and all the what to do's and 'what's this' of the nail painting process. Strangely, her sister would respond readily like a big sister would when her little sister's in trouble.

Lu followed the process systematically even though she had a hard time trying to familiarize herself with the whole nail-painting gang. Her mind raced back to her kindergarten classroom , when she would enthusiastically show her coloring book to everyone, especially to the teacher--proud that she had colored the flower or the apple or the sun and the clouds perfectly. She wished nail-painting was as easy. Then again, she thought practice could make perfect.

She painted her nails gold. She loves that color on her. She secretly wants to change her all-time favorite color from blue to gold or any shade of brown or yellow, but curiously, it seemed to her like a crime so she just kept the idea to herself.

Looking at her newly-painted nails, Lu felt happy and contented. She felt like she has done something again. Perfectly.

Lu let the paint on her toenails dry for a few minutes before going to sleep, wondering what she would have felt had her nail painting attempt turned out to be a total fiasco. She cringed at the thought.

Earlier, she had showed her painted toenails to her sister who just looked at her and her wide grin in funny disbelief.