Winter's Academy

Chapter Seventeen: Fun, Fun, Fun

To love what you do and feel that it matters—how could anything be more fun?

- Katherine Graham

I gathered what I needed and went creeping up the stairs to the roof, I heard the radio on, Time After Time by Quietdrive, obviously not the original, but it was one of my favourites. I stood quietly and listened to them momentarily,

"What should we do?" Max wondered,

"Don't know. It looks like it needs some real spicing up." Lucida responded, I didn't know what they had in mind, but I had my own idea. I had a bucket in each hand, large ones filled to the brim with balloons filled with different coloured paints. I threw one and it hit the wall right between them, also spraying them with blue,

"What the hell?!" They jumped and turned to see me laughing,

"You didn't?" Max asked, I picked up another one, and threw it again, right at Max's leg, it turned pink. "I hate this colour." She said through gritted teeth, I took the buckets towards them and put them down,

"Yeah. I know." I answered, she bent down and picked one up,

"Shall we?" she said,

"Yes, we shall." I heard Lucida say behind me, next all I saw was red and yellow.

We started throwing paint everywhere – sheets were already laid out on the pavement, so the ground wasn't getting much but the wall had heaps of colour spread all over. I've never had so much fun. Actually, I've never had fun since coming to this school, or since my parents passed away. I thought they were the only ones I could have fun with, so when they died, I believed that I couldn't have fun anymore.

The boys came up to check on us, as soon as Max saw them, she picked up another balloon and threw it at Alec. His face was covered red.

"You really shouldn't have done that." He smirked. In a matter of seconds, he picked up Max and dropped her in one of the buckets she originally brought up – these were big buckets, full to the brim with paint, this one specifically was green. Lucida went to help her up, that's when I saw Jackson pick up one of the other buckets of purple and poured it over Lucida's head. She thought of a comeback, jumping into his arms – a reaction to most men is to catch, resulting in the both of them turning multi-coloured. There was one person who was turning into nothing but an 'I'll watch from over here' person, and that was Angelo. I don't believe he saw me come up behind him and splatter three paint balloons on his head, but the blue, green and white looked very good on him. He picked up another bucket of red paint and I started to move away but I wasn't able to get away before he splashed it all over me. We were all throwing paint and dunking each other's heads into the buckets, it was so much fun. Eventually we covered the entire wall with different coloured splats – so much that not even we knew where it started.

There was one more thing we had to do. Lucida brought cans of spray with her, for spicing it up, as I believe she'd call it. We wrote 'Winters Academy' in black spray with a blue outline and a white outline around that. It looked very good.

We wondered how we were going to get down stairs without leaving paint behind, but since it was only 2:48pm, we decided to wait til our pants were at least dry.

"Hey, Eva?" Lucida said as we were watching from the balcony,

"Yeah?" I responded,

"How come you never told us you were in a mental institution?" I didn't have a perfect answer for that, but I could try,

"You guys were such worry worts when I first met you...and you used to ask so many questions, about everything and anything. I didn't want to alarm you in any way, so I sort of kept it to myself."