I See Emeralds

Chapter Thirteen (Alfred's POV)

I hope Kiku likes me as much as I like him. I think he's faking it just because of my eyes. That makes me worried. I'm trying so hard not to freak him out. I can tell he's really shy and nervous. What am I doing wrong?

These are among the many anxious thoughts floating in my head throughout the day. I may appear confident to others, but most of that is a cover up for my crippling lack of self esteem.

It's nice to be around someone like Kiku. He's really kind. He always listens to me. He makes me feel appreciated for who I am, although I haven't shown much of my true self to him yet.

"Hello Alfred." Speak of the saint and there he is. I nearly forgot Kiku and I are going to be in the same art class starting today! He smiles at me.

"Hey. I was wondering where you were," I reply. Well, I was wondering something like that.

"You're going to love this class. It's so fun." He sure sounds positive.

"How?"

"Our teacher Miss Gallows is the easiest teacher I've ever had. She hands us assignment sheets and then naps the entire period. She puts 100s in the grade book for everything. They should probably fire her," he explains. Woahhh. A free A. This could work in my favor.

"Everyone in our period is really nice too. They might be surprised that you're transferring into it, but they'll recover quickly," he continues.

"Isn't this the right room?" I point at the sign that says "Room 105" and Kiku nods.

"Come along." He opens the door and leads me inside.

At the moment, everyone is quietly talking amongst themselves. It's a pretty packed class. I focus my attention on the sleeping middleaged lady at the big desk in the front. She looks like somebody who lives alone with seven cats. According to the framed picture on her desk, I'm off by two. She's only got five.

I shake her until she murmurs, "Five more minutes..." She looks up at me with her eyes still half closed. "Who're you?"

"I'm that student who switched schedules...Alfred Jones. I thought the counselor said she was going to alert you ahead of time."

"Ah, right. I remember that," she says. "Carry on." She puts her head back down.

Kiku is still standing nearby. He passes me a sheet of paper. "This is our current assignment. But if you can't figure it out, it's okay if you don't finish. You're getting an A either way." He goes to an empty corner of one of the two long tables and sits down.

"Kiku, I wish you'd stop sitting alone! Remember, me and Lovi always tell you we'll hang with you. And now there's Toni too," somebody calls to him.

"I never said such things!" a weirdly familiar voice yells. Kiku looks down.

"I'm fine. Thank you for the offer, Feliciano," he says and pulls some supplies closer to him. I sit down next to him. Where do I know these names from?

I skim the paper Kiku gave me. We're supposed to paint something involving nature. Kiku has already made a lot of progress. He's painting a snowy sidewalk with trees. He avoids my gaze when he spots me eyeing his paper.

"It's supposed to be the sidewalk I walk to school on every day. The one we met on today, actually. It's not very good though." He twirls a paintbrush around in a cup of water.

"I feel like that was much longer ago," I say and chuckle. "It looks fine. But how do you know which color is which?" He points to a table in the back of the room. It has various jars on it, each with tiny meticulously made labels.

"Every time we get new paint everybody has to help figure out how to label them," he says. "It usually takes a whole class period because of how chaotic things get. I know which colors are supposed to go together from back when Miss Gallows actually taught us."

"What happened that made her stop?"

"She got divorced. She fell into a bit of a depression afterwards and hasn't been the same since."

"Oh." I begin to feel guilty about my earlier internal insult about her love of cats.

I stare at my blank sheet of paper for a few seconds. "You do know how to paint, right Alfred?" Kiku breaks the silence that has fallen between the two of us.

"Umm...not exactly?" He puts down his brush and gives me a patient smile.

"That's okay. It's like writing with a pencil, only a little different. It's fairly easy to mess it up if you're not careful." He motions to my hands. "Righty or lefty?"

"Righty."

He gives me a fresh brush and pushes his plate with various globs of paint on it closer to me. "Pick a color and try making something on your assignment sheet. Everybody throws those out anyways," he instructs.

I pick brown because it's the only color I can see. There are some small labels written in Kiku's elegant cursive underneath each glob, but I want to use the one that I understand the best. I try to make a star but it comes out squiggly and odd. "Bleh. It looks weird," I complain and throw the paintbrush down onto the table. Kiku picks it back up.

He puts his hand on my right one and adjusts the paintbrush in it before taking his back off. "More like this," he says gently. He guides me through making a slightly more complex shape than the one that I had done. It actually comes out normal.

He grins more brightly than I've seen him do before. "You're doing well!" He crosses his arms, stops talking, and lets me try on my own again. This time, it comes out just as good as the one that I made when I was following his verbal cues. I smile.

As crazy as this may sound, it's only been a day and I think he's the best friend I've ever had.