Socks and Clouds and Roses

Chapter 1

Some see in fog and grey, a handful will look and see in reds or blues or yellows. Others interpret in smells, feelings, levels of conscience. We classify, breaking things up like humans do. It's moldy, it's angry, it's green and turquoise. That feels dark, that seems murky, I get a distinct rosemary from this or that.

That's a beautiful thing.

It's also a terrible, awful, and twisted spectrum of dreams and love and fears.

'I love you.' Does that sum it all up? Does it really get to the base of what people need to hear from someone? Three sad words you toss the dice with, they roll around for a while and crumble to dust.

For once, I want to take a trip in someone else's brain, get out of mine because I think I'm going insane in here.

A smile stretches across my pale face, crossing the span of my cheeks to meet the brown hair covering half of my profile. The clouds outside are so nice. They're not cotton balls, although they may look like them. I hate comparing pretty clouds to something you remove your makeup with. Clouds are in and of themselves, an entirely different thing.

Cotton balls have nothing on my clouds. That's right, they're mine.

"Addie, stop staring out the window."

My eyes drag to the Spanish teacher at the front of the classroom, Mr. Daniels.

"My bad." I tell him loudly, a couple groggy students start in their desks.

The classroom is blanketed in a droll fog, the air sleepy and warm. The lights are bright, filling the entire classroom with artificially produced illumination. Amazing how cheap a place can look when the lights are an ugly dim orange, the kind you see in low budget films. My school has those bright reflective ones, real nice, definitely Hollywood ready. The dirty corners and scraps of paper would have to be cleaned up before our first shoot though. Desks lined up one by one never in perfect straight lines, the bottoms are aluminum or tin or some other silver plated metal, the tops this light sandstone brown color with tiny little dots sunk in the colors of salmon. A couple maps are up of Venezuela or Chilli or some other country I don't car to know. There's a flag in the corner, I don't even know what country's flag that is.

"Ok chittlins, doscientos noventa y nueve. Haces actividad ocho y nueve."

"You hate us don't you." Sam states from the seat diagonal on the left to mine.

"Yes, my job is to make your lives miserable. How am I doing so far?"

Everyone takes that as a chance to shout out various comments consisting of various assents to how good Mr. Daniels is at ruining our lives.

"Great, now I can go home to my cardboard box by the river a happy man." My teacher informs us in that thickly coated sarcastic voice, his face forms these parentheses marks around his smile when he grins at us and slightly laughs. We laugh with him, that's a running joke in our class, but half of these people don't like Mr. Daniels. He rocks back on his heel as he chuckles with our red Spanish book in both hands, almost as if he's a priest holding a bible in front of him. I don't think Mr. Daniels is a very happy person despite how many jokes and jests he says in class. Every time I see him though, standing up their in his thirties, brown hair and brown freckles, I get this feeling that he's unbelievably sad teaching basic Spanish to High Schoolers. Makes me want to make his job easier for him so I say nothing about the homework.

The bell rings.

"Thank you Mr. Daniels!" I make sure to say extra loud so he can hear me over the noise coming from the hallway.

"Thank you Addie." He tells me with this serious voice, you hardly hear it from him. I've always thought that, that meant he was trying to show how grateful he was, but I could be reading into it. No matter, if I can make someone as awesome as Mr. Daniels feel appreciated, then I'll thank him every day of my damn life.

Megan is in the class down the hall to my left, English, so I stand in the middle of the freshmen hall waiting for her. One particularly rude 9th grader bumps into me.

"Excuse me!" I shout at them, they just look over their shoulder with this confused expression, pretending I'm the crazy one in this situation. 'I'll rip your hair out you motherfucker.' I think but don't say.

Megan comes through the crowd, although I see her over the shorter students right away. She laughs like she does, in a way I've never heard anyone else do. Almost as if her entire soul was pushed out through that laugh, like she could do it all day and never stop, she dos it wholeheartedly, teeth bared and eyes accented by crinkles next to her eyes. That's a trait I think she gets from her dad, crazy Irish man that he is. They have the ability to make something out of nothing. Not joyful, in the usual sense as one would think. She just seems to look at something and turn it into a joke or a laugh or simpler than it is. I wouldn't describe her a ray of sunshine, turning things yellow and bright and magical with shimmering rainbows or glitter. Oh no, Megan makes everything red and solid. She takes the scientific, scary, proper, serious, or intimidating, and makes them so honestly human, she makes them red. It's almost as if she could turn anything around, make topics easier to breathe, she makes things real and simple. Her hair is a strawberry blonde, cut to her shoulders since last month, today it's in those messy waves I knew would look great. She has blue almond eyes, that reflect the light in the perfect spot, showing darker slashes of blue running through the lighter ones and melding into white. The skin around her nose gathers, the freckles scrunching together to ripple across her face, moving towards her eyes as she smiles with a prominent dimple on each cheek. My red headed hybrid.

She doesn't say anything after she laughs, just grins at me.

"Hey, how was English?"

"Oh my go