Color

Chapter #2 Steel

     I cleaned up and grabbed my dark gray backpack that I had so thoughtfully prepared for myself yesterday with the help of the school's standardized materials sheet. Pencils, pens, notebooks, binders, lunchmoney, earbuds, and my phone charger rattled away in their separate compartments of my bag as I made for the front door. (The last two weren't on the list, but were a more personal necessity for surviving droning first day speeches.)
   
    "Excited for the big day?" Thesa, my mother, asked as she spotted me trying to make a unobtrusive getaway. She was dressed in her normal nightgown, a light gray that she claimed was green, purchased because green had always been her favorite color since she met my dad.

    "I'm as excited as I always am." I replied, carefully watching my wording to avoid directly insulting school or flat out lying. 

    "And, how excited is that?" She asked, smirking, fully aware that she had caught me trying to sidestep her question.

    "Uh, very. Very excited. Just like how I'll be very late if I don't get going mom." I managed to say. I hated lying to her, even with something so small as enjoying school.

    "Uh huh. Whatever you say sweetie. Be sure to smile, it makes those green eyes pop when you smile." She said with a motherly smile of her own as she wrapped her arms around me to plant a kiss on my forehead, knowing full well I had more than fifty minutes to make the ten minute drive over to the school. It was precisely nine minutes and twenty seconds driving the exact speed limit assuming no traffic slowed me down, and I knew this because she had made me practice driving to school five times with her in the car to make sure I didn't get lost.

    I wiggled out of her embrace before the assault found momentum and shouldered on my backpack to protect myself. I scrabbled out the door and hit the button to start opening the garage, seeing her tires peaking out as the door lifted. My baby. A black (My parents claimed it was deep blue) Jeep Grand Cherokee which I had never scratched, dented, or stained. The keys to her were in my hand before the garage door finished opening, and I barely refrained from tearing out of the driveway when I saw my mother peering from the doorway. I eased the reverse, making sure it was clear that I was checking the road behind me both ways before I pulled into the street and towards the school.

    Seven minutes later I was pulling into the closest possible parking space at Galloway High School, home to the reapers. A name that seemed rather ironic to me at least, considering how school sucked the life and soul out of students. It was too early for many other students to show up, so the parking lot's population consisted of me and a couple teachers engaged in an intense, quiet conversation most likely about how to destroy kids spirits.
   
    I made my way to the front door of my new prison for the next nine months. I took my first breath of the school, breathing deeply of the stale scent of spiritually crushed adolescents. Back to school posters dotted the walls, black and white representations of students cheerily succeeding in life or completing homework; clearly the effort of some overzealous secretary or counselor to cheer up students as they blundered into the first level of Dante's inferno. The clock read '6:50', which, in short, meant that I had forty minutes to blow in a school I knew nothing about.
   
    Figuring hunting down my homeroom would be a good first step, I wandered down the main hallway searching for a sign that might get me towards room 1412 with Miss Kennedy. I quickly got a feel for the layout of the school, it was set up on one floor with one main hallway with five smaller halls branching off of it, those halls starting at one at the leftmost and rising sequentially to five. So, the first hallway was the 1100 hallway, the second the 1200, and so on. I discovered that at at one end of the building was the cafeteria and mirroring it on the far side, the layout for the performing arts.

By the time I had figured out where just about everything was in the school, the other students had started appearing. I was vaguely relating myself to a survivor in a zombie apocalypse as my dull eyed, stumbling, gray toned, mindlessly wandering peers made their way into the school. It was 7:15 which, judging by the number of student zombies, was about when the buses unloaded.

    Fifteen minutes until I restart my entire school life. I thought idly as I started shouldering my way through the thickening hallways towards the 1400 hallway. With no warning, the hallway lit up with color, vivid swirls of color I couldn't identify ran wild, obscenely bright and almost harsh against my eyes. Yet, it was gorgeous too, the vivid distinction between people, different hair colors, and eyes! Everybody had gone from a seamless mesh of gray bodies into a crowd of individuals, each vying for my view with the explosion of colors across their bodies and clothing. Then it was gone. With just as little warning as the mirage of colors had appeared, it vanished and the world returned to different shades of a harsh, steel gray.