Color

Chapter #3 Slate

I gasped, and felt my eyes welling up at the unexpected and short lived experience. Whenever somebody described how they had found their love, the one who had made them see color, it was always slow. The colors coming in slowly as they had met and gone through date after date. I'd never heard of somebody seeing color so shockingly, and I'd certainly never expected it to happen to me. I imagined I looked stupid, blinking rapidly and standing completely still in the crush of people, a lost, hopeless look glued to my face, but I couldn't see who it was that I had touched. The gray bodies crammed together formed an impenetrable barrier of flesh. I hesitated, then started elbowing my way through, searching desperately, bumping elbows or clipping fingertips discreetly with everyone I could, hoping for the same flash of all those gorgeous, unnamable colors again. The crowd thinned after a couple minutes, then cleared altogether but for a couple laughing pairs or single students rushing to their homerooms.

    I let out a sigh of defeat, my eyes watering up again at the hopelessness of my situation. A bell rang, long and blaring, announcing my tardiness to class, even then I couldn't do anything but stand and stare at the white and gray hallway. The same hallway that had just been full of life and color. The back to school posters dim and uninspiring again where before they had been shining in alluring unknown colors, the lockers an indistinguishable gray instead of their true explosion of color with writing, graffiti, and stickers. Even the light had changed. It had washed the room in some warm, comforting color, now it was just... visible.
   
    I stiffened, resolving to find whoever had given me the gift of color for that instant. Not quite managing a smile, but finally wiping my stunned, desperate look off my face, I marched into homeroom, blatantly five minutes late. The teacher, Miss Kennedy, looked a little displeased with me ruining the auspicious occasion of the first day. I'd exchanged a few brief words with her a few days back when I had come to the school to be enrolled. She seemed nice enough, but she was busy and a bit curt at the time, filing some papers with the secretary for some grant to go on some field trip with her environmental awareness club.

    "Ah, Haiden, there you are. I was worried you wouldn't make it in time to get your schedule for the semester," she said replacing her small frown with a slightly forced smile. She handed me my schedule, which had been sitting guiltily alone on the corner of her tidy desk a moment earlier, before saying, "Any seat that's not taken will be fine. I don't do assigned seats for homeroom."

I murmured, "Thanks," then slowly scanned the room, eager to find a free seat so as to avoid the stares of some twenty odd students now focused completely on me, standing uneasily at the front of the room. I awkwardly started for the first open seat I saw, positioned to the side of the room, between the attentive students clinging to the teacher's words and the troublemakers in the far back. My bag hit the floor next to me, and I spread out the schedule on the plain gray desk as Miss Kennedy resumed her mandatory recitating of school rules and policies. Her speech formed an almost pleasant buzzing background to my mind as I glanced down at my new classes.

    First Block - Intro to Computer Science - Mrs. Bradley - 1401
    Second Block - Trigonometry - Mr. Grayson - 1013
    Third Block - Chemistry - Mr. Rhoad - 1507
    Fourth Block - Speech and Debate - Mr. Smith - 1502
    Fifth Block - Art and Sculpturing  - Mrs. Brown - 1212

    It all seemed easy enough, except maybe Trigonometry and Chemistry, but it was to be expected; there was always one or two classes that you'd have to take seriously.

As expected, nobody really reached out to me during homeroom and I tried to keep to myself until I figured out what the kids were like. I'd listened in on a couple conversations, mostly friends catching up after the long summer vacation. From what I heard, the school seemed decent enough seeing as most talk was of what movies people had seen or what concerts they had been to instead of who had gotten drunk at what party or what kind of booze was available. My old school had been a rather interesting mix, with the good kids struggling to avoid the bad kids who just as voraciously kept to themselves. I hadn't really fit in either group there, but had instead found a niche with kids who made a happy, tight-knit collection somewhere in the middle. We had gone to wild parties with kids, high and drunk, doing all manner of idiotic, yet rather amusing, acts. On one occasion I vividly remembered some kid that had jumped from the roof of his parent's two story home, aiming for some whitewashed kiddy pool his drunk buddies had dragged out to the driveway. The vodka bottle in his hand had done little for his aim, and he managed to break his leg and slam his face into the pool, luckily saving him the worst of the trauma. Everyone sober enough to comprehend what was happening had been horrified, desperately trying to patch the oozing black blood pouring from his leg. He had ended up being fine after surgery and an intense grilling by his parents. That was never my normal type of scene though, I mused, I more or less prefered to keep quiet and maybe earn a handful of close friends who I could talk to freely about anything.

    My thoughts were broken by the same bell that had recently indicated my tardiness. I blinked, then grabbed my bag and schedule, glancing down to check what room I was bound for next. 

Intro to Computer Science - 1401

    I found the room easily enough, positioned just inside the 1400 hallway, the same one I was already in conveniently enough. I arrived sooner than most students and, resolving to search for whoever had given me my flash of color, set up near the front of the room and began introducing myself to everyone who entered with a brief handshake and an exchange of names. It earned me some weird looks, but I had thinned out a few people in my search for my unknown love.
   
    Computers had always interested me, mostly because color didn't make much difference for them. Developers knew that most times, two lovers wouldn't hold hands to surf the web, so there was little need for color. It meant I wasn't missing out on much for once in my life and I found that little fact immensely satisfying for some reason. Because of this, I listened intently as Mrs. Bradley started discussing her future plans for the class. She seemed legitimately excited to teach and talked about how they would be learning how to find different kinds of sources for research papers, design a simple website, and even begin development on a simple online game. I couldn't resist feeling a bit excited for the first time since the colors had come and so rudely disappeared. She was slow though, and lengthy in her speech. There were only ten minutes left in first block by the time she passed out syllabuses for everyone to get signed by the end of the week, which she wisely decided to let my restless peers use to chat about their summer. I kept silent and skimmed a couple internet posts about the time when two lovers had first started seeing colors with each other, curious about whether or not anyone else had an experience like mine. Nothing caught my eye, except a particularly strange one about a woman being kidnapped, only to see some color called "blue" for the first time in her captor's eyes. How much was true or fiction was difficult to tell, but no stories mentioned anyone being flooded with color all at once and so suddenly. I held the slate gray power button on the computer, until the white screen disappeared to black.