24 Hours

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

                The best way to recap is to start at the beginning. Where my furthest memories rested, I suppose. The deepest ones, the scariest ones, and the hardest to tell; they’re all there.

                It began with a daycare, I guess; I remember bright pink walls painted without a stray splotch of enamel anywhere on the wooden border that looked like a fence going around the room. I can easily reminisce on the multicolored spots splattered over the periphery of the room. It surfaced a slight, blurred memory of clowns; their yellow, puffy suits with the rainbow circles dotted on the fabric.

                Not to mention the kids. Yes, yes, there were lots of kids; boys and girls of all shapes, sizes, and ethnicities. It was a diverse playtime; there was lots of variation in attitude, so none of the kids appeared to have any noticeable, visible problems with any of the other brilliant kids who dashed, frolicking, around the room. In fact, my mother told me that by the end of the first week, everybody was friends with someone. And by the end of the first year, everyone was friends with everyone else!

                There were four kids I met that I enjoyed being around much more than the others. Their names were Laura, Sophie, Cody, and Maxwell.

                Laura was a tan girl with hair the color of mahogany. It was streaked with vibrant blonde highlights and reached all the way down to her waist, falling just below the height of her hips. Most of the time Laura kept her hair in a braid that draped itself over her back, tracing the length of her spine. She would wear big black glasses with large lenses, concealing her beautiful brown eyes. She began to form freckles, the ones that appeared much less often on tan people like herself than on pale, thin kids like myself.

                Overall, Laura had a caring, soothing, and intelligent personality for someone of her age. It was she would assist me with patience as I tried to reassemble a stack of building blocks, or it was she who would teach me how to draw rough little sketches on a piece of notebook paper, instructing me with precise – yet simple – directions and demonstrations.

                Not that she was much of an artist herself, of course; in daycare, what more could you do than scribble a stick figure on a piece of paper with a fat crayon and call it a self-portrait? Maybe, if you were an artist with true skill, you’d add a smiley face. And for the kids who made every mark with ingenious detail? Well, they’d cut out  two pieces of colored paper – one blue, one red – then stick them on the stick figure and call it clothing.

                Sophie had a much more strong personality than Laura. She had dark skin that was the color of lightly roasted coffee, and her hair was just slightly darker. It was woven into dreads and pulled back behind her delicate head in a ponytail. On rare occasions, Sophie would wear her favorite floral headband. It was pink with a pattern of red flowers printed on its surface.

                But Sophie certainly didn’t act with the same pleasuring, gentle mellowness her headband possessed; oh, no , certainly not! She was the kind of person who intended to make the most of her life, as if it were to end any time now. Any second.

                Sophie would dash around the classroom, knocking papers with quick, strong flicks of the hand and swings of the foot. It was amusing to watch; a baby girl, not older than two or three, scrambling to and fro, wreaking havoc with every step her foot made.

                She was chaos, and she liked it. Hell, we all liked it! She made our lives exciting, not knowing what crazy, psycho stunt Sophie was going to try and pull off next. Just when you think you have it all figured out, she’d something even more crazy and psychotic than the crazy, psychotic act you’d just attempted to imagine and failed to predict. It was kids like these that motivated us all to enjoy ourselves, no matter the dire situations we so often found ourselves caught up in.