Two hours later, Cecilia finally finished her homework and threw down her pen, annoyed. She'd gotten stuck on a math problem early on and had just spent the last twenty minutes revisiting it to try to solve for x. In the end, she'd resorted to the guess-and-check method for lack of any other way of solving.
Cecilia looked up as to stretch her neck, for she'd been sitting cross-legged against the wall with her head down for hours and her neck was starting to feel stiff. A flash of color caught Cecilia's eye—but no, it wasn't really color. Rather, it was a very dark shade of gray that was almost red...though not quite. Cecilia blinked and tried to find the point again, but it seemed to have disappeared. She decided that it must've been her imagination.
So much homework certainly has after effects, Cecilia thought, glum but somewhat amused as she neatly slid her papers into a painted red folder and tucked the folder into her blankets.
It was odd, Cecilia knew, how only a couple things around her were colored, but she had learned to live with it—even play games with the strange fact. Try to guess how many of the apples in the display were red and how many were light gray.
Cecilia shook herself out of her thoughts, only then realizing how late it was. I must've been doing homework for much longer than I estimated, she thought, wishing then, again, that she had a watch.
All of Cecilia's classmates had watches and Cecilia had had one too, before she got kicked out, but soon after stumbling into the alleyway she was in now with just the small suitcase, a cap, and a jar of cherries, Cecilia's watch had broken off, and she now could only tell the time when there was a clock around her. Still, by the looks of it, it was quite late, and Cecilia should've been asleep.
It'll be better tomorrow, Cecilia told herself as she kicked off her torn shoes and slid beneath the blankets.
⋆ ⋆ ⋆
The next morning, Cecilia woke with the sun, as she always did. Rays of bright, gray-white sun shone off her red hair as Cecilia got up and began getting ready. She changed out of the clothes from the day before and into another identical outfit she'd saved up for weeks to buy, then took with her a bucket and her dirty clothes to the staff sink at the back of a building.
Cecilia filled up her bucket with water tinted gray and washed herself off as best she could, then ran her clothes through it as well. The only other person who would be up at such a time in the morning would be the old bread seller a couple buildings down. She'd slept before dinner and gotten up in the middle of the night for as long as Cecilia could remember, but she was a recluse, so Cecilia didn't worry much about being spotted by her.
After dumping the rest of the water back in the sink, Cecilia folded her damp clothes up and hid them under her blanket, then pulled out the red folder that contained her homework done in, of course, red ink. A groan escaped her lips as she saw the amount of papers she would have to double-check and she couldn't help but feel the urge to rip her papers. She didn't, of course—not because she didn't want to, but because she was shocked by the sight of a colored leaf at her feet. Well, it wasn't exactly colored...more like not not colored. Cecilia blinked at the not-quite-red leaf, then passed it off as a sleep-deprived hallucination and began going through her papers before school.
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