Tamara, my perfect victim, would be subjected to every little anxiety I had as time ticked up to eight.
Well, if you had found someone who was really absolutely dependable, wouldn't you depend on them absolutely? Fill them with your light, eat away at their time bit by bit as you worried that some incorrect colour had entered your monochrome school world.
Yes, monochrome, black ash and white water and doctrine and inculcation but no inoculation, it was sterile, an empty stage without a cast or a chorus. I just went there, I was just popular. Things just happened.
But Hannah, Hannah Hannah. Half your clique, your beloved besties were drawn from New Stokes High, half your clique was from your old middle school in New York. That left three people, the dropouts Tamara and Camilla, who were really different but united by some perverse law of symmetry, the same one that made everyone nickname them Tammy and Cammy, and the pole star Giovanna. That girl was a breed of her own, a different kind of light source and completely immune to my magic. Yet she followed the rest of us, because......
What was I saying? Oh. "Are your friends monochrome? Do they not matter to you? Are they not even pieces on a chessboard to move around?"
For one, I didn't know how to play chess. I know how to set up the board and all the pieces move because Tamara and Eliana were going through chess and shogi variants in the group chat, so I saw all the charts and memorised them. I didn't exactly know what you're supposed to do in chess or shogi. Or go. I've played checkers. So, maybe I could move them up and down and left and right and in Ls and skips and jumps, but I couldn't make a grand plan to win the game. What kind of idiot manipulation is that?
But I was sidestepping the point, wasn't I.
School life or school existence was a dark room with a little light in it. (I was the little light, of course.)
My dear friends had colour. But, a dark room was very never colourless. Night vision was conferred to humanity by the rods in your eyes. The cones, which could detect colour, were inhibited in darkness.
That was a cool fact, wasn't it? I couldn't remember it for the life of me in middle school until I had begged Tamara to help me revise for a biology test. She had spelled it out for me. "You're a genius with some talent beyond talent and you didn't know this."
And shamefully I had said "Tammy, I don't."
"How."
"I don't really do anything in class."
"Aren't you normal. Don't you talk to your friends." (Tamara barely attended class even then, and my united group chat didn't exist until I met Camilla on a holiday to London a few weeks before I moved to Indianapolis, so she didn't know them. She knew them intimately now. You will see this.)
"I'm perfectly, angelically normal! But I don't. It's weird, isn't it? At break, I can talk to them a little, organise trips and outings and dates and beachside holidays together. But I feel a little limited, a little denied. A little empty. Outside of school hours, I can talk to them normally for hours straight. Inside lessons I don't focus or unfocus. I'm just there, sitting to attention!"
"That's..."
"Perfectly, angelically normal," I had said.
"Weird, even amongst the majority of the student population who can barely tolerate schools."
"I'm not weird," I said, and I psychically pouted. Well, I didn't do anything psychic intentionally back then, I pouted and Tamara just knew, since Tamara picks up everything and since phones are psychic power. Still, I tolerated the indignity, since Tamara would bear everything for me.
As she did now.
Return to the present and monochrome (for now) day, in the cold of the deep and early winter, back to an empty stage where things just happened to me or to others, where I was the main character but the projector never seemed to be playing and so I would never be embroiled in gossip, crushes, spats, rivalries and failed classes, which sat uneasily with me but I hadn't minded until someone Relevant had begun to meddle, so I began to whinge at Tamara with:
And I did.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
Tammy...
She was about to say something completely uncalled for and mean, and I just asked for it. Well, Tammy was my greatest helpmeet, and I was always right, so Tammy would be right if she was mean, so I'd be receiving correct advice.
...that is what that word means, right?
See, it was mean! You just knew she was thinking something mean when all the dead and resurrection metaphors came out, our little Lazarus. Lazara?
I did read online news sites, and Tamara knew this, but she also knew that I wouldn't count it since the internet isn't made out of paper. In any case, I had actually never heard this phrase before.
To describe what was wrong to Tamara, something must have happened. Even at a monochrome school, things happened, I could describe them. Even if never to me, even if I could only act elsewhere. But nothing had happened yet, so I couldn't describe anything.
So time ticked up to eight thirty. The people in homeroom who knew my power but not me filed in. The main cast filed in, four out of fifteen of the people I met and loved in Indianapolis. They spoke, a little, but they knew what I was like during lessons and were content to leave me be. I had explained the situation to someone, they explained it to someone else, and there were titterings and Owens introduced and introduced themselves. But then lessons began, and so Owens began to teach in her style, and the empty world filled with her favourite colour, a sweet melting goldenrod.