Quick Note To Readers: The great response that I got from this story took my breath away. Thank you so much! I hope that you warm souls will stick the story through with me. ;) It should be ridiculously fun.
KINDERGARTEN -
"My colors suck." Tony snatched the color box away from Fella, looking over the rows of sharpened crayons with confusion. "How do you keep yours so pretty?" he glanced back and forth from his paper to the crayons, hoping that they would magically start coloring a masterpiece. No such luck. Fella snatched the crayons back.
"Because I don't stab my paper with them, Tony." Fella sneered. She selected a lovely shade of...red...and began coloring in the grass. Warm sunlight beamed through the classroom's windows, speckling down on the kindergarten's tables.
"Yeah, well..." Tony looked at his own mutilated pile of wax. He stuttered to think of a viable comeback. "It's art, Fella." He finally sneered in her ear. "I can do what I want with it."
"It's not art if it looks bad."
"Says who?"
"Says me."
"Did the painter from Elmo say that?" Tony asked, believing he had just settled the argument with such a profound comeback. Half of him was expecting the room to burst with applause and for roses to be thrown in his direction.
"Well," Fella bit her bottom lip. "No."
"Well, he is an artist. And you ain't." With that, Tony took one of Fella's crayons and began coloring, a little softer, on his paper. She turned her head down. Tony was right. The Elmo man WAS an artist. How was she supposed to compete with that? So she went back to her own coloring.
"Why are you coloring the grass that color, Fella?" Tony stopped and stared at Felicia's vibrant fuchsia grass. "Grass ain't that color, Fells." She paused, staring down in panic at her crayon.
"It isn't?" her voice was almost inaudible.
"No, it's green." Tony took the proper green out of the box so Fella could exchange it for her red. Because he was a proper gentleman - boy- and he would have the decency to get Fella her crayon.
"But Tony," Felicia looked back and forth between the two colors. Red and green. "Those two are exactly the same." Tony's forehead crinkled with confusion when he saw the truth in Fella's eyes. The colors were opposites though, red and green. And grass wasn't red. He didn't say anything for a long moment, so Fella blushed with a fierce embarrassment and turned back to coloring her grass red.
"Maybe I see the world different than you, Tony. And that should be okay. That IS okay."
PRESENT
Thursday night, inventor and billionaire Tony Stark introduced his latest intuitive software. The television crooned on and on. Tony this. Tony that. Maybe an interview or two, catching the genius standing in front of his massive, palatial home with fangirls screaming in the background. 'Meant to inspire the human mind' Stark's own voice came from the TV set. 'Not that my mind needs any inspiring, but maybe YOURS.' And the fangirls raved when Tony blew a kiss at the camera.
Fella had glazed eyes, while stirring her hot chocolate monotonously, fixed on the screen. The world outside her dingy apartment dulled down, but the traffic noises, the shouting, and the clamor never quieted. Horns echoing down the brick alleyways reminded Fella that the only world out there was a world of slow-creeping taxi cabs and hardly-ever-creeping work schedules. Barely scraping by with the bills was constant. Sometimes, she wasn't scraping by at all; she was only accumulating more debt on top of her old student loans.
But the television showed a different world. How could two human beings, bred in the same environment as younglings, grow so very far apart? She wondered. And why was it Fella who got stuck here?
"When are you going to turn that stupid thing off?" Fella's roommate entered the living room from the bathroom. Vanessa was constantly harping. Nothing Fella ever did could be quite right for Vanessa. The kitchen was always too dirty, the garbage was never taken out, the windows needed cleaning, the bathroom smelled funny -
Fella didn't give the decent response, instead only clicking the off button on the remote and watching as the screen went from a strange blue to black. Vanessa huffed and slammed her bedroom door closed. Music to Fella's ears. If only Vanessa stayed in her room and stayed quiet forever, life would be a peach.
Sometimes Fella wondered what kind of prison sentence she would face if she made Vanessa quiet by force. But prison didn't seem fun. So Felicia kept her angry ideas in her head.
She stood up to put her glass in the sink. Was the mug red or green? Fella would never know. One of the drawbacks of being colorblind. But she had slowly grown into it. Eventually, she embraced the fact that she would never know what purple was. She would only know it as a murky brown, blending with other colors like blue. When she turned around there was another magazine, sitting on the kitchen table, with a cover that screamed up at her.
"TONY STARK'S NEW INTUITIVE COMPUTER SYSTEM! LOOK AT IT FELLA! LOOK AT IT!"
"I don't care about your stupid ideas anymore, Tony." She crumpled up the magazine and chucked it into the wastebasket. Maybe in the morning she would feel different about him.
Doubtful.
She walked sullenly toward her room, where she hoped she could stave off some of her midnight hunger by sleeping. No more chocolate tonight. Chocolate was bad.
Suddenly, a sharp, white hot pain rocketed up her nerve system. She cried out (a few words more… colorful… than she usually spoke), and plucked the lego out of her heel.
"Wha…WHAT?" She breathed quietly. "I didn't even know we had legos! Why do we have legos?" It looked up at her, shiny red, and mocked her with as much mockery as an inanimate object can manage. And she threw it into the living room, where she would probably end up stepping on it again in the morning.
