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:
<hannah> Hi
<tamara> Good evening
<hannah> You live in wyoming it's earlier in the morning for you
<tamara> I haven't slept
<hannah> You should sleep.
<tamara> Is that an order
<hannah> No I need you.
And I did.
<tamara> What for
<hannah> Ah, many things
<tamara> I know.
<hannah> Sorry
<tamara> Don't apologise, it's unbefitting of you
<hannah> Unbefitting
<tamara> Tell me what's wrong
<hannah> Someone has filled my empty world
<tamara> You fell in love? Who's the boy
<hannah> I can tell you're trying to put me at ease because you're not even calling me gay for once.
<tamara> If you need me to continue teasing you as usual then that's fine
<hannah> But no I'm not in love I'm in hate
<hannah> East and Midwestern are conducting an 'experiment' on my school
<hannah> And others but isn't mine the important one
<tamara> Do you want the cute answer or the honest answer
<hannah> Honest
<tamara> no lol
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?
<tamara> Since world initialisation and the garotting of American prestige by the Condor Raid, American private schools have essentially been a resource liability
<tamara> While private schools in Britain were the vehicles through which it revived Protestant charity and 'Puritan austerity', those remaining in Europe were flattened into German-sponsored gymnasiums or French-sponsored lycea and those in West Africa house religious staff fleeing a disillusioned world or are funded by Russian-backers in a resurrection of old Soviet policies of international education, private schools in North America have remained as they are prior to esp
<tamara> They provide a comfortable, well-funded, extracurricular-focused life to a vanishingly small minority of pupils who are either part of the new or rejuvenated ruling class of the many new megacities or will vanish with the old ruling class in the dead and dying exurbs
<tamara> And what good is having a comfortable life in a world with cold and without comfort
<tamara> And what good is having extracurricular after extracurricular in a world where the leisure activities have all been distorted, and the curriculum is totally insufficient to deal with it
<tamara> So the important changes need to be made to the neglected public and charter school, where so much potential skill has been left abandoned under the ice, or worse, rotting with the corpses and now has to be fished out
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?
<hannah> What happened to the ones in South America and Asia and Oceania and the rest of Africa (When she said something mean but so very true, I had to deflect, reflect.)
<tamara> West Asia and North Africa are generally testing grounds for Second City pedagogy but otherwise nothing as much.
<tamara> As far as I know and I don't know everything
<hannah> You do
<hannah> I know everything and you know more than me
<tamara> Shut up
<hannah> Also Second City pedagogy what's that
<hannah> They replaced my teacher with some like twenty year old from the Second City
<tamara> 20yo
<tamara> Second City
<tamara> Burying the lede much???
<hannah> What does that mean
<tamara> Like a newspaper
<hannah> I haven't read a newspaper since I was eight.
<hannah> You and Lucy have less boring analyses :)
<tamara> ...
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.
<tamara> I mean that was the critical part, wasn't it
<hannah> Probably
<tamara> They're not normal, there's something wrong with them
<hannah> I know
<tamara> Of course you know
<tamara> You and your Carmen
<hannah> She's not mine
<tamara> Unfortunately the critical part is
<tamara> I belong to the mundane world, mostly
<tamara> I can be there for you
<tamara> I can be there for the rest of the Indianapolis group
<tamara> I can tell you the history of the Second City
<tamara> But only you can describe their wrongness, I can't predict this shit
<tamara> You're our prophetess
<hannah> I am
<tamara> So suffer a little, and then describe it for me
<tamara> I'll help you cope, and you can protect everyone from their strange colours
<hannah> Okay
<hannah> Thank you for being here
<tamara> C'est rien (She always does this, knowing I don't know French.)
<hannah> It's everything.
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.
