Welcome, my Name is Noah. Noah Connors. All my life I’ve lived in a world without color, but recently, that has changed.
I’ll tell you the whole story.
It all started on a Monday. Monday the sixteenth. I was sleeping peacefully, dreaming of mine and Nate’s plans, when I was awoken by a single, sharp tone. I left the bed and prepared myself for another boring day of school. I carefully put on my uniform, a pair of black pants with a gray T-shirt with the number 30A printed on it before carefully combing my dyed gray hair back.
I got to school about thirty minutes later after my mom drove me to school. She did that every day. As I walked in, I brushed past him, letting him hand his necklace off to me. We did that every month, since Nate had training of the sixteenth, and that would of course warrant a search of him as well as them knocking him out and doing something strange to his fingers. No one really questioned it. Well, no one except us, which is why we couldn’t let them get that necklace.
Nate’s necklace was a flashdrive, and on it, we had stored everything from plans to take down the school, to just our opinions on the whole no color policy. Speaking of the no color policy, it was the single dumbest thing on the planet. Sometime before either of us were born, the government had enacted a policy. A policy that said that color was deemed illegal on Artem Isle, our home just north of the state of Washington. But the policy was literally ridiculous. I mean, they for some reason thought we would get big ideas about overthrowing them if we were creative? It was dumb, but most of us were used to it, but it was still ridiculous that they polluted the air just to kill the grass and create a cloud of smoke to make it harder to see the sky…
Anyway, sorry for my tangent there, back to school. So, walking into school, Nate and I both headed toward our first class, Algebra 2. We both sat down and Mrs. Stine was handing out worksheets for today. “Class, this is your project for this week, expected to be done by the end of the week.” She said simply and I looked down at the assignment. It was simple, shouldn’t take me very long, but I started sketching my draft for it anyway.
Later, as the bell rang for the end of fourth period, about twenty students lined up in the hall, including Nate. It was time for his training. He’d be there for the rest of the day, and a few minutes after school tomorrow, so I’d give him his necklace back tomorrow when I met him in his ‘lab’ afterschool tomorrow. Until then, he was on his own.
In seventh period, Mr. Sands had us working on Für Elise, by Beethoven, but in the minor key, as most music here was. However, piano class was always harder without Nate, because even though I was considered the schools ‘gem,’ it was more because of status than smarts. Everyone knew Nate was the smarter than I was, they just didn’t like his family for some reason. Who knows why. But Nate was the one who usually taught me how to play the songs in here, because even though he couldn’t talk, he could still show me how to play something. Plus, he’d found a way to get the keyboard to play it all by itself, which I found hilarious.
That period passed excruciatingly slowly, but when we were finally dismissed, I walked home as quickly as possible, wanting to get all my homework done and some food from my secret stash before my mom came home and got upset. She’d complain about how as the high chair’s son, I needed to eat healthy, but I was certain whatever slop she was trying to feed my was nothing but poison, so I had my own stash hidden under one of the kitchen tiles that she had yet to find out about.
I spent the rest of that day in my room, thinking about new ideas for ‘The Plan,’ as Nate like to call it. My mom got home at around 5:00 and I had to deal with her for a bit, but otherwise it was uneventful, just another boring day in this boring world I call home.
As I climbed into bed that night, I had only one thought in my mind; “I wish I could trade this world for one of color, where I didn’t have to meet in secret and could be whoever I wanted to be,” I whispered as I feel asleep, waiting for another tomorrow of colorless torture, but I wouldn’t get another one of those for a long time…
I’ll tell you the whole story.
It all started on a Monday. Monday the sixteenth. I was sleeping peacefully, dreaming of mine and Nate’s plans, when I was awoken by a single, sharp tone. I left the bed and prepared myself for another boring day of school. I carefully put on my uniform, a pair of black pants with a gray T-shirt with the number 30A printed on it before carefully combing my dyed gray hair back.
I got to school about thirty minutes later after my mom drove me to school. She did that every day. As I walked in, I brushed past him, letting him hand his necklace off to me. We did that every month, since Nate had training of the sixteenth, and that would of course warrant a search of him as well as them knocking him out and doing something strange to his fingers. No one really questioned it. Well, no one except us, which is why we couldn’t let them get that necklace.
Nate’s necklace was a flashdrive, and on it, we had stored everything from plans to take down the school, to just our opinions on the whole no color policy. Speaking of the no color policy, it was the single dumbest thing on the planet. Sometime before either of us were born, the government had enacted a policy. A policy that said that color was deemed illegal on Artem Isle, our home just north of the state of Washington. But the policy was literally ridiculous. I mean, they for some reason thought we would get big ideas about overthrowing them if we were creative? It was dumb, but most of us were used to it, but it was still ridiculous that they polluted the air just to kill the grass and create a cloud of smoke to make it harder to see the sky…
Anyway, sorry for my tangent there, back to school. So, walking into school, Nate and I both headed toward our first class, Algebra 2. We both sat down and Mrs. Stine was handing out worksheets for today. “Class, this is your project for this week, expected to be done by the end of the week.” She said simply and I looked down at the assignment. It was simple, shouldn’t take me very long, but I started sketching my draft for it anyway.
Later, as the bell rang for the end of fourth period, about twenty students lined up in the hall, including Nate. It was time for his training. He’d be there for the rest of the day, and a few minutes after school tomorrow, so I’d give him his necklace back tomorrow when I met him in his ‘lab’ afterschool tomorrow. Until then, he was on his own.
In seventh period, Mr. Sands had us working on Für Elise, by Beethoven, but in the minor key, as most music here was. However, piano class was always harder without Nate, because even though I was considered the schools ‘gem,’ it was more because of status than smarts. Everyone knew Nate was the smarter than I was, they just didn’t like his family for some reason. Who knows why. But Nate was the one who usually taught me how to play the songs in here, because even though he couldn’t talk, he could still show me how to play something. Plus, he’d found a way to get the keyboard to play it all by itself, which I found hilarious.
That period passed excruciatingly slowly, but when we were finally dismissed, I walked home as quickly as possible, wanting to get all my homework done and some food from my secret stash before my mom came home and got upset. She’d complain about how as the high chair’s son, I needed to eat healthy, but I was certain whatever slop she was trying to feed my was nothing but poison, so I had my own stash hidden under one of the kitchen tiles that she had yet to find out about.
I spent the rest of that day in my room, thinking about new ideas for ‘The Plan,’ as Nate like to call it. My mom got home at around 5:00 and I had to deal with her for a bit, but otherwise it was uneventful, just another boring day in this boring world I call home.
As I climbed into bed that night, I had only one thought in my mind; “I wish I could trade this world for one of color, where I didn’t have to meet in secret and could be whoever I wanted to be,” I whispered as I feel asleep, waiting for another tomorrow of colorless torture, but I wouldn’t get another one of those for a long time…