Shade Me (2 page)

I
F I WERE
a conscientious student, I would be studying for my chem quiz instead of sitting on a window ledge, chain-smoking. But it was beautiful outside—clear, starry, kind of chilly. I loved the way the air in Brentwood smelled on nights like this. It was crisp and still and promising, and if you closed your eyes and inhaled deeply enough, you could even fool yourself into thinking you were catching a little whiff of the beach five miles away. So much better than the aroma of the high school, which smelled like old food, new money, and competition. And phoniness. So many fake people. Sometimes I wondered if a real feeling actually existed in this city, if you could trust the words of anyone here. I sure as hell didn't. When you lived in a town where it seemed
like everyone claimed to have a sister in a music video or an uncle who was so-and-so's agent, it was hard to know who was real and who was a wannabe.

But I didn't give a crap about being a conscientious student, so instead of studying, I was sitting and smoking, my legs hung over the ledge, the backs of my shoes thunking, soft and rubbery, against the side of the house in time to the music pulsing through my computer speakers. I'd already dropped three butts to the rock landscaping below. Dad would have a shit fit later; would blame the gardener. But at the moment I didn't care. I was enjoying myself. I would finish my smoke, and then, I promised myself, I would go back inside and cram. Enjoyment over.

Who was I kidding—the air could have been choked with pollution, unbreathable, and I still would've rather been sitting on the ledge than hunched over a textbook, scratching notes onto index cards and memorizing formulas. I only had a semester and a half left until graduation, thank God, but that also meant I only had a semester and a half left to try to salvage my pathetic GPA. At the moment, my graduation status was iffy. The school called it
academic probation
. I called it hopeless.

Not that
academic probation
was a surprising new development for me. School had never exactly been my forte. I pretty much avoided being there every moment I could. Hence, the grade issues.

When I was a kid, I always wondered why nobody else talked about words and numbers looking magenta or brown or blue or yellow or silver. I never understood why emotions didn't have colors to other people, or how someone could be depressed without seeing a field of sickly greenish yellow everywhere, or why nobody else seemed to understand that happiness was pink.

Turned out I was the weird one. When I got to kindergarten, I couldn't concentrate on the alphabet, because I was too dazzled by all the colors. Math was torture, because threes were purple, but so was the letter
E
, and I was always getting them confused. And I hated it when teachers would say things like, “Roses are red,” because while the right color for the word
red
was definitely red, the color for
roses
was more orangey pink.

And then there were the colors of feelings. My mom always called me “sensitive,” but I learned later that she really meant “intuitive.” Most people missed the little hints that we all give off when we're feeling sad or angry or happy or uncertain. But those feelings also had colors for me, so I couldn't miss them, even when I desperately wanted to. Where other people knew a room felt awkward, I knew the same room was blushing dusty pink.

But as a kid, I didn't know all this yet. Like all my friends, I didn't consciously realize that my second-grade teacher had red-rimmed, puffy eyes and a voice that turned down at
the edges and hands that shook. I only knew that the putrid brown that her white chalk left behind made me cry. I didn't necessarily notice that the PE teacher's fists were balled up and his face tense with anger when he yelled at us, only that the numbers on his jerseys were always electric pulsing ragemonster red and they scared me.

And the worst, Mrs. Hinton, the art teacher who wrote her name so neatly in cursive. Later I would piece it together that, of course, there had been hints that she was sick. But at the time all I knew was that her room felt dull olive to me, and that halfway through the year, she was absent for a few days and never came back. I asked and asked if any of my friends had seen the ugly color in her room, but they hadn't. Only me. I felt responsible, like I had
made
her sick. She was probably dead, and I might have made her that way, too. Because of my colors.

After Mom died, and I became too afraid of letters and numbers to go to school, Dad bounced me around from doctor to doctor, trying to figure out what was wrong with me. I was only eight, and I was nervous and upset, so I couldn't describe what was going on any better than that the room felt brown or green or that the word
color
was like a flashing dance of primary hues. Most of the docs seemed to think it was an eye problem. One sent me off for brain scans. Two suggested therapy. And another insisted I was making it up; that I was trying to get attention. I learned quickly to put
doctors on my People Not to Be Trusted list. When people in charge couldn't seem to figure out what was wrong with someone, they assumed that person was messed up in the head. God forbid we didn't have all the answers.

Dad was about to give up when we finally found a doctor who'd seen cases like mine before. He told us that some people's senses combine. They might hear a scent or see a feeling or smell a shape. Or, like me, see a color in a number or letter or emotion, or all of the above. It was rare, and pretty much impossible to treat, but at least we had a name for what was going on with me: synesthesia. He said it wasn't uncommon for someone to have more than one kind, like I did. He also said synesthetes could be highly intuitive, which explained why I could “see” Mrs. Hinton's sickness and the PE teacher's rage in my colors, even though nobody had ever exactly told me that Mrs. Hinton had hepatitis or the PE teacher had a short fuse. According to the doctor, this was like a gift. According to him, I was special. And in case I didn't like feeling special, I would eventually just get used to it. I would get to a point where I barely even noticed it.

That was third grade. A grade I got to be in twice, thanks to my special little gift. I was now just months from graduation and still avoiding my homework, so I guess that doctor was wrong. Instead of getting used to it, I learned to hide it well. The only person besides me and Dad who knew about it was the high school counselor, who Dad forced me
to “open up to” after I started failing enough to make graduation look iffy.

“You never know, Nikki,” Dad had said. “He might be able to help you through a lot of old emotions, and then maybe this will go away.” Because sometimes even Dad didn't get that my synesthesia wasn't just an emotional problem to be solved.

But ten seconds in the same room with Mr. Ear Dandruff or whoever the counselor was, I was wishing that he would just go away. It was clear that (a) he didn't believe a word I was saying, and (b) even if he did, he didn't exactly care.

“So you're saying you're too distracted thinking about colors to concentrate on your work,” he'd said.

“Not really,” I said, hating that I was having to talk about this once again, and that I hadn't gotten any better at explaining it at eighteen than I had been at eight.

“Not really,” he repeated, his voice vaguely sarcastic. He wrote something on a piece of paper. I glared at him.

“It's not that I'm too busy thinking about colors to think about what we're doing in class,” I said. “I'm trying to concentrate, but the colors just . . . push in.”

He nodded as if he'd just cracked the code to the universe or something. “Push in.” He was great at repeating stuff.

“Yeah, so I'll have to think, ‘Is this a three or an
e
,' and
by the time I've figured it out, I've completely lost my train of thought.”

He wrote something else down, nodding. I shifted, starting to get irritated. “So you're working, and then you start thinking about what colors things should be, and you get distracted,” he said.

“Yeah. Well, no. Not like you're saying.”

He arched an eyebrow at me, pooching his lips together in thought. “Have you ever been tested for ADHD, Nikki?” he asked.

I sighed. “Yes. And I don't have ADHD. It's synesthesia.”

He nodded, flipping back a few pages in my file. “Yes, yes, I see that.” He glanced up at me and pasted on a patronizing smile. “I think we would be wise to look at ADHD again, since it's affecting your schoolwork. Testing has come a long way in the past ten years. They could have missed something when you were tested before. You might find a new, treatable diagnosis to be more satisfying to your grade card.”

I stared at him, stunned.
A new, treatable diagnosis more satisfying?
Did he really think my dad and I were that dumb? That we just went with synesthesia because ADHD seemed too hard to deal with? Rusty starbursts began to glow in my vision. I imagined my eyes—dark, deep-set, intense—filling with those starbursts. I imagined my untidy straight brown hair floating on them, my angular features sharpening to
rusty points as I became a starburst myself—my anger as visible to the counselor as it was to me. “You know,” I said, gathering my things, “you can shove your ADHD test up your ass. Flunk me if you have to. Won't be the first time. I'll live.” And I stormed out.

I half expected him to call Dad, and for Dad to read me the riot act for throwing away a chance to get help so that I could graduate. But he must not have. He must not have told anyone.

And I sure as hell wasn't telling anyone. I was an excellent secret keeper. They should hire me for the goddamned CIA. The colors were still there. Just nobody but me knew it.

When does anyone use chemistry in real life, anyway? Or math? Or Western Civ? You know what they should teach in school? How not to become a bitter, mistrustful ball of numb when life shits all over you. How to survive your mother's murder and never get any answers and still somehow come out the other end a useful human being. How to keep people at arm's distance so you don't lose your mind when they leave you, because no matter what they say, they always, always, always will, no matter what. That would be a useful class.

I dragged on my cigarette, pulling hard down to the filter, and used my thumb to flick it onto the rocks below with the others. It landed with a little fireworks show of sparks. Like a celebration.
Congratulations, Nikki, you are officially
a chain-smoking, nonstudying, academic-probation, failing freak show. Let's throw a party for your bad self! Pow!

I turned my face upward and slowly and ceremoniously exhaled, making my lips into a tight O to send a funnel of smoke into the sky, then reached into my pocket to pull out a new cigarette. Screw my promises to go in and cram. I wasn't going to get any chem done anyway.

But just as I reached into my pocket, I felt the familiar buzz of my phone against the side of my hand. I groaned. It was probably Jones again.

Jones was my ex. Newly ex, actually, and I didn't have the energy to talk to him. I'd been avoiding him at school ever since we broke up. Or rather, since I broke up with him. I could see rotting brown pulsing onto the cinder-barf school walls before he even rounded the corner to my locker or the lunchroom or the gym. The same decaying brown that made me cry when I was in kindergarten just made me hide now. Every time I saw Jones coming I doubled back, ducked into a restroom, rushed away. School was bad enough without enduring some schmaltzy romance novel scene in the hallway, starring heartbroken Jones and the cold bitch who broke his heart.

We'd been dating for months, and I was into him, I really was. He thought I was beautiful, even though I thought I was too skinny and plain. Overlookable. He had an excellent
body, a killer smile, and an eager attitude that made him super easy to manipulate. Violet was the color I associated with lust, and I felt like a lit-up violet Christmas tree every time I came near him. Like a neon bar sign:
Nikki Kill on Tap Here!
Jones and I had so much passion I sometimes felt my very skin would light up when he touched me. And that passion didn't go away after I broke it off with him. I still wanted Jones. I just didn't want the same thing he wanted.

He ruined it all by falling in love, an adorable puppy trailing after his master. I knew it was getting bad when I started seeing color change around him—violet to pink to magenta. His heart practically beat out of his chest every time we were together. Fantastic.

I liked Jones. But I didn't love him. After seeing what happened to my parents, I didn't believe in it. Love, too young, spelled disaster, and I didn't want any part of it.

Jones had taken to calling me three or four times a day, begging for another chance, telling me how devoted he was, pleading to make things right between us. He had no idea that professing his love was exactly the wrong way to make things right. I'd taken to silencing his calls.

But I was four cigarettes in and feeling generous, so I pulled out my phone without even bothering to look who it was.

“Hello?”

There was nothing. Scratch that, there was something that sounded like rough footsteps in the distance, and some tight breathing.

“Hello?” I asked again. Irritated. If this was Jones's new method of trying to get me back, it was lame as hell. The heavy-breathing stalker method, Jones? Really?

“Hey,” a voice said. It was quiet, the pitch high, like a girl's voice, or maybe a child's. “Listen, I . . .”

I heard something else, then. A man's voice in the distance, saying something that I couldn't quite make out.

“What? Hello?” I asked again.

The breathing got faster, more urgent.

“Nikki,” the voice said, and while it was still unclear if it was a girl or a child, something about it itched with familiarity in the back of my mind.