When I was in the seventh grade, I became a color.

But perhaps not in the way you’re thinking.

The shade I was given was not so much physical as psychological. It was not my skin or bones that melted away into a pastel puddle of revulsion on the floor, but my sanity itself. Lucky thing that the carpet in every school building looks exactly the same, so no one unsuspecting would catch the invisible stain my mind had left behind.

All things considered, it was the worst test a person could take at 13 years old.

“A personality assessment,” they would come to tell us, mounted on violet paper with many words I could not define. The pencil fell off my desk while the English teacher explained the rules, and I felt helplessly embarrassed while I leaned precariously to return the paint and wood to its worthy home of my knuckles.

1.Circle the word in the horizontal column that you most identify with.

2.Add together …show more content…
“Stand by for further instructions.” Like I was a seventh grade spy, a dubious James Bond who had taken a claim to another female body.

“Stand by for further instructions.” Like something was about to go horribly wrong, and I knew it.

I could only remember what horizontal meant because on that particular morning the sunrise, which took homestead at the horizon, was so fantastically pink that my bus driver made us stop and wonder at it before opening the metal doors to release us.

pink sky in morning, sailors take warning.

My mother sometimes said that during the days spent at our vacation home in Washington, before we sold it to the neighbor's mother and vowed to never come back. I have not seen those walls in four years. I cannot fathom what they might have looked like.

I was, perhaps, a perfect student. Each word I choose became entrapped within its own small, gray enclosure, a boundary my hands had built for them. Perhaps these words were my livestock, the creatures of me captured in 12 point