Green Today


# Green Today

My little brother Tommy blinks too much and doesn’t talk enough. Same as lot of the kids these days. He’s eight. I worry he won’t grow out of it.

When I pick him up from Seacrest Elementary on my walk home from Wavetop Middle School, the playgrounds are empty and the kids are sitting five to a bench, waiting patiently to leave. He sees me and gets up, nodding a goodbye to the little girl beside him and comes to my side. When I was his age, none of the kids sat on benches. We screamed. We fought, we rubbed each others’ faces in the dirt. 

That’s all changed. 

"Hey kid," I say. He nods.

“Hey Becky. Green today.”

Green is the new word people use for a certain illusion the screens display on Tuesday and Friday nights. It’s a bright kind of gray you never see anywhere else. I’ve sat and watched Green before, but I can’t do it too long because it gives me headaches, just like all the other Colors.

"Yeah? You wanna skip it and play catch?"

"Don’t want to skip it. It’s Green." I don’t expect him to say yes, and it’s okay that he doesn’t want to. Green is Tommy’s favorite color, and I’m not that great at throwing a ball around. Neither is he, for that matter.

Color is the word people have made up for these brighter grays. Can you imagine there’s more than just Green? After I saw my first Color, I thought for sure that was all there could be. I was wrong. Since then I’ve seen something they call Yellow, and one they call Red, and Blue. A bunch of others I don’t even know the names of. Blue is my personal favorite, though I couldn’t explain it to you. Nothing in the world is Blue. It’s the reason the screens are so exciting, and why they’re so scary.

The psychochemists, the neurobiologists and the politicians say the screens are a lie. That nobody sees color on the screens, that it’s just a manipulation of our retinas by a high frequency wave pulse. They’re certain we’re boiling our brains in front of them. They mention crime, obesity, unpredictable behavior. They don’t say anything about Tommy’s even-tempered personality, which is what I fear the most.

Of course, it doesn’t help much to say something isn’t real when any of us can go down and see it any day we want. You walk past a theatre and see people come out of there and you can tell it’s not a lie. It’s starting to leak out, starting to show up other places - not just on the screens. My dad says politicians want to keep people from experiencing these things but they can’t arrest everyone. For now, at least. He’s got a lawyer friend writing a law to make colors exclusive. So you had to pay by the color, and it would only be available to those who had the money to pay for it. Ever since Tommy heard about it he talks about dad’s lawyer friend like he’s the devil wrapped in skin.

Tommy told me he’ll die before he lets anything happen to Green.

Tommy told me the Colors are the only thing keeping him from running in front of a bus.
  
We walk to the theater and a family stumbles past us, fresh out of a Color screening, saying something like “The world since Colors came out is so much better,” all of them nodding together. But I wonder. Everyone was doing fine before Green came along, before Blue, before Red. There were problems, but we were solving them. Making life less brutish, more enjoyable, and slightly longer. Colors seem like a distraction. Nobody cares about making anything better so long as they keep their Colors.

So when Tommy tells me Green is all he wants on a Thursday afternoon when it’s sixty-five degrees and there are boys playing basketball and frisbee nearby, when he tells me he’d rather die than not have this color to stare at, I get scared.
  
I pay fifteen bucks for Tommy to see his Green and I wait outside in the warmth of the white sun, doing math problems on a picnic table. I square root whatever big crazy numbers I can think up until that gets boring, then I squash the ants on my paper with the point of my pencil. I try to imagine what they go through, how they just no longer exist after I do what I do. I don’t like how wondering about that makes me feel, so I stop. 

When my fifteen dollars of Green runs out, Tommy comes out and stands by the picnic table. He clutches the ticket stub in his hand, rubbing it back and forth between his thumb and his forefinger.

“I’m imagining it’s Green. It would look much different if it were Green.”

We took the bus home, and after we got on and sat in our bucket seats next to each other, Tommy stared out the window. 

“What you thinking about, kiddo?” 

“Just if I could see what things are Green.” He looked at me and smiled. “You know, boring stuff. What about you?”

“I was thinking how about when we get home I make us ice cream.”

“What flavor?”

“Milk.”

“That’s okay, Becky. I think I’ll just have a piece of toast.”

“More for me then, I guess, kiddo.” 

He didn’t say anything. 

“How was it? Green?” 

“It was good.”

“Anything special happen?”

He rubbed his neck. “Aw, Becky. You’ve seen it, right? You know that’s not really what it is. It's just like, you stare at it and you feel okay, okay?”

“You normally don’t feel okay?”

“Not as okay as I do when I see Green.”

“I guess I just can’t convince myself I like it,” I said.

“You’re fourteen. You don’t like anything.” He was looking daggers into me.

“Hey, hey. Maybe I’m wrong. And maybe you’re being a little defensive because you like the Color. I don’t have to like everything you like. It gives me headaches, why would I like it?”

“Okay.” Tommy said. “I do like it. I worry about what if I can’t have it. I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

“About what?” I hoped I’d said something good.

“About dad’s friend trying to pass a law to make Colors off limits for poor people.”

“Oh yeah, that guy Lyle Something.”

He looked down and mumbled something I couldn’t hear quite, so I made him say it again.

“I’ve been meeting with him,” Tommy said.

“You’ve been meeting with Lyle? That guy?”

He nodded.

“That’s not safe! You’re eight years old, Tommy, what the hell!”

The passengers were looking at me now, but my face was getting hot. I didn’t care.

“I have to get him to stop what he’s doing,” Tommy said, spreading his hands in front of him. “I have to figure out something.”

“You can’t get involved in that, I can’t believe you’re out meeting people and you’re probably going to get me in a lot of trouble now.”

“How would you get in trouble?”

“They’re not going to think an eight year old was messing with the Color pipeline and that I let him do it!”

The other people on the public trans car were staring at us. When we got off at our stop, three of them leaned out after us to see where we went.

“Can you promise not to tell Dad? Not till I get him to come to some kind of agreement about Colors?”

“Fine. But next time you meet him, you better tell me and I’ll go with you. I don’t like colors like you do, but I’ll sit with you and make sure you’re safe.”

“You could watch or wait outside, then when you eventually tell Dad you won’t get in trouble too.”

“True. Thanks.” Little guy was trying to keep me out of trouble while getting into the biggest trouble of his life. But maybe that’s how things go when you care so much about something. I was proud of him, but more thirsty.

We passed the corner market.  “I want to stop in here for a soda,”

“Okay.”

The shopkeeper looked up as we came in, a small man who lifted a hand then went back to circling things in a catalog. I browsed the candy bars.

“Becky, look.” He was at the back of the store, standing in front of a sealed vacuum cooler. Inside, about halfway up and unmistakable, was a Green drink. It didn’t just say green in the title, but it was literally Green. I had a hard time looking at it because it was so bright and different from everything else. 

“Just got that in,” the shopkeeper crowed, “it’s the first Color soda anywhere in the neighborhood. You guys want to try some?”

“That can’t be safe to drink, can it?” I said.

“Oh it’s safe, at least in the short term. Can’t know about long term results just yet but hey, I had a bottle and didn't die.”

“I don’t know,” I started saying, but Tommy was already jumping up and down.

“Please Becky, I need to try it.”

“How much?” I asked the shopkeeper, hoping he’d say more than what I had.

“Free, since it’s new. I want to watch the looks on your faces when you drink some.”

“Oh please, Becky, can we?”

I thought about it. What if it gave me worse than a headache? What if I woke up later and my skin was a lighter shade of the same green? Or Tommy? What if it did more to him since he was smaller than me? I was leaning against doing it, didn’t think I needed Green soda in my life, and my face was scrunched up so Tommy could tell what I was about to say, because then he looked at me like if I didn’t do this for him now he’d never forgive me.

“Okay.” I said okay.

We both drank the Green soda, from paper cups while the shopkeeper sat back with a grin.

It tasted fine. I don’t know if I started feeling different immediately or if it took a few minutes, but I started noticing different things about myself. I could feel my heart beating. I could hear the blood inside my ears rushing around. I could feel my muscles creaking and stretching when I walked. Mostly I felt like a living thing, when before I knew I was a living thing but it was abstracted, like if I read a book and a sentence was “You are a living, breathing, human animal.” Like, _of course_ I was, but I’d never actually _felt_ it before.

_Feeling it_ was weird. I didn’t want to go home, partly because of how I felt made the rest of the day seem more _possible_, but also partly because my Dad would be able to tell something was different about me. About both of us, really, but I think he was used to Tommy already.

I had homework to do, so we went home.

Dad was home, reading a book. He looked up from it when we walked through the den.

“You guys have a good day?”

Tommy nodded and kept walking to his room. I stopped. “I took him to the Colors like he wanted.”

“Okay.”

“Did you know there’s a new Green soda drink down at Bolio’s?”

“I didn’t know that. Did you have any?”

“No.”

“Did Tommy?”

“…”

“Tommy drank Green soda?!”

“I couldn’t stop him. The shopkeeper had some and he gave it away for free.”

Dad got up out of his chair, his cheeks darkening. He motioned for me to follow him into the hallway and downstairs. There he spoke to me in a low but booming voice.

“Becky, I don’t want to lose my son any more than I already have. I’ve allowed you to take him to the Colors till now, because it's passive and regulates his mood…but letting him _drink_ a Color? I’m disappointed in you.”

“I’m sorry.” _I shouldn’t have said anything._

“Promise you’ll help me out with him? Don’t let him drink any more Green soda?”

“Okay, I won’t let him.”

“I need you to understand how serious I take this. Green is bad. I know it.”

I felt I had Green coursing through my veins, like if he looked at me long enough he’d see little flecks of it, know I was lying. At the same time I found myself laughing at his idea that Green was bad. How would he know?

“I’ll keep an eye on Tommy and make sure he doesn’t drink more stuff. But it’s going to be everywhere soon. I don’t know what we can do at that point.”

“I’ve got people working on that.”

“That Lyle guy?”

Dad crossed his arms. “Leave that part of it to me, is what I mean.”

He stayed downstairs and I went back up to my room to do homework. As I passed the den again I saw the book he’d been reading lying pages-down on his chair.

_“The World We’re Losing.”_

I picked it up. On the inside dust jacket was a description of how colors had come to distract us from the enemy.

I wanted to know who the enemy was, and I had my own suspicions about the colors. This was my chance to find out. I took the book to my room and sat down to read.

"The world we are living in now is sadly limited," the author wrote, "because we're distracted by something entirely beyond our existence - Now, I don't want to be someone who says that people who go and watch Color, I mean, I must say I've done it myself, I don't mean to say that these people are unclean, or that they are gathering within themselves any deeper malfeasance than the rest of us, but it has to be said that the Colors and what they represent are completely outside of anything any of us would have ever thought we'd have to deal with.

>"So in that way, having Colors at the theater and talking about Color and making laws about Color and doing this or that about Color--detracts from what could be the good in society. Basically something outside of society is trying to make a home inside of it. We cannot allow it a toehold simply because it is interesting."

I flipped back to the inside cover where it might say this book had been compiled from a series of lectures at this university and that, but there was nothing like that. The man had written a book the way someone would speak, down to the changing the subject in the middle of a sentence.

I kept reading.

>”The whole world out there, of math, of science, of all the natural things that happen that are so interesting. Geology, how could I leave them out?  We look at the natural world and discover these things, then we're free to use what we've learned to further enrich our teachers, students, and general public. This sort of pursuit also helps our scientists do experiments with higher rates of reproducibility. Color distracts us from these goals. We can't let the most important pursuit become chasing Color."

I thought back to when Tommy first started expressing interest in Green, and when he'd first demanded to see something Green. Once a heck of a companion during my quizzes and dress up days, now he only ever wanted to see more of it. Green. I'd started altering my own routines he needed it so bad. It changed him. He wasn't annoying, he didn't say stupid things, he was...he was more of an adult.

I thought about my own relationship with Green. It wasn’t like Tommy’s, but it was there. I wanted to give Green the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t want to automatically reject it because I was uncomfortable or because of a book.

I read more.

>In the coming years, public opinion will shift in favor of the newly reported Colors. Therefore it's important to keep the stuff out of childrens' hands and heads. Take them to a hospital on a visit. Show them people who've lost everything because of Colors. Instill in them some context of fear, some sense of the balance they'll need to keep in order to remain members of society."

I had to read that paragraph again to understand it. Colors had ruined lives? I hadn't known that. I hadn't seen that.

>Once it's taken hold, it may be too late to preserve our way of life. Especially if Colors are available to all in the light of day, and not in the privacy of homes at night. The eventuality that follows the wide adoption of colors goes beyond what we have ever considered, and will enable more to positions and powers, having corrosive effects in the long run.

I wrinkled my face and didn't read any more. The book was a fear book, a worry thesis concerned about the potential _good_ Colors could bring. Not that they were bad, but that they could be influential beyond our wildest dreams, and that was a problem.

I felt I'd been offered the secret to everything -- if it could change so much, it was clear I had to ensure Colors could be seen everywhere, by everyone. I had to put aside my concerns about Tommy.

I put Dad's book back and crept to my room, closed the door and stuffed a shirt into the crack beneath. Now I could have the light on but he wouldn't see I was awake.

I got out a notebook and flipped past my world history notes. When I got to the first blank page, I wrote "First Coloring" at the top.

My thought was to try to spread awareness, get everyone a taste of their first color. Whether it gave them headaches or calmed them, they could make an informed decision about its existence. Make their own decision, instead of my dad and writers of books deciding it for everyone.

Adults don't like change, but children? Children see how much change could fix. How much the effects could ripple. Maybe we can't see all the effects. That's what makes us useful to pull the curtain back.



Adam Holwerda, Story Peddler

Adam Holwerda,
Story Peddler