The Classix

DISCUSSING COLORS WITH FOSTER FARRAND

CLARIFICATION: This is NOT A PART OF THE CLASSIX.

I wrote this background story about Foster for the Wattpad Block Party this past summer, and I thought I'd share it with you right here in case you missed it. With Foster's new confusing reappearance into the story, I thought this would be a good time to post this!

Now, without further ado, ENJOY SOME GOOD, OLD-FASHIONED FOSTER FARRAND:

Before I joined the Famoux, I was colorless person. Scott Fare was a kid who wore strict basics: greys, whites, beiges. Colors are supposed to be expressive, vivid. Poor little Scott didn't see himself as either of those adjectives.

    Or maybe he just didn't want to.

    Let's just say that colors never exactly improved my pre-Famoux life any––not the darks, nor the brights. We give them designations, and I never seemed to mesh well with them. The loud mustard shade my mom picked for the walls in the kitchen were supposed to be happy, but didn't deflect punches any better than the mint ones at the old house. The navy blazer I wore to school was supposed to be intelligent, but it didn't look good with my pit stains on humid days. And the pink balloons . . . oh, the bright magenta balloons tied to every chair at Neena Rae's ninth birthday party were supposed to be cute and girly. They bothered me to no end, absolutely no end, perhaps because I wanted some for my party. I liked them. And when I told my at-the-time best friend Carter that, he quickly became my that-time-has-passed best friend, and we never spoke again.

    "You like pink?" he'd asked. "That's a girl color."

    I tugged at the edge of my t-shirt, feeling frustrated. "But I don't like blue as much. Why do only girls get to like a certain color?"

    "Because it's girly."

    "Then I'm girly," I told him. And as I said that, I distinctly recall wondering to myself if there was some sort of alternate word to describe it––a word that didn't exclude boys from it so much. We'd been learning in school about freedom, and how Eldae is the only country in Delicatum where everything––everything––is legal. Why wasn't I free to like the color pink without having to be a girl?

    But as it turned out, I needed not wonder about the word any longer. Carter gave me his best (and not to mention the fucking worst) alternative for girly:

    "Then you're gay."

    He said this with such horror, as if instead of telling him I liked the color pink I'd told him I liked feeding dogs peanut butter treats mixed with rat poison. Looking at it now, maybe he was the dog, and this knowledge about the pink and me was his lethal treat.

    Either way, he was dead to me afterward.

    After that I became colorless. If it's possible to end friendships over them, or designate them to specific genders so passionately and firmly, I didn't want to pick a favorite. That's bullshit. So I wore my beige pants, shut up around all of Carter's Eldae-style carbon copies at school, did nothing to provoke them when they passed me their pink slips defaced with drawings of explicit boy parts, and made it through the day with flying colorless colors.

    Carter and I were at odds for the rest of time. We were different on all fronts he cared about: We looked different. We loved different. He ended up ditching me for the kid with rich parents and a big house named Lee Finnegan.

    Lee Finnegan's favorite color was yellow. Carter liked yellow––yellow was okay for a boy to like. And in Carter's eyes, he and Lee Finnegan were similar on all fronts. After all, they looked the same.