“Colour In Lines”

Regina wanted to get into the gallery show, but she didn’t think her charcoal sketch should be in the gallery show. Had she become the best artistic version of herself, already? Had she peaked in eighth grade?

No one she had met was better than her with charcoal. She had the mind of a fourteen year old with a decade of experience, as she figured. Sure, everyone starts drawing at a young age, when you think about it. We all start colouring very young. But, while other kids got bored of crayons and passed over the dull-looking coloured pencils for the vibrant, soaking rainbow colours of markers that stained their bodies and clothes like they’d been painting, Regina specialized in charcoal. Not right away. First, she started in black pencil. But, as she drew and doodled and sketched and experimented with her black pencils, her young hunger for novelty turned her into a niche expert on black. Graphite from soft to hard, pastels in soft, hard, and oil, she experimented with and collected all of them over the years in cases, jars, boxes, and drawers. She used them each for their individual novelties. But, her passion went into her collection of charcoal. 

Whatever you can imagine artistic pieces of charcoal can look like will never be more than a portion of what was a vastly colourful spectrum of black charcoal. She had pencils in every brand. Black-dusty stubby smooth dowel bits of charcoal in thick pieces, skinny pieces, and pieces that looked like rocks, but in her hand felt like they lacked density. She had tackle boxes filled with stubs and dowels and rounds and pyramids and all other types of shapes you can imagine a piece of black charcoal might be cut, broken, sanded, and rubbed into. Truly an artist, she collected and modified the tools of her craft to create in the ways she wanted to, even if she didn’t think about what she was doing in such specific terms.

For her art-gallery piece, she unearthed a plastic egg carton from the bottom of her bottom desk drawer filled with arrowhead-like chips of charcoal suited to fit the spears of squirrels, voles, and grasshoppers. Each cup in the carton held a pile of like-sized chips. For her art-gallery piece, she decided to fill four hundred thirty-two square inches of grained paper with spiraling fractal patterns with a detail of geometry requiring charcoal arrowheads from the spears of hunting grasshoppers. She did the whole thing by hand, and she had fifty hours into it, with maybe another four to go, and she felt no joy in what she produced. Regina saw all the layered thickness and contours of charcoal repeating in mirrored geometric shape patterns like half a dozen molecular rabbit holes swirling down the drain as dull and formulaic. Viewed at the right distance on the wall her piece might topple an unhinged person by vertigo. But it didn’t move Regina at all.

Her art-class table partner Ankit pulled her out of her thoughts by asking, “Can I the blu?”

She got annoyed, but he wasn’t that bad, and It could be worse, she thought when she saw the table over Ankit’s shoulder cackling and clowning and two out of four of them had nothing but smudges on their papers. She pulled a marker out of the tin cup and passed it across the resin-topped science table repurposed in the art room.

“No. Bl-u,” Ankit said with deliberate pronunciation.

He moved there from Gujarat only eight days before school started. No one knew what to expect. The school had special teachers for English language learners, but none of them spoke Gujarati. Good thing Ankit understood a lot of English. Maybe all of it. He didn’t talk much at all. Like, ever. He nodded his head a lot. He mostly communicated in gestures and one- or two-word messages. 

“Bl-u,” he said, again, and pointed at a stripe in his shirt.

But, he wrote better than at least half the kids in Regian’s class. She got paired with him in Language Arts to peer review the first five-paragraph essay of the year. If it wasn’t handwritten, Regina would’ve thought he used AI. She kind of suspected he used AI and copied it onto the paper. Mrs. Lundgren didn’t accuse him of doing it, but the way she asked him twice if he’d written it (he added a rare “Yes” to his head nod for emphasis) made Regina think she suspected it, too. Come to find out, Ankit had learned how to write that well in English at his school in India. Better than half the kids in her native English-speaking class.

“Here,” Regina said and pushed the entire tin cup of markers over to him.

“Wow,” he said, and nodded his head at her paper.

Regina shrugged. She didn’t feel “Wow,” but then she did feel icky for shrugging off his nice compliment. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

“Will you colour?” Ankit asked.

“No,” Regina said as a reflex.

“No?”

“It doesn’t need colour,” Regina said. “Is that a fish?”

“Football player,” Ankit said and laughed as quietly as he talked.

Regina laughed with him.

Her friend Kasey said she thought Ankit liked Regina and soon they'd be going out. Regina loudly rolled her eyes at Kasey. “Gross,” which was Regina’s answer to every question about boys in her class. However, Regina and Ankit were still peer-review partners in Language Arts. So, Regina didn’t act like he was “gross” when they were in Language Arts because he was a better writer than half her class—and just as good a writer as her.

His essay was so good. His handwriting was so neat, too. All the letters were uniform and evenly spaced from each other. Every word appeared clearly in its own space, capitalized if appropriate. The logic of his essay remained clear, paragraph by paragraph. Every now and again, though, he phrased a sentence oddly. She couldn’t say exactly what was wrong with the sentence, grammatically, but it didn’t sound right to her ear. She tried to rewrite what she could to make it sound right. But, she didn’t have to do much. Just a touch-up here and there. The assignment was “a personal essay detailing three things your classmates may not know about you.” Ugh, Regina had said aloud when she read the prompt.

“We’re supposed to write about three things our classmates may NOT know about us,” she whispered to Ankir.

“Yes,” he said and nodded.

Two of his unknown characteristics were that he liked football—No kidding, Regina thought, he wears a football jersey every other day—and he worked at his family’s gas station, which everyone has seen him at. The third detail of his essay took her by surprise. He moved here to have a better chance of getting a higher education.

She didn’t understand it right away, even though he had written it clearly in his essay. Apparently, if you have a popular last name in India, it diminishes your chances of getting into a university. His surname was “Patel,” which is very popular. He said he’d have little chance, and his parents wanted him to go to university. The admission system here accepts students based on different criteria.

Regina wrote about not being happy with her art-gallery piece and finding a chunk of kneadable eraser in her bottom drawer (she hadn’t told any of her classmates about it), and the third characteristic everyone knew but probably didn’t think about anymore, like when an everyday oddity fades into the background of your attention, was technically appropriate because Ankit didn’t know, and he was her peer-review partner.

Ankit pushed her paper at her while pointing at a word: “Tritanopia.”

“It’s a rare colour blindness,” she whispered to him. “You know what that is? It doesn’t mean I see in black and white.” Regina paused to remember it all and try to summarize it all, all of it, into a simple statement Ankir would understand. “In preschool, I coloured the sky green. I coloured everything red and pink.”

“So?” Ankir asked with shrugged shoulders.

“I didn’t know my colours. I don’t,” Regina said.

“You see colour,” he said, affirming what he’d heard Regina say.

“Not the ones you do,” Regina mumbled.

“Good.”

“Good?”

“There are many words for one thing,” Ankir said, and it was the most Regina had ever heard him say. “Show the thing you see.”

“Yeah, but, you’re gonna see something different,” Regina corrected him.

“So?” Ankir said, with a shrug and his smile.

Regina wanted to get into the gallery show, and she knew her charcoal sketch should be in the gallery show—if it had colour. She was becoming the best artistic version of herself. To do that, she couldn’t peak in eighth grade. She had to let go of what she couldn’t control and create art with her own eyes.