The Strawberry Earrings

When Marie was born, she had caramel-colored skin. She was sure of it, even stared at the glaring difference in her baby picture. It was her, a brown-skinned bundle of newness wrapped in a gray blankie with her two gray parents, smiling with their gray teeth and twinkling gray eyes. Within the first year of her life, she lost that brownish hue of her skin and became gray as well, just like everyone else that lived in Graytown.

Growing up, everything was gray. Children learned the alphabet, but prioritized the letters G, R, A, and Y above all. After these four, it continued the way non-monochromatic students learned, but with these four letters always at the forefront. As a warmup to their reading and writing exercises, they sang in unison, “G, R, A, Y, B, C, D” and so on.

Street signs and advertisements had words and designs in all shades of gray, from a light, pearly hue to a dark, shadowy tinted one. Concrete was their single most valuable building material. All shows and movies had not experienced the mind-blowing shock and delight of watching their characters transform into technicolor.

Graytown was nothing but gray and no one questioned it.

That is, until Marie had to go to the grocery store on her way home from school to pick up a forgotten ingredient for her mother’s dinner recipe that evening.

Standing outside of G-Foods, she glanced at her stone-colored sticky note with “potatoes” written in charcoal. Her mother’s handwriting was always beautiful, loopy and large, and Marie wondered how much it would pop if it were in a different ink, instead of the same drab one that everyone was expected to use.

Knowing this would never happen, she pushed this thought to the far-off crevices of her mind and entered the store. She passed the oysters and saltwater fish, the gray owl cheese and sesame ice cream, and finally saw a line of truffles and mushrooms that led to the rest of the produce.

“Gray potatoes! Just barely rotting!” read above four large barrels of spuds that were a few hours away from being thrown out.

Marie grabbed her sack and placed the four most salvageable ones inside, squishy but not to the point of being mush; they would have to do.

Once leaving the store, her normal route home had been interrupted, cut off by construction equipment and multiple adults in hardhats.

“Graytonians, we apologize for the inconvenience! Please take Rhino Road as an alternate route! We should have Elephant Lane back open by dusk this evening!” one of the hard-hatted folks yelled on a megaphone.

Dusk was not far off and this new addition shaking up what should have been a normal day was an inconvenience. Marie needed to get home, needed to deliver her mother’s potatoes. Rhino Road added twenty minutes onto a commute that normally took ten. Without much of a choice, she and several others began their trek on the road less chosen.

Rhino Road was rarely used by locals. It was the edge of town, known for its nefarious activity with the youths and other groups, but daylight offered a temporary blanket of security.

Halfway down Rhino Road, past some abandoned houses and vacant fields was a sign that Marie had never seen before in a color that she had never glimpsed before. It was so vibrant, so different than the normal gray of her world, that her eyes watered while looking at it. Instincts begged her to turn her gaze away, to save the pain and discomfort her peepers were experiencing, but she could not. Instead, it was like her feet were drawn to the sign, not only walking directly up to it, but quickening her pace as well.

The sign was surrounded by broken glass and trash that Marie had to tiptoe around, like avoiding landmines in a field. With each step, letters became visible on not just the one sign like she previously thought, but two.

On a wobbly-looking piece of lumber were two signs no bigger than Marie’s forearm. One pointed to the left, toward Graytown, and the other pointed right, toward a blank, bland ash-colored wall. The left sign read “GRAY” and the right, which was the bright one, still hurting Marie’s eyes, read “MAGENTA.”

“Magenta?” she asked herself, whispering aloud.

For years, she wished for something other than gray, but had never known what that was. It was like asking someone that never left the mountains to imagine the sea, impossible to the point of not knowing it was even a possibility. This color would have been unfathomable if she were not standing right in front of it. Marie looked around her. Surely, she was not the only one on Rhino Road with burning eyes from the sign that stopped to take a closer look. No one was there though. Everyone continued walking on their normal paths to home, work, or wherever they were going.

Scratching her chin, she turned back to the magenta sign. The wall it was pointing at appeared to be nothing more than just that, a plain old wall. Like trying to decipher a code, she glared at it. Then, the tiniest bit of motion appeared in front of her. It was like the wall was moving, almost breathing in gray and something else. It was a color like that of the sign, piercing her eyes, but also poking her interest. Deciding that she wanted to poke back, Marie pushed her index finger towards the wall. Unlike any wall that Marie had touched prior, this one gave. Her finger slipped through like it entered a room covered by a silky curtain. Whatever was on the other side of the wall was hot to the touch, warmer than the side she was on. She looked at her sack of potatoes, placed it in front of the sign on a clear patch of ground, and walked through the curtain-like wall.

The world of Magenta surrounded her. It was painful, beautiful, and mesmerizing. She spun around to look at the wall she had just entered from. It was no longer bland, but an electrified lavender with “GRAY” written in the same ash tone that it had been on her original side. Even though it remained difficult to look at, the difference pleased her. She imagined her mother’s handwriting in this color and how it would stand out like no other, exactly as she always wished.

Several honks sounded from behind her, making her swiftly spin to face this fresh territory. Fuchsia colored cars zoomed around a busy intersection with people, like her familiars at home, all in differing shades of electric pink and purples waving and smiling at one another. Marie had walked right into the outskirts of a remarkably busy intersection. Above a fountain with amaranth shimmering water spouted out of it was a sign that read “Welcome to Magentaland!”

Part of her was aware that she could turn around and act like none of this had happened, returning to the life of gray that she was accustomed to.

“I can’t just stop now…”

Another whisper to no one except herself.

Seeing more was a must. Tentative steps led Marie to the middle of the square. The cobblestone below her was hot pink and seemed to glow a bit with every step that she took. A sweet fruitiness had engulfed the air and filled her nostrils, making her stomach growl with desire. Just as she had stopped to try and take everything in, a gaggle of children leaped out of a store with hot pink gushing from their smiling mouths, immediately stealing all her attention. Whatever they had just stopped gorging on was from a place called “M-Stop.” The sweet scent intensified as they passed Marie. Their lingering eyes zeroed in on her differing hues of gray before simply nodding and continuing along. She followed whatever the sweetness in the air through the store’s front door.

A bell dinged as she entered, pingy and friendly, and made Marie jump. A pile of cerise tulips was knocked over in the aftermath.

“Oh dear, are you alright?” a woman who was wrapped in a large glittery apron asked.

Marie’s hand, which had been scurrying to pick up the flowers, hovered over the one she was reaching for. Clumsiness was not a great start to this adventure. Instead of words, she just nodded.

“You’re from Graytown, I see.”

Satisfaction was in the woman’s eyes while Marie just stared, bug eyed and still speechless. Talking to herself always was easier than talking to others.

The apron woman laughed.

“Well, you came to the right place. We have sweets, treats, and some things offbeat. It can be your one stop shop here before you go home. Unless… you plan to stay?”

“No! I’m going back home!”

Marie did not mean to yell this.

“Well, stay as long or as little as you like! I’ll pick these up. You go explore!”

It was not that folks in Graytown were rude, but they were never warm. One of the earliest lessons learned in Graytown public education was that “warmth is limited in hues of gray and shade.” This strange woman’s kindness made Marie’s body’s core temperature rise, like she was suddenly wrapped very tightly in a cozy handmade blanket with a nasty fever.

“Thank you.”

The woman nodded in response and Marie began perusing.

There was so much that she had never seen before— odd stone looking things named beets, contraptions called salt lamps, grapes, and pens with poofs at the end of them instead of the normal charcoal that she was accustomed to writing with. M-Stop was an amusement park.

In the very center of the store was a display with the words “FREE TO EAT” written on it. Containers were filled with small, plump things labeled “berries.” There were all sorts of these berries; strawberries that resembled little hats, raspberries like even tinier hats, and pinballs called cranberries, redcurrant, and lingonberry. Having never tried any of these, the hairs on Marie’s neck stood up. She feared how her body would handle food from Magentaland. The children that she met before came to mind, their smiles and glee, knowing that this was what they had feasted on. She wanted to feel what they felt, wanted to taste what they had savored. She placed her index finger upon the strawberries first, rubbing the tiny divots and fibers of its body and popped it in her mouth. Syrupy satisfaction erupted on her tongue. This one berry opened a void and like the group of children before her, she nibbled on all that the containers had to offer. Some were saccharine, others offered a good balance of sweet and tart, and then the cranberries were just downright sour. With a belly full of berries, she knew these flavors were something she would crave for the rest of her life. Wanting something that she was not sure she could have was a terrifying thought. It suddenly felt like the gateway back was pulsating and beckoning her. She needed to return to Graytown.

Just as she was about to ring the bell to leave, trying to move faster than her legs would allow, the apron woman called after her.

“Hey, gray girl!”

When Marie turned to face the woman, she placed something small and hard in her hand.

“Just a little something to remember your time here.”

She opened her hand and found dangly earrings with strawberries hanging at the bottom of them. They were rose gold and reddish pink, like nothing she had ever worn before.

“They’ll add a pop to your clothes.”

The woman pulled back her light pink apron and showed a small gray pin of a cat.

Unable to adequately thank the woman for what she had just experienced, Marie once again resorted to a nod and left, holding her new earrings into a tight fist.

When she went back through the wall, the gray was now just as painful to look at as the magenta had been. Nothing was quite right, but then again, she was not sure that “right” was how she would have labeled Graytown to begin with.

Her potatoes remained, waiting for her, and smelling even more rotten than before, but she continued home and did not mention any of this to her mother.

 

While getting ready for school the next day, she looked at herself in the mirror wearing her normal attire. A chunky gray sweater hung over her shoulders over a striped skirt with dark and light gray lines, pebble-colored pantyhose, and gray sneakers. Her normal silver hoops laid on her dressing, waiting to be the final touch of this outfit. The strawberries that she had been gifted were directly to the left of the hoops, equally waiting to be picked up. Instead of making a choice, she placed one of each in her ears; the hoop in the left lobe and the strawberry in the right. The result was not the kind of compromise she hoped for. It was more like dipping a toe in a river that you wanted to fully submerge yourself in. So, she returned the hoop to the dresser and placed the other strawberry in her ear.

With a smirk on her lips and her stomach doing somersaults, she walked downstairs to greet her mother. Instead of her mother’s face, she was greeted with her behind as she bent over and dug around in a cupboard.

“Hi, mom!”

“Hi, honey. Are you off to school?” she asked, still facing the cupboard.

“I am!”

“Have a wonderful day!”

Her mother was still rummaging around, refusing to look Marie in the face, refusing to bear witness to her newly prized possession.

The gymnasts in her stomach seemed to trip and tumble, leaving an uncomfortable bubbling instead.

Reminding herself that she would have a chance to show off her earrings over dinner, she left for school.

The first person to greet her there was Ms. Dove, the guidance counselor. Other students received half-hearted good mornings and welcomes, but Marie’s was different, vastly different.

Ms. Dove dropped her clipboard, clutched her hand on her chest and gasped.

“Marie, your earrings!”

“Yes?” she asked, choosing to ignore the fallen clipboard between them.

“They’re really something.”

No one else spoke to Marie on that first day of her wearing her strawberry earrings. Even her closest friend, Sam, who had talked about wanting to experience the world and get out of Graytown, kept his distance like Marie was a walking pathogen.

Her lobes were naked during dinner that evening as she held the strawberries close to her in her lap and checked on them every few minutes to make sure that they, too, had not abandoned her.

The next day at school was more or less the same. Folks still ignored her, but others shamelessly gawked.

Sam spoke on the fourth day and simply pointed out the obvious by saying, “New earrings?”

It was not until after the first full week of wearing them that things took a turn for the worse.

With her head held a bit higher than it had been the week before, Marie walked to her locker to do her normal morning routine. Unlike other mornings, there was a crowd around her locker with fellow classmates speaking in hushed voices or holding their hands over their mouths. One student saw her approaching and yelled, “She’s here!” The crowd separated into two rows, creating a sort of path for Marie to her locker. What was causing the commotion revealed itself. In big, bold letters read several words.

“FREAK!”

“WE HATE YOUR EARRINGS!”

“YOU HURT OUR EYES!”

Below them was a crude, elementary looking drawing of a strawberry.

Her nose prickled and tickled, threatening to turn on a sprinkler system behind her eyes. Craning her neck and trying to maintain its height, she walked through the crowd and continued. It was not until that evening, while she was alone in bed, that a tear fell down her cheek and soaked into her pillow.

The following weeks got worse and worse. Every time a janitor would clean off the paint from her locker, new graffiti would make its way back by the next day. Students that she had never talked to, people that she did not think even knew she existed, were slamming her books out of her hand as she passed them in the hallways. Teachers refused to call on her when her head raised in the air to answer questions or request to use the restroom.

Marie was being othered and still, she wore her strawberries. When something happened or someone sneered at her, she made sure to gently rub her finger along the back of one of her earrings.

Even her mother handled her new jewelry with contempt.

“Must you wear those things every day?” she asked.

Still, Marie caressed them.

After three long months, something unimaginable occurred. While walking to class, she saw something daring out of the corner of her vision, something she had never seen before. The same painful and wonderful sensations of Magentaland came over her. Her books dropped to the ground, but not from being slammed away. She had lost her grip at some point while looking down the perpendicular hallway.

Approaching her was Maxwell, a boy that she had never talked to, only seen around town and in the hallways from time to time. He wore charcoal slacks, a cloud-colored t-shirt, and something else, something new. It was his shoes, but not just any shoes. They were not acquired in Graytown. These shoes gleamed and glistened in emerald, green.

Marie’s jaw was slack and dropped as low as the books at her feet.

When he finally approached her, he reached up to her earrings and said, “I went to Greencity because of you. Thank you.”

Her spine straightened, both shoulders yanked back, and her cheeks pulled into something that was recently unfamiliar to her. It was a smile. Then, Maxwell and Marie walked together, side by side down the hall, one in magenta and the other in green in a world full of gray.