Chapter Text
Orange's enrollment into Sticksville High is her first experience with public education—cramped, cold classrooms, rows of rusting lockers, teachers' noses turning up at the pale patches of vitiligo mottling her face. She would've failed the first pop quiz slapped on her desk if not for Yellow silently replacing the paper with her own completed copy, already labelled Orange Becker.
"Standardized testing is the failure of the system," Yellow tells her later. Light glints off her glasses just-so, like a sliver of smiling teeth. Orange chokes on stories of annotated picture books and handmade multiplication tables; smiles back, still trembling.