Monochrome

Spaghetti Boy

The girls' dormitory was in a three-story brick building that could have been two thousand years old. The windowpanes were thick and wavery from centuries of gravity pulling down on the glass.

But the paint job, if you could call it that, was modern. Every square inch of the outer walls had been so covered with murals or graffiti that you could no longer see the original color of the brick. As Ingrid carried her luggage up the steps and through the main door, she saw that the graffiti continued onto the walls inside. Bright, clashing colors covered the walls, ceiling, and floors, and the moment she stepped into the building she was hit with sensory overload.

As it turned out, the aesthetic of the dormitory matched the aesthetic of the entire campus: ancient structures marred by the free, overenthusiastic use of art supplies. The trees behind the dormitory were almost as tall as the building itself, and so far Ingrid hadn't seen one that hadn't been tagged or decorated or just artified in general.

She was curious about the history of these buildings, but she wasn't curious enough to ask anyone. So she filed it away in her mind under Never-To-Be-Solved New School Mysteries. She'd been transferred too many times in her life to bother learning too much about each new place, so she reserved her investigations for problems that might actually affect her life at some point in the future and let the rest of it go.

With one hand she pulled her beat-up old rolling suitcase and with the other, she held her map, her new-student info packet, and a slip of paper with her room assignment. Under her left arm was tucked her official school "uniform," which was just a pair of matching T-shirts that bore the A-Four logo. Every kid she'd seen so far was wearing some version of this shirt, although few of the shirts still resembled the basic cotton tee from which they'd been crafted. They'd all been layered or marked on or bleached, torn apart and stitched back together, or converted into some other article of clothing entirely. As far as Ingrid could tell, no one cared how you wore the shirt as long as you wore it.

She had been assigned to room 335. She carried her luggage up the two flights of stairs and walked down a narrow hallway on the third floor, looking for her room. The doors had all been personalized, with the room numbers and the names of the girls who lived inside painted on them. The names came in pairs, which meant she was going to have a roommate. Swell.

She went all the way to the end of the hall and stood between room 333, on her left, and 334 on her right. The door to 333 was black, and a poem had been painted onto it in neon blue. It said:

Enter in threes if you dare,

Digi-Kam's digital lair.

Across the hall, room 334 boasted "Tatiana and Chloe's Room!" on a door that was white on the left side and green on the right. Then, at the very end of the hallway, there was one final door. It stood out specifically because it was the only thing in the building that hadn't been tagged or painted. Actually, nothing was on it, not even a number. But this was the only room that could possibly be 335, so, with no other options, Ingrid knocked on the bare door and waited.

The door did not open. She pressed her ear against the door but didn't hear anything inside. So she tried the knob, but the knob wouldn't turn. Locked.

She hadn't been given a key. She stood back and contemplated the door. Then she checked her assignment again to be sure that she hadn't made a mistake. Nope, it definitely said 335, and here she stood between 333, 334, and a locked, unnumbered door. Someone had made a mistake, but she didn't think it was her.

She tried the handle again, just to be sure. Then she got on her knees and peeked underneath. Too dark to see anything. So she sighed, took the handle of her luggage, and headed back in the direction from which she had come.