Vanilla

Prologue

"Is that why you're wearing glasses at such a young age, Vanilla?" She laughed. "A child should enjoy playing as much as they can before they grow up you know.

"You won't get to play as much when you're older. Why don't you go out and play with the others?"

It was something he'd never had the courage to do. Going out to play felt, to the boy, something exclusively reserved for a select few who'd passed some sort of unseen test and gained themselves an invitation to enter the realm of childhood. Yet, it seemed to him that everyone else deemed age as the sole invitation or ticket to being a child and that at some point, they no longer were and anything before that, they would have that title pinned to their breasts without any way of removing it.

"Is there anything you want to play?" His teacher prompted again, crouching to level their eyes and gently pull the book out of his hands. The boy bit his lip, staring at the book.

"Not really. But I also don't have anyone to play with." He thought about the seesaw.

The boy had studied how they'd work; read a book about those teeterboards just to be sure he'd know what to do when there was, should there be, someone who would play with him. They worked on a specific mechanism—a long, narrow board supported by a single pivot point and that was the key to making it work. Not one but at least two were needed for the seesaw to serve its purpose.

It was the hardest to play.

"I'm sure you do, darling. Come on, let's go join the rest of your class," said the teacher as she took him by the arm and pulled him up, leaving 'The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde' on the floor by the window where he could, still, hear the creak of the seesaw.

"But I want to read my book," he'd protested then, only to have muttered the words under his breath and remain unheard.

He was brought out to the open and past the fence into the backyard, where the loud, joyous noises were coming from. It seemed to startle him.

"Miss," he had tugged the edge of his teacher's dress but she'd propelled him towards the playground just in time for her to miss his call for attention.

"Go on! See, they're waving you over," she pointed in the general direction of the swings and the boy had turned to look. He couldn't see anyone waving. "Go and play with them."

Uneasy, he swallowed every streak of doubt and tottered over to the sandbox, where several of his classmates were building a sandcastle. It was unstable and starting to look like the leaning tower of Pisa that he'd read about in a book and he knew just about why. All he had to do now was tell them—so that their precious sandcastle wouldn't crumble and sink into nothing after hours of hard work.

"Do you know that buildings need wide foundations because they exert tremendous pressure on the ground?" The children turned to the speaking boy, blinking with their shovels held mid-air. "To avoid sinking, their foundations are made wide so that pressure on the ground decreases while ensuring that they are easily balanced. It's the simplest form of architecture, which I think maybe your sandcastle is lacking at present."

He smiled upon finishing, fidgeting with his suspenders. One of the girls turned back to their sandcastle and stared. "What's foundation?"

"Oh! That's this part of the—" The boy had stepped forward in eagerness, delighted to answer a question but the moment he did, the leaning tower of Pisa had, so coincidentally, taken its inevitable fall and met its fate.

Another girl had began to cry.

It was despite his failed and terribly mistaken attempt that the boy continued the believe that he could fit in with the rest of his classmates and do exactly what children were meant to do, at least according to the world he lived in. His second attempt was two days later, when he'd re-studied and prepared himself beforehand questions about seesaw mechanics and ran through conversation simulations in his mind for possible cases of things going wrong. There were none.