CLARIFICATION: This is NOT A PART OF THE CLASSIX.
I wrote this background story about Foster for the Wattpad Block Party this past summer, and I thought I'd share it with you right here in case you missed it. With Foster's new confusing reappearance into the story, I thought this would be a good time to post this!
Now, without further ado, ENJOY SOME GOOD, OLD-FASHIONED FOSTER FARRAND:
Before I joined the Famoux, I was colorless person. Scott Fare was a kid who wore strict basics: greys, whites, beiges. Colors are supposed to be expressive, vivid. Poor little Scott didn't see himself as either of those adjectives.
Or maybe he just didn't want to.
Let's just say that colors never exactly improved my pre-Famoux life any––not the darks, nor the brights. We give them designations, and I never seemed to mesh well with them. The loud mustard shade my mom picked for the walls in the kitchen were supposed to be happy, but didn't deflect punches any better than the mint ones at the old house. The navy blazer I wore to school was supposed to be intelligent, but it didn't look good with my pit stains on humid days. And the pink balloons . . . oh, the bright magenta balloons tied to every chair at Neena Rae's ninth birthday party were supposed to be cute and girly. They bothered me to no end, absolutely no end, perhaps because I wanted some for my party. I liked them. And when I told my at-the-time best friend Carter that, he quickly became my that-time-has-passed best friend, and we never spoke again.
"You like pink?" he'd asked. "That's a girl color."
I tugged at the edge of my t-shirt, feeling frustrated. "But I don't like blue as much. Why do only girls get to like a certain color?"
"Because it's girly."
"Then I'm girly," I told him. And as I said that, I distinctly recall wondering to myself if there was some sort of alternate word to describe it––a word that didn't exclude boys from it so much. We'd been learning in school about freedom, and how Eldae is the only country in Delicatum where everything––everything––is legal. Why wasn't I free to like the color pink without having to be a girl?
But as it turned out, I needed not wonder about the word any longer. Carter gave me his best (and not to mention the fucking worst) alternative for girly:
"Then you're gay."
He said this with such horror, as if instead of telling him I liked the color pink I'd told him I liked feeding dogs peanut butter treats mixed with rat poison. Looking at it now, maybe he was the dog, and this knowledge about the pink and me was his lethal treat.
Either way, he was dead to me afterward.
After that I became colorless. If it's possible to end friendships over them, or designate them to specific genders so passionately and firmly, I didn't want to pick a favorite. That's bullshit. So I wore my beige pants, shut up around all of Carter's Eldae-style carbon copies at school, did nothing to provoke them when they passed me their pink slips defaced with drawings of explicit boy parts, and made it through the day with flying colorless colors.
Carter and I were at odds for the rest of time. We were different on all fronts he cared about: We looked different. We loved different. He ended up ditching me for the kid with rich parents and a big house named Lee Finnegan.
Lee Finnegan's favorite color was yellow. Carter liked yellow––yellow was okay for a boy to like. And in Carter's eyes, he and Lee Finnegan were similar on all fronts. After all, they looked the same.
But they sure as hell didn't love the same.
xxx
He told me to call him Finley in our letters. Lee Finnegan always liked coming up with variations of his name like that––one time he asked the whole school to only refer to him as Finn, and a other time wrote Leonardo on all his papers for an entire semester. When choosing an alias for our circumstance, he'd decided Finley was a substantial enough variation that if anybody happened upon one of our letters by chance, they'd never even guess that it was him––that yellow Lee Finnegan was writing love letters to the weird boy who didn't look like everybody else.
"But everything's legal in Eldae," I'd tell him.
"That doesn't mean it's accepted."
Lee Finnegan was cynical like that.
But Finley . . .
Finley was idealistic. Finley was optimistic about the things our peers liked to cover with rainclouds. We sent a string of letters over the years through a book. One day I'd pick it up from the library and find a letter from him inside. The next day he'd pick it up and find one from me. We checked out A Separate Peace hundreds of times, and in between the lines of dialogue I got to know Finley's mind; the mind he never dared show Carter and their massive group of indistinguishable friends. It was a mind that considered things. A mind that thought past the hair on his head.
I noticed how Lee Finnegan never added to the conversation when they went off in study hall about how the world ought to be one thing––uniform, fixed, consistent. Lee Finnegan was instead being Finley, and reading my letters to him in our book as his friends extensively planned the way they'd change Delicatum for the better. Look a certain way, love a certain way, and so on in such a disgusting fashion. Uniform, fixed, consistent.
But Finley loved me, Eldae's own paragon of inconsistency.
He told me over and over again how much their ideas revolted him: Please don't listen to them in class, Scott. They don't understand you. They don't understand anything that's not exactly like them.
So why not make them understand? I wrote him once.
I waited in study hall for him to read that––to look up at me from across the room and acknowledge it. When he did, he shook his head softly.
The next day's letter told me the thoughts in his head: They'd sooner kill you than understand you.
xxx
Looking back on it, I'm not sure who had it worse: Finley or me. For being the same in opinions, in structure, in internal disposition, we really couldn't have been more different in the lives we led.
Whether I liked it or not, I wore my polarities on my sleeve. I wanted so badly to live a colorless life, but my hair was a shade of bright red that absolutely no one had been born with in the last five years. While Carter and Co. had silky smooth skin, like milk, mine was coated in crumbs; a thousand brown freckles covered me from head to toe.
With the help of a little word of mouth and mob-mentality, it was pretty easy for everyone to quickly identify that the only guy we know with red hair and freckles also happens to likes boys, and we should all ostracize him.
It took nothing for me to be hated.
All I had to do was exist.
But Lee Finnegan––nobody hated him. Absolutely no one. He caught up with his large group of friends every morning, flirted with plenty girls before the bell rang, and always had something to do on the weekends. But in study hall he could do nothing but nod aimlessly through Carter's manic power talks.
"We need to really attack this epidemic at its center," Carter would say. "Nothing's ever going to be consistent if we have anomalies."
Lee Finnegan nodded aimlessly, scribbling something to me in A Separate Peace, something like, I'm so sorry he says these things.
"Things need to be one way. There's only one way."
If I'm correct in my memory, Lee Finnegan winced. Then he nodded aimlessly, scribbling even harder.
So the grass wasn't green on either sides. The green died out into brown, the same brown as the clothes I wore everyday.
Colorless.
xxx
It didn't take joining the Famoux and meeting the other members for me to learn that that I wasn't the only one in Eldae who looked different than how they were supposed to. I'd been hearing for years about another one––the girl who lived in the little town next to mine. The girl with black hair and bright blue eyes.
You'd think anomalies would probably attract each other like magnets in such a bitter world of similars, but I never crossed paths with her once. She was three years below me in school.
I hear the worst things about what people do to her, Finley would write me. Cruel things. You're lucky nobody does this kind of shit to you.
When I'd request that he elaborate, I'd instantly wish I never asked.
Sometimes we bring bad things upon ourselves, and we've no one to blame. You say something out of term, and you get slapped in the face. It's your fault––you're accountable for the things you say. But this girl . . . the hurt she endured was not on purpose. She did not ask to come into this world with that black hair, those blue eyes. And yet the people treated her like her existence was something she designed all by herself, like if they struck hard enough she'd finally be normal.
There's a cruelty in this world that I'll never be able to comprehend.
xxx
As Scott Fare, I never saw the girl's eyes in person. Finley was the one who had seen her, the one who told me all about them. People had very specific reactions when they made eye contact with this girl. Some screamed. Some thought her to be possessed. Some looked away in fear of losing their vision.
Her eyes were eclipses. I didn't have to see them myself to recognize them when they walked into a room.
When Bree died, Norax brought in a new Famoux member in a matter of days. Her name was Emeray Essence, and the only part of her old self that the Fissarex didn't change were her eyes.
Her bright, bright blue eyes.
"She came from Eldae," Norax told us, a motherly hand on the girl's shoulder. "I hope all of you realize that she was in a very similar position as you were before you joined us in the Famoux."
Very similar. I wanted to shake my head. Very worse.
Upon meeting Emeray Essence, I got carried away. Here was the girl in the town beside mine Finley had told me all about. The girl whose peers pushed her around like a doll. The girl three years below me in school who had nobody to protect her. Here she was, standing right in front of me, asking for me to accept her.
Looking into her eyes made me want to scream. There were so many things I wanted, and yet nothing I could say. I wanted to tell her I knew her, and that I was so sorry for all the cruelty she'd felt in this goddamn world. I wanted her to know how I'd been thinking of her for years, how I would've protected her every second of her life if could've––if I ever had the chance to.
But we go to the Famoux not to run into people who know of our past lives. We go to the Famoux to become somebody new––somebody with no preconceptions. I couldn't let myself say the things I wanted to say. It wouldn't be fair to her new chance at living a better life.
So I kissed her instead. To this day I'm not sure why. I guess I just wanted her to know that she was capable of being loved.
xxx
My life as Scott Fare was never more colorful than it was when the world was pitch black. It was during a Darkening sometime the year before Norax found me and I became Foster Farrand. I was sixteen years old at the time, and at this point Finley and I been corresponding for just over two years.
Two whole years of letters, and yet we'd never really had the chance to truly interact beyond the serendipitous three minutes where nobody was standing in the general vicinity. There was always someone around. There was always someone coming.
But when you don't want to make a scene of your interactions, there's no time like a Darkening. Outside the light of the Famoux on your television, you can't even see your own hand out in front of you.
In short, nobody needs to know where you are.
Nobody needs to know what you're doing.
In the week leading up to this fated Darkening, I decided to take a risk just in bringing it up in one of my letters. I wrote, Darkening in a few days. Do you think you're gonna watch the Famoux?
His reply: My family's been saying that the Famoux has gotten boring. Apparently they're replacing them in a couple months. So what I mean is no, I'm not watching the Famoux.
If Finley and I weren't meeting up during this Darkening, there's no doubt that I would've been watching the Famoux while my mom slept the day away on the couch beside me. But even so, I told him, Yeah, kind of boring, I'm not watching them either.
Most of the letters between Finley and I rounded out to be two or three pages long. They were never dramatic love notes or whatever you might've been expecting; they usually included around a dozen different casual sub-conversations going at any given time. That week we'd been talking about new music, a Delicatum history project, his friend Jeff's romantic troubles, a very specific pair of shoes I no longer remember, and, of course, the upcoming Darkening.
But on the final day of classes before the blackout, Finley dropped every single one of those subjects. I picked up A Separate Peace only to find a small strip of paper.
You walk to school everyday. Please tell me you could do it with your eyes closed.
Find the front steps tomorrow morning.
xxx
The Darkening was to last two days at most. My mother overworks herself to death in the weeks, so a part of me sorta assumed she'd sleep for the majority and wouldn't notice my absence. In hindsight, I wasn't really assuming anything––my brain wasn't working well past the vision of Finley's note burned in my brain.
Find the front steps tomorrow morning.
I saw those words every time I blinked.
My mother wasn't so tired as to sleep for 48 hours straight. I'd never done a reckless thing in my life, so my slipping out the window in the middle of a global blackout was, in her words, THE REASON WHY I'M GOING TO END UP HAVING A HEART ATTACK, SCOTT!!! Of course, I wouldn't find all this out until after I got back, and I'd pay the price in weeks upon weeks of house arrest, re-painting all the walls we had that same mustard color she loved so much.
But the work would be worth it. So, so freaking worth it.
xxx
The darkness that morning was thick with humidity. Traveling through it was like stepping through a dark sea. Despite my blindness, the walk to school was the easiest walk I've ever taken. I could feel the concrete of the sidewalk beneath me, and all its usual turns. I could hear the hum of the Famoux blaring from every house I passed, and it lead me on my way like a siren song. The closer I got, the more light my insides felt. If you weighed me then, I'm almost positive the scale would've picked nothing up.
The first thing I gathered when I reached the steps of the school was that he wasn't Finley. Finley was a code-name in a letter. Finley was a secret entity that I kept hidden in a box full of papers.
But there wasn't a code-name on the steps of school. There wasn't an entity holding a lighter so I could see his face. No, right there in front of me, illuminated by fire, was none other than the true, genuine, yellow Lee Finnegan.
The rich kid with the big house.
Carter's best friend.
The guy who'd been reading the same book, A Separate Peace, in our study hall for the last two years.
Yellow Lee Finnegan.
"Good, you found me," he said, voice like a light. It seemed to come straight from the flame. "My pen pal."
We laughed like it was a joke, but all I was thinking about in that moment was how lucky I was to be something he referred to as his.
Lee Finnegan pointed his lighter to the space on the steps beside him. I followed it like a moth. Our shoulders brushed against one another's as I sat down.
I'm not lying when I say that my life was as colorless as it was contact-less. Nobody in their right mind wanted to bump into me––what if my freckles carried a disease? What if I had a crush on you? People tended to avoid me like the plague.
But on the steps of our school, Lee Finnegan didn't shift away at the contact like anybody else would've. He pressed his whole arm against my arm, his hand searching to grasp mine in the darkness. Our fingers intertwined wordlessly, and every feeling in the world coursed through my veins at once.
To him, I didn't carry any disease he could catch.
I only carried his hand.
"You know, I'm really sorry, Scott," he said suddenly.
"You're what?"
"I'm sorry that it's been this way, that it has to be this way."
It, I marveled. What was an it? He stressed the syllable so strongly––built it big enough that I could pack a duffle bag and live inside of it.
It.
"What way do you mean?" I asked.
"Hidden."
A silence followed, sorta like the silence that always follows us in classrooms and hallways. This is what we were in daylight––this is what it was: Quiet. Hidden.
I wanted nothing more than to agree, to say, Oh, I'm sorry too. Why can't we change that? To hell with Carter's ideas––everything is legal in Eldae. Why does this have to be hidden, Finley? But I couldn't make myself agree. Because in that moment, I didn't.
"You don't have to apologize about that," I said. The words surprised me almost as much as they surprised him. "It . . . it could be better, sure, but it also could be worse. I'm happy for what it is."
"You don't mean that."
"I'm serious, Lee Finnegan. I don't take it personally. It would only be personal if you did something about it––if you ever made it less hidden."
He didn't follow. I didn't follow either. But I kept on, musing with myself and talking to steps below me.
"You've got too much to lose," I told him. "Frankly, I don't want you to lose any of it. I don't want to be the reason why your life takes a catastrophic turn."
Another wave of silence stretched over us like a blanket. I watched with wonder as he fiddled with his lighter, the flame flickering in and out of the darkness. After a minute of this, his fingers tightened around mine.
"You already are, Scott Fare."
It took a while, but I found his lips in the dark.
And it was right then and there that I decided Finley was my favorite color. He wasn't one shade––he was every shade; every single one of them in the same moment.
Every day after that I acutely noticed the way Lee Finnegan's skin glowed in comparison to everyone else's. His eyes, the same tint as the others his age, were somehow shiner, perhaps because the brain that hid behind them was brighter, more beautiful than anything I'd ever known. And the brightness from that mind of his shown in every pore, in every crack of light in his skin.
I looked at him, and that's all he was.
Brightness.
xxx
When I first joined the Famoux, I tried to run away.
Norax found me on a completely random afternoon in autumn. I'd been walking home from school with my eyes closed when she interrupted me, stopping me in the middle of the sidewalk with that motherly look all over her face.
"Does the sun hurt your eyes, dear?" she'd asked me.
I shook my head. "I just know the way really well."
To Norax Geddes, I was a novelty. A seventeen year old boy with red hair and freckles. She'd never seen anything like me before. She liked that.
"I don't think you realize how loved you could be, Scott," she said. "Look at you. You could be loved far and wide. You could be loved stronger than you know possible."
She was a good talker. In between her words and her proposition for me to join, I somehow managed to forget all about how I was already being loved far and wide; how I was already being loved stronger than I know possible.
I forgot.
"I'm in."
But she never told me about the Fissarex. When I emerged from the silver box and saw myself in the mirror, Norax and I both cried.
Her tears were out of happiness.
Mine were out of complete and utter fear.
She'd gone off about the magnificence of my freckles, and yet my skin had become smooth and spotless, like porcelain. She'd raved about my fiery hair, but swapped every trace of red for bleached blond. Standing in front of that mirror, I was no longer the Scott Fare that Norax Geddes had deemed capable of being loved far and wide and strong. I was somebody new entirely.
I ran before she could give me a name.
xxx
Hours later, a hoard of guards found me in the woods beside the Reformation Center. I was still in the papery hospital gown I'd been issued upon leaving the Fissarex, and it was no match for the weather outside. When they brought me back, shivering and dehydrated, a woman named Zoya ushered me into a room so I could change before Norax could get to me.
"You've got some guts there, kid," she said. "Getting past four different hallways full of armed bodyguards . . . how'd you run so fast?"
"I don't want to be here."
Zoya handed me a pair of jeans and a mustard yellow sweater. Just looking at the clothes made me want to puke. Lee Finnegan's favorite color was yellow.
The realization struck me again. I'd just thrown away that entire life of mine in one afternoon. The letters, the glances, it.
Scott Fare no longer existed.
"Tell me why you've changed your mind," she requested. "Is there something holding you back at home?"
Zoya was the woman who held the paintbrush. Zoya changed my skin, my hair, my structure. But somehow I trusted her more than anybody else.
I told her everything. About Finley––Lee Finnegan. About the letters. I told her every little detail as she rummaged a closet to find me a pair of shoes. And when the shoes were found, and when the story concluded, all she did was smile.
"You've led quite the magnificent life, Foster."
My brow furrowed. "Foster?"
"It means one who keeps the forest." She tapped the front cover of a name book on the coffee table beside us. "You could say that I'm just as fascinated with renaming as I am remaking. And I want you to keep what made you run into the woods today."
In the weeks following, Zoya set up for me a mailbox at a modeling agency and let Norax know that I'd taken an interest in that career path. Foster Farrand was going to be the only full-time model of this new Famoux generation.
At the start of every week I went to my mailbox at the agency to pick up the usual contents: Notes from photographers thanking me for my time. Catalogues with my new face on the front cover. Photo shoot offers from various brands who wanted a Famoux member backing up their product.
And then, of course, a well-battered copy of A Separate Peace.
xxx
In the Famoux, the colors are vivid––so loud it often hurts to look at them. Whenever I walk outside, and the lights are flashing all at once, there's this sheen of white across all the colors at burns that burns my irises. For hours after, my vision is dotted with several globs of white whenever I blink.
Yellow is no longer the soft emotion in Lee Finnegan. It's the gold in our hair and in the trophies my new friends hold. It explodes in the bulbs of a dozen cameras at a movie premiere. All the colors that matter are bleached with these flickers of white.
Sometimes when I go home from an event, and my vision is dotted with globs of white, I think about colorless Scott Fare.
Colorless Scott Fare, with the fiery red hair.
Colorless Scott Fare, with pebbles of warm brown tossed across his skin.
Colorless Scott Fare, with bursts of yellow on the walls, on love, on life.
Colorless Scott Fare had bouquets of red roses and acres of brown fields to grow them in. Colorless Scott Fare may not have had green grass, but he had the bluest tears imaginable when he cried, and a sense of empathy that could make flowers grow.
And by hell, colorless Scott Fare had the sun.
It strikes me within those blotches of light, within every blink of my eyes, that Scott Fare had all the necessary components to grow a beautiful garden. Maybe I didn't have to have my roots ripped from the grown and planted among the greener grass. And for that matter, why should green grass somehow be better than brown grass? Isn't brown trying its hardest to live? Shouldn't brown get some credit for staying alive?
I go on these tangents in my mind. My world becomes the colors, and I give them all second chances. I swap their connotations. Blue can be happy, because it's the color of the girl from the town next to mine's eyes. Green can be hostile and undesirable, instead of envious. Yellow can be strong, rather than sickly or childishly happy. And pink––pink can be whatever the hell it wants to be.
At night, it's not quite as dark as it was on that Darkening with Finley. I can see my hand in front of me, sure, but sometimes I can suspend the truth. Sometimes I can picture myself with fire hair and freckles again. And as I sit there, mentally painting every strand of gold, every dot back on my porcelain arms I think about those colors, and conformity, and societal expectations, and other vast and lofty things I barely understand yet wish to shatter and shock and shake.
How wonderful it is to be colorful? How wonderful it is to have red hair in a sea of brown or blonde or black? How wonderful it is to love however you want to? How wonderful is it to be red flowers in a sea of green, or polychromatic galaxies in an abyss of galactic nothingness, or mustard yellow on every wall in the house, or pink balloons at a little boy's birthday party? How wonderful is it to splatter your colors on the blank white canvas that is our collective lives?
Scott Fare never stopped to ponder a spectrum of colors, but rather centered in on yellow. He was too busy writing to yellow Lee Finnegan to even begin to imagine what kind of force had.
Scott Fare didn't know how colorful his life truly was.