There are a number of things people should not wake up to on a Saturday morning, and a pounding window is certainly one of them; especially if the pounding window is caused by a somewhat deficient man that whistled off-tune Beethoven symphonies while he worked. My mom had hired a guy to attach window screens to every last one of our windows, insisting that it was the only option for keeping our family safe because a) bugs, and b) robberies that could be stopped by a flimsy net.

Anyway, even though talking to Barry about my inner feelings made me feel a little bit more alive, I had been moping around the entire day, just dreading the day I would have to go to the St. Hemling interview (where they judge me even more). The last time I went to the St. Hemling interview I was only six years old, and awaiting my seventh birthday in November. The person who interviewed all the newbie primary school kids was – wait for it – Mrs. Brig, and obviously it was traumatic in a way that kind of made me want to rip my hair out. Mrs. Brig (or Mrs. Brussel, as I like to remember her) had me in a room all alone and pestered me about everything I liked and everything about my history. Which, honestly, isn't very insightful coming from a six-year-old, but she didn't care. I didn't care either. All I cared about was her garlic breath, which was probably why she was so disgusting, inside and out.

All that aside, the window screen eventually resulted in a very-confused-and-irritated-Orenda at 1PM, laughing as I explained to her that it was a little bit harder for her to tumble through my window like she was committing a robbery – which was, of course, that the screens were for.

"Maybe you should actually walk in through the front door for once," I mumbled as I maneuvered my fingers around the screen clip. I flipped it up.

"No, I like going through the window. It's... dangerous. Thrilling. Romantic, even."

"I guess." I sat down on my bed and smoothed my cold sheets around me as I listened to Orenda breathe and spin around on my chair.

"So? I-"

"I talked to Barry – my tutor – yesterday. Like you said. Thanks, by the way." I felt like I was saying thanks to practically everyone I within a 10 metre radius around me, but I suppose I needed to.

She didn't talk for a very long time, which gave me (perhaps too much) time to reflect on everything I had screwed up in my already screwed-up life. The only thing that came to me, the only thing I never really pushed away from me was, admittedly, Orenda. I sighed and fell back onto my mattress, taking the risk of hitting my head on the headboard – which really hurts, usually. My glasses got pushed away from my nose and I casually ripped them off and set them beside me, on my pillow. A truck rushed past my window, and the rumbling momentarily covered up the sound of Orenda, so for a second it was like she wasn't even there, and the room felt empty again.

"I'm a terrible person," I mumbled, right after the truck left.

"No, Finnegan, you're not."

"I am. I literally destroy everyone I know just because I'm not satisfied with myself. They're just too nice to get mad at me." I propped myself up on my elbows and tried my very best to keep my eyes closed, or half-closed, I couldn't really tell. My bed suddenly creaked and I flinched a little, and I heard Orenda gasp, which probably meant I had opened my eyes when I got surprised. I stuck my glasses back on.

"Finn, you're not a terrible person." She assured me, and then sat next to me, her flowery scent all around.

I lay on my back again and cleared my throat, "well I'm not great."

"Neither am I. Look, let's go. I've got so many cool things to show you, and I am almost two thousand percent sure it'll make you feel better. Heck, I'm three thousand percent sure. That's a lot of sure-ness, I'll tell you." I smiled, and she laughed. "Hey, we're teenagers. I'm not sure what I expect – other than mood changes in the blink of an eye. Sorry. Bad choice of words. What can I say? I'm also not very sensitive." Orenda grabbed my hand and pulled me upright, making me laugh and tumble off my bed.

She pulled me to my window and jumped out, the crunch of the bushes making me laugh even harder, and I gingerly slipped out along with her, with my shoes half-on. I missed the bushes by a little bit, and fell down on the hard ground, the grass still a little damp from the coldness of the night. I groaned and Orenda just giggled quietly, trying not to let my parents figure out that the screen had, fortunately, not prevented this ninja from getting in. She helped me up and kept saying things about how great her surprise for me would be, and how much it would spark my insides on fire and I would become a heap of melted-Finn that was so happy I couldn't even contain my happiness inside of me. Even though it was a little bit gory and morbid in the way she explained it, I couldn't stop smiling at the idea of that feeling.

"God, Finn, what I would do to see you like this all the time." Her hand didn't let go of mine, probably because I had forgotten my cane at home, and my shoes were half-on, and I was wearing only a t-shirt in 10 degree weather.

I smiled even bigger, and tried to ignore the fact that my hand was sweating against hers, despite me being completely frozen. It was like she was the only thing bringing me warmth and I had to bite my lip real hard and repeat to myself over and over and over in my head: 'I don't love her I don't don't don't I don't I don't I don't love her.' It didn't really work, but I felt cold again.

-----/////-----

Orenda had taken me to her house again, with the teeny tiny little porch stairs and the warm, comforting feeling of the inside. It was a little bit too quiet once the door slammed shut, and I found myself fiddling with the hem of my shirt as Orenda took off her shoes and dragged me inside. My feet immediately felt the thick carpet and she kept talking to fill up the silence around us; she talked about her school and how the bakery had been rated four stars, and how the fire had caused the rating to go down a little bit not enough for it to be deadly or anything. Then we were downstairs in her paint-filled basement, with Green Day playing quietly in the background.

"You've already showed me your painting shrine, Orenda," I muttered. The smell of paint encompassed me.

"Yeah, but I got something for you this time, and it's not just a brush and a palette." She let go of my arm and I heard a clattering of... just, stuff, and finally it died down.

"Is it a bomb? Grenade? Stevie Wonder's glasses?" I chuckled to myself.

"Witty, and possible, but no. I got you a painting set!" She squealed and threw a bag of stuff onto me, "so now you can PAINT! At your HOME! When you have nothing to do! Great, huh?" I tried to bring the corners of my mouth up, and I prayed silently to myself for it to fool her.

"Thanks," I replied, and attempted to open the contents of the bag, but I couldn't exactly find the zipper, or opening, or whatever.

"You don't like it, do you?" She sighed and turned the music up louder, yet it was still too quiet for me to figure out which song it was. Egan listened to Green Day a lot, but I didn't really give a crap about Egan at that moment.

"I like it! I just, how do I even... y'know? Use... it." I set the bag on the ground and stuck my hands in my pockets.

"Here's an idea, you give it a shot and see what comes next."

I scoffed.

"Or you can be an idiot about it," she said dryly, "paint a picture; it'll be a good millennium project for the New Year. Like new century resolutions and such."

"Orenda, this is stupid. Okay? It's not that easy to just paint."

"Finnegan, you literally are the most pessimistic-"

"But I'll give it a shot," I said quickly, and that shut her up. She laughed that bubbly laugh and picked the bag up from against me, the contents in it crashing around inside. I held out my hand and she passed it to me.

I slowly backed up and felt an object behind me, and realized soon enough that it was an armchair of some kind, and then sat down, my entire body somehow enveloped inside of the seat. Green Day continued playing, but the song had shifted into a more upbeat one, and I found myself tapping my feet along to the beat. I exhaled quickly and shouted, "let's paint!" then clapped my hands together and stood up, the bag on my lap clattering onto the ground noisily.

"Well, someone's excited. Okay, so, another surprise... wait for it... wait for it..."

I waited.

"I got watercolours! They were so expensive, but definitely worth it." She grabbed my hand again and pulled me closer towards her; until I could feel her shoulder rubbing against my arm (she was a little bit shorter than me) and her hair right next to my nose. At that moment I would have given everything away just to be able to see what colour her hair was. Maybe it was baby blue like the sky, or white like the snow, or even magenta; everything good and everything bad. Truth is, I didn't know what the heck hair looked like, much less the colour hair was supposed to be.

I held my hands out away from me and felt the wooden table I was standing in front of, the surface glossy, yet a little bit too dusty. I wiped my finger on my pants. I grabbed the paintbrush from Orenda and tried to remember what she told me last time she kidnapped me and brought me to paint. The brush she gave me that time was smaller and thinner, and the tip was way softer. I spun the paintbrush between each of my fingers nervously as I listened to the song and Orenda pouring water (I think?) into a container. She passed it to me.

"Why do you like painting so much anyway?" I asked her, and swiped my brush around in the water a few times, until the water splashed a little bit onto my shirt.

"I don't know. It's the same thing as asking me why I like blinking. It makes me feel less... dead." She laughed. "Also because it's a helluva pastime."

"Oh yeah, that's how I feel about eating. You know, that rush of adrenaline that courses through your body when you bite into that sandwich, the emotions and the happiness that pounds through your veins."

She groaned and a few more things clattered onto the table. "But in all seriousness, Finnegan Annson, it makes me happy."

"Then it makes me happy too." I set the water down on the table and at the same moment she passed me a thickish sheet of paper, and I set that down too, trying to make way for it as well as I could.

She didn't reply to me, instead she just swooshed her brush in the water and a few things scraped against the table, and then she was painting. Like, without even teaching me how to paint. So, naturally, I did the same with my brush, and intelligently found the palette-type thing. It wasn't like the goopy sort of paint she gave me last time, but more like I was dipping into a block. I put the brush onto the paper. I stroked down.

"Remember last time when we were here? And you oh-so-desperately wanted to be Stevie Wonder and do actual things?" Orenda recalled, and I bit my lip nervously.

"That was embarrassing. Sorry about that." Stroke. I tried thinking about her laugh.

"I think you're fine just the way you are. And I also think I know why you hate that school so much. Because of everyone telling you that you are just like everyone else, even though you're not. Truth is, you can't see. That's okay, that doesn't make you worse or less capable, but they really should be real with you guys. I don't know. I'm rambling."

I gulped and stroked a few times roughly, and tried to imagine her hair.

"I don't know why you... I just... I'm so confused about you. There's a surprise. Usually nobody gets me."

My hand clenched and I turned my head towards her. "It's okay. I'm strange."

And then she shuffled around and kissed my cheek, her lips lingering on me for a couple seconds (that felt like hours on end) and I stood frozen, not even able to close my mouth.

"Sorry. There was paint on your cheek. I like eating paint." She cracked up at the end of the sentence, and I laughed too.

"Same here." I slurred, grinding my teeth together anxiously.

"I've always wanted to experience a metanoia." She had changed the subject again. I remained frozen.

"Metanoia?"

"Like, changing the way I live. The things I do. I'm done my painting."

I hadn't finished mine, but it felt semi-finished, so I set my brush down beside hers. She really had a point, but I couldn't exactly string her words along to have them make sense. It was like having a huge lake in front of you and hearing two water droplets getting released into the lake to go and make sense of themselves. What nobody ever understands is that those water droplets never find each other ever again after that.

"I want to show you something," I said to her gingerly, and held out my hand. She took it.

"What?"

"Let's go back to my house."

So, that's what we did. We passed by a little kid at one point, who said, "those two people are married." Perhaps we looked like an old married couple, minus the prune-like skin and all that. The bag of painting supplies thudded against my calves every once in a while as we walked, and my arm started getting a little tired from carrying it, but obviously I was too proud to admit it. My shoes were fully on at that point though, which made walking about ten million times easier, and the chattering of Orenda's neighbourhood made it more normalish, so that wasn't all that sucky.

When we got back to my room, we did the essential – toss our bodies through the window, quite professionally, might I add – and I sat on my bed while Orenda spun around on my chair. She had assured me before we went in that there were no cars on my driveway. It honestly bothered me that my parents still hadn't found out she was sneaking through the window.

"Remember last time you brought me to Willow and it was raining and it was basically hell on earth outside?"

She chortled, "Yeah, I do."

"Well, and then we dotted the sidewalks?"

"Mmhmm."

I started telling her about how Barry gave me the sequel to Dotted Sidewalks and how it was a longer book and how that was something that made me feel happy and less dead – similar to her and painting. To which she replied that she couldn't read a word on that book because there were practically none, except for the cover, and that kinda made me feel better but not really.

I figured if Orenda was going to tell me everything she loved and why she loved it, I was basically obliged to return the favour and talk about myself for a while. There wasn't much to talk about though, I was deeply uninteresting. I felt as if the only interesting thing about me was that I knew the existence of Orenda, like she had become a part of me that made me more me. It didn't make me a new me. It was just me.

"Finn, can I ask you a question?" Orenda suddenly piped up, and I pushed my glasses closer to my face.

"Ask away."

"What would you do if you could change one thing in your life?"

I breathed deeply and said, "to change the fact that people pity me. So that I wouldn't miss out on anything, I could be normal, really." It sort of scared me that I didn't have to think so hard about that.

"And if that meant you would lose everyone else? Your friend Egan? Barry? Heck, even St. Hemling? All your experiences? Willow? What if you were out wearing smelly old leather jackets and smoking cigarettes? What if you had never met me? Would you give all that away just for a pair of working eyes?"

We sat in silence for the umpteenth time.

I don't know what she expected me to say, but it made me scared she would even ask a question like that.

"Never."

A/N

Hey guys!

I guess I'm writing this little author's note to thank everyone who's been reading my little story haha! I hope you like it :) And the video attached is one of the songs I imagine playing quietly in the background as they're painting...

How's everyone's summer going? (I literally haven't done anything) ((oops))

Also, maybe comment your thoughts on 'Yellow' so far! What do you like about it, hate about it, what do you think is strange about it? AND I've been trying to think of some people for casting in this story, since I (obviously) don't describe the features of these characters. Ideas?

OH AND a vote would make me a very happy person :))))))) 

I LOVE YOU ALL! HAVE A GREAT DAY HAVE A GREAT LIFE

-Jen <3