Page 5 of Pride High 3: Yellow
“Yup!” Anthony assured him. He chose green paper and began cutting out leaf shapes. He managed to work in silence for a full minute before the little girl interrupted him.
“What happened to your hair?” she asked.
“I drank too much strawberry lemonade,” Anthony said. His hair was solid pink at the moment, which had nothing to do with the holiday. He simply liked how subversive it was. “I’m actually a redhead, so I’ll have to drink a bunch of orange juice to turn it back again.”
“If that was true,” the little girl said. “I’d never stop drinking grape juice.”
“That would turn your hair purple,” Anthony clarified.
“I know!”
He stopped working long enough to glance over at her. “You’re cool.”
“Thanks!” she said. “What are you making?”
“A card,” Anthony said. He folded a piece of beige paper in half, thought of a good line to write on the front, and then began gluing cut-out leaves around the words as decoration. The inside would be trickier, but he had an idea.
“Why are you drawing all those snakes?” the little boy asked.
“They’re not snakes. They’re branches.”
“How come they’re so droopy?”
“It’s a willow tree.”
The little boy furrowed his brow. “They look like snakes.”
Anthony glanced over athiscard. A white circle had a face drawn on it with yellow yarn glued to the top for hair. “How come your card has a ghost on the front?”
“That’s my mom!”
“Then why does she look so pale? Like a vampire.”
The little boy looked down at his card, his face starting to crumple. “She needs color,” Anthony said. “Give her some blush on those cheeks so we can tell she’s still breathing.”
“Some what?” the boy asked.
“I can do it!” the girl said, moving over to help him.
That bought Anthony some time. Although when he folded a pale-green piece of paper and began cutting out tiny diamonds, it attracted the attention of the kids again.
“Are you making a snowflake?” the girl asked.
“They aren’t supposed to be green,” the little boy said.
“Watch and learn.” Anthony swept the tiny green diamonds into piles. He swiped a bottle from glue from a toddler who was slowly eating it and squeezed little dots all over the branches of the willow tree. Then he gathered up the green slivers of paper and stood, holding them above the card. “Are you ready for this?” he asked as the kids pressed closer around him. “Confetti time!”
He let the green paper diamonds rain down on the card, most of them striking glue dots and becoming leaves. He blew off the rest, causing scraps of paper to spiral through the air, some of them clinging to the toddler’s sticky cheeks. The kids around him cheered.
“Never forget what you’ve witnessed on this day,” Anthony said as he stood. “Your life may depend on it.”
He stood and turned around, surprised to see Cameron standing not far away while wearing a bemused smile.
Anthony walked over to join him. “I made you something.”
“A valentine?” Cameron said when accepting it. “But I thought you hated—”
“This isn’t about me,” Anthony interrupted. He nodded at the card. “It’s about us.”
