The Ritual-- Prologue

Lunet had a ritual, and one she quite liked to adhere to. It began at twilight:

The first thing she did when she turned in for the night, tired from hours spent in the backyard, was smell the outdoor residue lingering on her hands.

Everytime she did it expecting the lush scent of hydrangeas and summer breezes.

And everytime she was disappointed when her nose came away sniffing an odor that was dirt and wood chips and rusty swing-sets, hardly as mystifying as she'd hoped. 

Squeezing large, runey clumps of pungent hand sanitizer onto her grimy palms, she would fly into the kitchen, past the living room with the green chairs and up newly carpeted stairs. Her short flight through the house would end when she reached her room, the door propped open wide enough for the pink glow of her furnishings to paint the outside hallway a wispy futia. Her room, if not located on the second floor of her childhood home, might've been mistaken for a quaint toy store, for its interior was plastered wall-to-wall with an impossible number of stuffed animals, plastic dolls, and energetic picture books. However, also different from a toy store, Lunet loved and cared for each toy separately, building time into her ritual to kiss each of their tiny heads goodnight. Some she would even share secrets with, whispering about the boy next door or the fairies she could've sworn she spotted dancing in the forest (a forest she claimed to have explored, despite being strictly forbidden from entering it on the grounds of it being too far from the house). When she was finished with this, she would collect the toys she loved most and adorn them around her pink, satin pillow. Her twin bed, bought when she was just old enough to escape nightly from her crib, accomodated her and the parade of stuffies comfortably. Whenever the shadows of the night began to frighten her, forming shapes that were monsters and ghosts and an array of evil creatures, she'd bury her face in the friendly pile of familiar, furry animals, believing that she would be protected in a cocoon of toys. Though she'd deny having ever been scared in the first place, this method of self-comfort never failed to coerce her wild mind into restful sleep. 

Of course, baths and hair-drying and teeth brushing often broke up the flow of this daily ritual, on account of her mother's insistence. But on the rare occasion that Lunet successfully snuck into her world of toys and magic without notice, she could recall having the most vibrant dreams, watching a million of her favorite colors dance under her eyelids. In fact, the colors were so remarkably vivid one night that she was sure she had a superpower, although she was perplexed as to what exactly this power entailed. 

But she considered it often, and through the years, as her ritual was eventually abandoned and her barrage of stuffed-animals was a diminishing collection kept under her now full-sized bed, she remembered the nights that color would burst in her dreams. She no longer stayed in the mossy outdoors until twilight or harbored a secret crush on the boy next door, nor did she quizzically smell her hands for a fantastical perfume that was never there. But she would try so desperately to remember the colors, and on good nights, she could almost imagine them again. How lovely, she thought quietly to herself one summer afternoon, it would feel to be immersed in the vision once more. 

When she turned into Mrs. Howards ninth-grade honors literature class, Lunet didn't expect to find those colors again. Their memory had all but faded from her mind, as well as the majority of her fantastical imagination, leaving only a faint smoke trail of what had been giggles and pictures and valiant stuffed animals. When she picked a seat near the teacher's desk- having picked up a habit of becoming 'teacher's pet', a role she considered of strategic importance for more reasons than one- the kaleidoscope was dormant in her heart, resting as if it had been lulled to sleep by a band of familiar toys. And as her classmates began filing in, picking spots in varying places around the room, she thought only of high grades and bright futures. 

She might've lived such a gray life as this, and loved it, too. She might've traded in her blonde curls for brown bangs and her princess dresses for long skirts, and she had every intention of doing so. 

But when his sparkling eyes lit up with the colors of a thousand summer dreams, the vision slumbering deep within her heart burst to life once again.