“Celeste Sapphire, get ready for your first day!” My mom shouts, as if I hadn’t been up since 4 in the morning, simultaneously dreading and being uncontrollably excited for this day. 

I just blend into the background, barely noticed except for the occasional, “OMG your handwriting is so neat” comment. That’s the extent of conversation I get with any classmates. If we finish a test early and the teacher says we can talk if we want to, you can bet that I’ll be practicing Esperanto on Duolingo. I would talk to Sunday, if we could have conversations that don’t end up analyzing her latest weird dream, but those are the only conversations we have, and they get out of hand so quickly that it’s best that I reserve them for outside of school. I can’t discuss them without someone overhearing and sending me to guidance, again, so I just end up complaining about creative writing. 

***

“Rosie, it’s 7:00 on the first day of school, and it starts at 7:30! Get ready now!”

I rummage through my drawers and find a decent looking shirt to wear with my denim skirt. Hopefully this will be presentable enough for the first day. I smear on some lip gloss and attempt to do my eyeliner before my mom yells that it is already 7:15. I notice that my eyeliner is uneven, but I give up as I try to be on time at least one day this year, preferably the first day. I grab a TripleShot iced coffee from the fridge and pray that I don’t fall back asleep; I slept around two hours last night. As we sit in traffic, the streets are still flooded from the rain, and the sun shines and creates a rainbow. I think of when my friends all called me “Rainbow Brite” in sixth grade.

***

“Hey, Rainbow Brite!” I see a girl call to Rose Rayne in the hallway. 

“Evelyn, if you get the Accompsett kids calling me Rainbow Brite too--” 

“Rainbow Brite?” Another student in the hallway is in as much confusion as I am. 

Rose’s face turns red and she sighs. “Of course. Right when I want to start off on a new foot, reinvent myself, this happens. It’s just a cliché… I should’ve known that life is not High School Musical.” 

“You could make it into it,” Rose’s unnamed friend tries to reassure her.

“Not when I’m Rainbow Brite.”  Rose sighs, and turns to her friend. “Sure, when you called me it, it was fine; but now you’ve got the whole class of 2025 saying it.”

Rose’s friend’s face turns into this expression like you’d see on a child’s face when all their dreams are crushed. 

Am I any more than Rainbow Brite? Rose wonders to herself. She doesn’t seem to be known as Rose in this school; I’ve only heard her be referred to as “Rainbow Brite”.

***

I finally walk into E206 after asking two different hallway aides and getting conflicting answers. By sixth period on the first day, the layout starts to make more sense. 

I meet Ms., not Mrs., Brooks, and within the first five minutes of class, she jumps into letting us know about her divorce and all of its details. I thought a simple, “Hey, I’m Ms. Brooks, not Mrs. Brooks-Nichols” would suffice, but she made sure to inform us of the matters involving her dog’s attachment to her soon-to-be-ex-husband, how she’s counting down the days until he moves out, and all of that fun stuff that’s not necessarily in the English 9 Honors curriculum. She sets up a class JamBoard, for us to introduce ourselves. Maybe I should introduce myself as “Rainbow Brite”, the nickname my friends gave me in sixth grade. I decide not to; it’s high school now, and I feel like it would not fly in an honors class like this fine class I am attending right now.

I introduce myself as the most basic thing ever; “Hi, I’m Rose, and I like to dance.”

***

Before long, someone deletes Rose’s note on the JamBoard that says her name, and replaces it with “Rainbow Brite”. The slide becomes filled with the words “Rainbow Brite”. Ms. Brooks inquires about this name. 

“It’s just a nickname they gave me,” Rose says.

Ms. Brooks joins in on the joke and calls Rose “Rainbow Brite”, until she suddenly pauses. “Wait, is the name offensive? I hope you’re not making fun of her.”

“No, it’s fine,” Rose tries to ignore the nickname, but deep down, she feels like she is losing her identity as Rose Rayne to the confinement of the nickname, Rainbow Brite. Rose starts tearing up. “Am I any more than ‘Rainbow Brite’?” she cries out. 

“Rainbow Brite, wait for me--” Evelyn calls, asking Rose to wait while she packs up.

“We don’t even have the next class together. And besides, I'm already going to get lost on my way, I should at least try to be close to on time.” Rose dismisses Evelyn.

***

“So, Rosie, how was your first day?” my mom presses me for details about today, which was really nothing out of the ordinary, besides the whole New Building thing.

“I don’t know, it just was.” I say. I know that it was the first day and all, but the summer went by so quickly it felt like we came back to school after a two-week Christmas break. The map of the building became easily understandable by noon, and my brain just factored in all of the new people as incoming sixth graders.

“Did you try to make friends?” she asks, then specifies, “besides that girl, Evelyn.”

What? Why did she feel the need to voice that? I know that my whole family is getting frustrated at me for not really having friends, but the fact that they would just slip it into dinner, like “oh hey, how was school, Rose-who-doesn’t-have-friends,” makes me angry.

Renee tries to break the tension by saying that college was the “same old”, but Mom still won’t let my friend situation rest.

“When do clubs start? You would want to join as early as possible.” she continues on. “I thought you’d make friends at soccer, but you seem to dislike it.”

“I’m not just going to join a club for something I’m barely interested in just for the sake of ‘making friends’.” I let it be clear. “Look, can we please just stop talking about this?”

I haphazardly place my dish in the sink, narrowly avoiding shattering it, and run to my room to sit in sorrow and listen to emo music. What a fun first day of school.

***

It’s Friday, again. Hopefully, since today is a Friday, and the second day of school, the teachers will still take it easy. 

“Celeste Sapphire Jewell,” my English teacher calls. I say, “here”, until I realize that she already took attendance and it’s twenty minutes into the class. 

“No, you’re not here. Please come here.” Oh no. What could that possibly mean? She escorts me outside of the classroom and the typical “ooh”-ing and chattering starts.

“Celeste, I just wanted to ask about what this Google Doc was.” She shows me the Google Classroom page for our get-to-know-you exercise, and I see that I accidentally turned it in.

And she saw it. Well, not Rose, but Ms. Brooks saw it, and that’s still bad enough.

“Do you know anything about why they call Rose ‘Rainbow Brite’?” she asks me.

I am stunned. How do I even begin to confess to writing this piece of fanfiction about this English class on only the second day of school? I try to form a cohesive sentence; “No, I have no idea, actually, why they call her that; I was just intrigued and decided to write this for fun, and, uh, Sunday helped me write it too.” So Ms. Brooks had me, Sunday, and Rose stand in the hallway and try to make sense of this situation. 

“Rose… Rayne.” Ms. Brooks examined Rose’s name like it was foreign. “What are your siblings’ names? Did your parents just choose you to have the alliterative name?”

“My sisters’ names are Renee and Raven,” Rose explains. Ms. Brooks seems to still be interested in this alliteration situation, but she decides to finally move on and address the bigger problem.

“So, Rose,” Ms. Brooks changes the topic, “did you know about this story that Celeste Sapphire Jewell here wrote about you?” 

Rose stares at me like I am a creep; well, I am. “You did what?” Rose’s voice cracks with concern. My heart starts racing. “Can I read it?” she asks.

That went better than expected. The only problem is how Rose can’t just read the story without commenting on the parts that are not true, which is most of the story. 

“I never felt like I was ‘losing my identity to being called Rainbow Brite,’” Rose absolutely destroys the entire basis of the story. “Is that all you wrote about?”

Oh, well. In November, Rose Rayne moved to Florida, and there was no one to remember this story. No “Celeste Sapphire Jewell who wrote this story”, no attention, positive or negative. I was simply just a student in this building. I was just me, Celeste Sapphire Jewell.