End of the Mixed-Up Rainbow

A Story by Diana Sterling

They had just painted the apartment and the smell had a too-dark cast to it that didn't suit the vernal groen from which the odor came. Thinking this, Lexie pulled it in with a deep breath. At the same time she was aware that the effort to redecorate was a driving need to Barby's chameleonic character. Lexie turned to the girl next to her in the oversized bed and smiled pensively at the rumpled hair. The messy hair seemed intimate somehow. Trying nonchalance, Lexie stretched, exposing the pink, wot cavern of a yawn.

The stirring woko Barbara, who opened her eye not pressed to the pillow and confronted the green, paint-stained fingers of her hand. She rubbed the tips of her fingers together, hard, as though to eliminate her depressed, low spirits. Then she said: "Lexie, you think if they planted mo I'd grow?"

"What?" Lexie was still writhing in a slow stretch, pulling and twisting each membor of her body. She drew her shoulder toward her face, and, pulling her arm rigid, retated her wrist while, legs taut, each foot repeated the wrist simultaneously. "HOW GO?" she said.

"A green thumb," Barbara said, "I've got a green thumb."

"Should've worn the gloves I had out for you," Lexie said, in no mood to joke. "You would'nt've got all splotched."

"Practical," Barbara said, putting the word out in three knotty sections. "All the time practical.

that green to you is green to me?"

"What is that supposed to mean?"

What says anyway

"I mean, what'f what I call green and what looks groen to me is really purple? Purple to you, I mean."

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