Title: “The Red Trees Strategy”
Date: 2013 July 5
Characters: Jaekyung & Eli
Genre: Life
Words: 1232

When I was a kid, there was a boy who used to color the tree trunks red and the sky purple. The teacher always told him it looked pretty, but I was forever confused on why he would use such odd colors to portray two of the most beautiful aspects of nature. Everyone knew tree trunks were brown and the sky was light blue. There were no questions about it, but the boy continued using those colors as if it didn't matter to him, because he liked it that way, to have the sky purple and the tree trunks red. It didn't bother him so I didn't have much to complain.

At first, I thought he just wanted to stand out and get attention especially from the teacher in order to earn an extra star on the students chart, “Who Was the Best Today.” I couldn't care less, because at the end of the day, we would have the same amount of stars anyway. That strategy of his never worked.

Still, that thought stayed with me until eight grade. We were paired up as partners to work on the science project together. Both of us didn't want to do anything extraordinary or spectacular, so we stuck with doing a regular poster about the Carbon cycle. I basically ended up doing all of the work, so I asked him to color it in order to even out the amount of work between us.

When the teacher was generous enough to give us free time in class to finish our projects, I saw him pick up a red color pencil and began coloring the tree trunk I drew red.

Unbelievable.

The beautiful tree that I worked so hard on was now ruined because of the wrong color. Who would have thought he was still the same boy who wanted attention? It didn't get to me, so I became a bit angry at his sudden unreasonable move.

I immediately exclaimed, “Eli, you colored it red!”

He then glanced up at me, looking confused and then out of nowhere, he tossed the color pencil across the room. People looked over at us, curious of what happened, and at that point, he was mad. Really mad.

“Damn it! Why didn't you say anything earlier?” he yelled at me, clenching his head as he stared at the tree that was half shaded in red.

“I just thought... I-I wasn't thinking straight,” I lied, trying my hardest to calm him down, but he wouldn't let me as he continued to observe the crimson color on our poster with his furious face.

“What is wrong?” The teacher was suddenly by our side, managing to get Eli to take a break and planning to talk to us one on one. “So what happened, Jaekyung? Did you anger him?”

“No,” I instantly answered, annoyed that I was suddenly accused as the bad guy. “I just told him that he colored the tree red, and he got mad at me. Th