“Greenie”

It was determined long before she ever opened her eyes for the first time, and then, even the nurses and visitors had commented on what beautiful blue eyes she had. It was easy to accept, since her mother’s eyes we blue, even if her father’s eyes were brown. No matter: genetic coding had established the eye color just as naturally as it had determined the color of her wispy auburn hair. Mom was perfectly happy to have a blue-eyed girl; within a few months, however, it was clear that her true eye color would be green.

In her fourteenth year, things started becoming complicated. By that time, she had long, curly hair that she liked to wear swept up in a pony-tail. Thick cinnamon-colored bangs framed her face, drawing attention away from her jade-green eyes and toward her rose-bud shaped mouth. Before she had even turned thirteen, Mom had shown her how to apply striking colors of lipstick, and now she loved to try out new colors. It was so much a part of her image by now that if she failed to wear color on her lips, Mom usually noticed right away.

“Where’s your lipstick?” Mom would query with subdued alarm. She had no idea why it seemed so vital that she always wear lipstick, but it was simple enough to keep Mom placated. Besides, people always complimented her on her smile, just like Mom told her they would.

There were a few kids in her school with green eyes, and they all wore their hair with bangs, like hers, except for one boy, a few years older than she. He seemed almost proud of his green eyes, wearing his hair swept away from his face and always looking directly at others. Although he never criticized the other children with their blue, brown or grey eyes, he was almost militant in his assertion that there was nothing wrong with him, just because of his eye color.

Of course, the other children mostly stayed away from that boy, whispering behind hands when he passed by; some of them were even openly hostile toward him, calling him names like “Greenie” and sometimes even hitting him with their fists or kicking him. He never ran away, and he didn’t seem to even defend himself most of the time. It was terrible to see him so tormented, but one had to keep in mind that he did bring it upon himself. All he had to do was keep his eyes lowered, deflect the attention. As long as people didn’t have to see them, they didn’t seem to care.

At the same time she resented his brazenness, she couldn’t help but admire his courage. She longed to be able to pull her hair back and look directly into people’s eyes without fear or shame.

When curiosity finally overcame discretion one day, she sat down near him at an otherwise-empty table in the cafeteria.

“Hi,” she said quietly across the table. She said this in her usual way, with her eyes downcast, so she didn’t see the stunned expression on his face.

“Hi,” he responded flatly.

They sat in silence for several minutes. He was watching her intently, waiting for her next utterance. It was unusual for someone to get this close to him if not for the purpose of saying or doing something hateful, but so far, she seemed completely harmless.

While he was watching her, she was waiting for an opportunity to glimpse his unabashedly green eyes. She tried to sense his gaze, a skill at which she’d become quite adept, but he never seemed to look away. Finally, she gathered her nerve and looked up. Their eyes met, and the rest of the world suddenly fell silent around them. Green eyes gazed into green eyes. It was the first time she’d ever really looked upon eyes like her own, and she couldn’t look away. His startled expression melted into a broad smile, and she couldn’t help herself from smiling back. A whole new world was created in that moment—a world where she could look into the eyes of someone who understood how she felt, where she didn’t feel like she had to hide anything. The truth was that she hadn’t even realized she was hiding until then; she had never questioned why she wasn’t supposed to look people in the eye or wear her hair off her face. She had merely accepted that these were normal expectations and robotically complied.

“Mom, what’s a Greenie?” she asked, as she practically ran into the house that afternoon.

Mom was in the kitchen, slicing tomatoes for a dinner salad, and she froze with the knife poised in mid-air.

“Where did you hear a word like that?” she said, trying to sound nonchalant, although her heart felt like it had turned to stone in her chest.

“At school. There’s this boy, and they call him Greenie. Is it because he has green eyes?”

Mom carefully and deliberately placed the knife on the counter. Then she straightened her back and took in a deep breath (she hadn’t been breathing since she heard the word). She had known this day would come, but she just didn’t know it was going to be like this.

“Well, first of all,” she began, speaking slowly and diligently. “I do not care for that word, and I do not want you using it.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. She placed her books on the kitchen table and sat down with a pout. Tears began to sting at the edges of her eyes. “Mom, I have green eyes, too. Is there something wrong with me?”

Her question brimmed with all the honesty and innocence of a child. Mom tried to keep her posture, remembering the pediatrician’s words from years ago: If you don’t draw attention to it, it may never cause problems. She turned now to fully face toward her daughter, who stared expectantly at her, and took another full breath.

“Sweetheart, you’re just different. You can’t help how you are, any more than you can help how people see you. You just have to go along and do what you have to do to fit in.”

“Like what?” Her eyes were fixed directly and inescapably on Mom’s face now.

“Well,” Mom drew the word out for a few seconds, stalling. Her eyes traveled the room. “You just have to try to be more like everyone else.”

She had to let those words sink in for a few moments. After all, before today, she thought she was pretty much like everyone else. Now she was learning otherwise. Her whole life was changing, and she didn’t understand why.

“Why don’t people like green eyes, Mom?”

“Oh, well, it’s in the Bible, dear,” Mom began, with a hint of rehearsal in her words. “It’s in Genesis. Chapter twenty-nine, the seventeenth verse. There’s a story about two sisters, and one is named Leah, which means ‘meadow,’ so I guess that’s where they get the ‘green’ from. Well, apparently, the verse says that Leah was ‘weak-eyed’—I think that means she was ugly—but her sister Rachel was beautiful, and their father tricked some poor soul into marrying Leah instead of Rachel. Really, in the end, I think the whole thing makes Rachel look like the one who has something wrong with her, but you know how people like to interpret things to say what they want.” She had presented the explanation nearly perfectly, and all in one breath even! Now, this was how she had planned The Talk to go. Yes, just like this. She had given the explanation, answered the big question; it was all pretty much over now. She paused for grateful consensus, but met only with silence and an expression of astonished confusion.

“Well, anyway,” she continued, clearing her throat a little. “That’s how it started. Someone associated Leah with green and deceit and next thing you know, green became the color of evil.”

“You mean like when someone says they’re green with envy?”

“Yes, exactly. And since green eyes were not a dominant genetic trait back then, they were a rarity, and that made them different. And people hate things that are different.”

“Hate? People hate me—because of my eyes?” Now the tears readily spilled out. “Why would someone hate me for something that is just a part of me? Why, Mom?”

Just as she’d done for sixteen years, Mom avoided looking directly into her daughter’s green eyes as she came to wrap her arms around her.

“I don’t know, sweetheart. I don’t understand it, either. It’s just the way it’s always been. We can’t change it, so we have to try to get along.”

She sobbed for a long while, unable to speak. She wished her tears would wash away the color from her offensive eyes.

The next week, Mom took her to the optometrist, where she was fitted with blue contact lenses. They were uncomfortable, and she never really felt like they were part of her, but at least she could “go along,” as Mom said.

As a blue-eyed girl, she did all the things her parents had wanted for her: she graduated from high school and went on to college, all the while dating several blue-eyed and brown-eyed young men. She graduated from college and found a stable job and a nice apartment. She continued to date nice blue-eyed and brown-eyed men, and her parents waited anxiously for the day when she’d come home to announce her engagement to one of them. But she never did. She never seemed to stay with one man for very long, in fact, and she’d sometimes go for months without dating at all.

The television channels ran the stories over and over about it: NB’s (the new politically correct term to denote green-eyed people—Non-Blue/Brown) VIE FOR EQUALITY!

“What’s next?” The politician questioned, addressing constituents at a rally for his upcoming re-election. “Do we just let them marry and produce a whole new generation of NB’s?!” Shouts from the crowd of blue and brown-eyed people urged him on. “It’s just not natural! We can’t let them corrupt our whole society! We have to protect what is natural and right! If you keep me in office, I’ll do everything that has to be done to make sure we keep our country pure and normal!”

“But what about their rights?” A voice shouted over the cheers, instantly quieting the crowd. They all looked around to see who had shouted the question, and they waited for the politician to respond.

“What rights do they need?” He asked, a sardonic smile teasing the “ee” in need, drawing the sound out until it sounded completely ridiculous, just like the idea of NB rights. Then he continued, looking at once very serious and deliberate. “They can work and live in this country. That is their right. But what about the rest of us? What about the rights of those of us who are normal?”

She watched the news in her apartment, alone. She wasn’t wearing her contacts. She never wore them when she was alone. They felt uncomfortable, and, besides, she knew who she really was. That’s why she was spending so much time alone. She was no longer pretending to be interested in all those blue-eyed and brown-eyed men. She’d just as soon be alone than be with someone just to make everyone else comfortable and happy. She wanted to be with someone who she understood, who understood her. She wanted to be who she was. She had started venturing out without her contacts sometimes, and she’d even found some places where NB’s gathered and openly made eye contact. It felt right to her. It felt natural to be among her own kind.

She ran into that boy from high school once, in one of the NB gathering places. They hadn’t spoken since just after she got her first pair of contacts, when she had told him she had to try to fit in, and he had quietly slipped out of her life. Still, she never forgot him or that feeling she’d had when their eyes had met that first time. In fact, that was the whole reason she’d started “going green,” as the NB’s called it. She was astonished to meet so many NB’s who had tried to do exactly what she’d done, and they all knew there were many more who were afraid to admit their true color—maybe even to themselves—much less openly show it.

When she saw the news story about that boy a few months later, it bit right into her heart. “NB KILLED NEAR NB CLUB.” The reporter told how he had apparently come out of the NB club and was getting into his car a few blocks away, when three to five people with clubs and baseball bats had assaulted him. The apparent cause of death was a knife-stab through one eye, which pierced his brain. The assailants were seen leaving the area, but police had not been able to get adequate descriptions from a dozen witnesses to the assault.

Assault, she thought. It was a murder! A horrible, senseless murder!

She went to the bathroom to splash water on her face and her reddened eyes. She glimpsed herself in the mirror—her green eyes staring back at her. When would it end? Would she meet with the same fate as that boy? Would anyone care if she did? How could she ever live her life as a green-eyed person without constant fear? How could she live as a blue-eyed person without her heart shriveling like burning paper?

“What’d he expect, walking around like that?” She could hear the voice of a bystander speaking to the news reporter on the TV in the other room. “It just ain’t natural. What’d he expect?”

She splashed another handful of cold water onto her face and swollen eyes. She reached for the hand towel near the sink, and saw the discreet little container for her contacts. She picked up the container, and, opening it, she gazed upon her blue eyes. They were the shade of the morning sky just before the sun appears on the horizon, the color of a new day.

Her pale pink lips, which only knew lipstick on special occasions these days, curled into an illuminated grin. She snapped the lid shut and unceremoniously tossed the case into the trash.