All the rooms in the school were gray. Some legends swear they used to be painted vibrant colors, but hardly anyone was left from those perplexing times to tell the tall tale. All the walls were uneven, full of different sized painted lumps. Some of the newer additions to the wall still had a faint shape. Every now and then a student would see the faded triangular shape of a nose, the roundness of empty, dying eyes, or the opening of a mouth whose raspy whisper was stolen years ago. But hardly anyone ever paid attention to the walls or even took the time to glance up from the ground, so these shapes scarcely got noticed.

The wetter the paint, the fresher the victim. Sometimes the newer additions, still oozing and dripping in paint, would get filthy flies and bugs stuck to them. The older ones were dry, some already cracked and peeling. Once all the pieces crumbled to the ground, they’d turn to dust and be swept away by the breeze, lost and forgotten.

Some of the lucky teachers were gifted with whole classes who had succumbed to the gray wall. They were still technically supposed to teach, but no one ever responded. The teacher would just stand in front of the room, pretending that the class was alive and listening. They’d sometimes hear the haunting echoes of laughter or gossip rattling the support beams behind the drywall. Some even said the teachers were their own shade of gray.

Every student felt it: the gravitational pull to the walls, like magnets ferociously reaching for one another. The wetter walls would stick to newcomers like glue, drawing them in. It usually began with one body part. Someone would get too close and comfortable with the wall, too curious about the conformity, and the dull color would stick to them. It would spread through their body like a virus, stealing their color. The viscous wall would part, creating a dent-like opening, sucking the student in. It was a slow process for some, gradually pulling them in deeper, eating away at their graying flesh. Then there were those who were oblivious to their subconscious integration with the wall. Those were the ones who usually fell backwards, tripping over themselves and flailing their exhausted arms. They relaxed with relief once fully fused with the wall. Everybody did.

At first, concerned parents took their children to doctors or specialists at school, but eventually they stopped making the effort. Parents had to accept their children’s inevitable fate of the gray wall. Some visited, bringing flowers, stuffed animals, or magazines. They’d pull up a chair and talk to the wall about the news or family matters, pretending their children were listening. It soon became a dream of the majority of parents to let their children’s exuberant skin color blend with the gray of the wall. It made their job much easier to have a simple child, amalgamated with everyone else in the wall. Life went on.

One girl, though, refused to be simple, defying the entrenched custom in the school. She’d ride the hours of the day looking up, while everyone else glared down, burning holes into the floor. People would part the hallways for her, jumping head first into the ravenous wall. She used to encounter a group of soon-to-be-grays on a daily basis, who’d laugh at her reluctance to capitulate to the wall, despite her complete fascination.

“Too afraid to join?” they’d sneer with their lifeless smiles. They were practically walking walls already.

It was a rarity to be in close proximity with the wall and not submit to its grayness. The girl liked to run her fingers along the dry parts of the wall, tracing the bumps and crevices. As if cloud watching, she’d point to a gray lump and try to guess who or what it once was. This was the stuck-up nose of a popular. She used to live on pages of words and spent all her time alone with the company of her thoughts as they bounced off the walls. But she ditched the reading glasses and locked herself up in her own hollow head to join the rest. She let herself be devoured by the school hallway’s crowd, which trampled her to the ground and shoved her to the sidelines; her remains were drawn to the wall.

This, over here, was the sharp jawline of an ill-mannered, uniformed boy, defined by his number. He emitted deep, empty laughs from the back of his throat, letting blank pages define him. He gripped those papers so firmly, never losing his grasp, even when they stuck to the wall.

And most tragically, this right here was the faded smile of a free spirit who once resisted vigorously but became imprisoned by the chains of the impregnable wall. The girl would stare at this mighty wall with sad eyes and greedy relief, for she was yet to become part of it.

One day, slightly more peculiar than the last, while making her routine trips along the walls, the girl spotted something quite anomalous. A small, elevated patch of a bluish color, too vibrant to be a stain. She put her ear to it and could feel the warm vibration of it, as if it were coming to life all over again. Her head pressed against the wall, she carefully ran her finger over the delicate protuberance, so as not to flatten its excellence or smudge the mesmerizing hue. After lifetimes had passed in the gray wall, the girl finally pulled her head away and smiled a sly grin, heedless to the smudge of blue on her ear. It was a slightly different shade of blue, blending into its own color the minute it touched her skin, almost instantaneously.