This is for Some Kind of Character: Cal’s Character Contest. It involves the words Papier-mâché (52) and Purple(27), and pictures 14 and 17. Tell me what you think.

Papier-mâché and Purple

There was a row of trailers on each side of the grassy lane, the same lane that led from her home to Emily’s. A trailer park. The word was white trash, uneducated, and redneck. But to a nine year old, a trailer park isn’t so bad when there’s a birthday/costume party with ice cream and a piñata.

So Mandy was dancing down the lane—a young white girl with cornflower eyes, blonde hair, and a pair of flopping mesh wings on her back. They were wings left over from her mediocre Halloween costume, but it didn’t matter. She was a butterfly, gentle and innocent, fluttering to her best friend’s party.

Mandy’s favorite color was purple. And when she arrived at the celebration and saw that Emily’s piñata was purple, she felt like something blessed. That soft, light purple was a gift from above. What it really was, what she now knew ten years later, was that it was a papier-mâché balloon covered in cheap wrapping paper and full of two cent candy. To her as a teenager, it was a symbol of her poverty and of how oblivious she had been to it. But papier-mâché and purple is delightful to nine year olds.

And Mandy had been the one to break the newspaper shell and spill the bulk candy onto the kids and trailer park grass. The candy had fallen like rain—just like the drizzle she had endured while her parents had fought in the living room, silhouettes against the mini-blinds. And the candy had fallen like autumn leaves that ushered in high school and all its taunts at her dirty jeans and ripped jacket. And the candy of her memory had fallen like the tears now running down her face.

Here she was, thousands of miles from Missouri and the trailer park, in the middle of Arizona, crying over what she was discarding. The desert road swallowed up half her tears, while the other half hit the red paint of her beau’s convertible and rolled down its side.

“Ready to go?” the boy said as he turned from his moment of relief and zipped up his pants. Twenty one, cute, and had a car. He was her future, her escape.

She quickly wiped away her tears and nodded. Was she ready to leave her miserable childhood behind? Was she willing to forsake the trailer park and its false claim as her home? Yes. She already had.

Mandy took the sunglasses off her forehead and put them on, shielding herself from the world. She draped herself over the car’s side, head on crossed arms as the it started, and stared at the horizon. It was purple. A soft, light purple.

Dust flew up around the car, and Mandy sat up straight. The horizon was everywhere in this treeless land. She couldn’t escape it and its purple. She was lying to herself, knowing nothing would ever change, driving into a world covered with purple.