The Color Of You

Chapter 2 -The Girl in Technicolor

Lila Adeniyi believed clothes were prayers, stitched together with hope, stubbornness, and a touch of mischief.

That morning, she stood before her mirror, head tilted, tying a yellow gele made from leftover Ankara she’d cut the night before. Her top shimmered faintly, silk she’d thrifted and reworked, and her skirt was a riot of bold patterns, each piece a rebellion against silence. Anyone else might call it “too much.” Lila called it balance.

“Balance in what universe?” Tolu said from her bed, scrolling through her phone. “You look like the African Union decided to host a carnival.”

Lila grinned, checking her reflection from every angle. “Exactly. It’s Wednesday, the world needs cheering up.”

“Abeg,” Tolu groaned, tossing her pillow. “You need deliverance from colour. You need to stop dressing like a traffic light. You can’t just be loud and bright at the same time. Pick one.”

“Traffic light ke?” Lila twirled. “Please, I am an experience, both is the brand.”

Tolu eyed her and sighed dramatically. “Omo, one day these oyinbo people will think you escaped from a costume parade.”

“Let them,” Lila said, slinging her bag over her shoulder. “At least that’s iconic.”

Tolu shook her head, muttering, “Na you sabi,” but she was smiling. Everyone smiled around Lila. It was hard not to. She carried her joy like sunlight, bold, impossible to ignore.

Outside, the air smelled like wet earth. Rain had softened the pavement, and puddles caught fragments of the pale morning sky. Lila hopped over them easily, humming an Asa song under her breath. People stared, as always. She didn’t mind.

You couldn’t dim joy that had learned how to survive disapproval.

Her father’s voice echoed in her mind, sharp, familiar, and uninvited, “You’re going abroad to study, not to chase fantasies with fabric.”

He’d said it at the airport, his jaw tight, his disappointment neatly pressed into his suit. She’d smiled then, because crying would’ve felt like defeat.

It wasn’t that her father didn’t love her, he just didn’t think there was a future in fashion and thus thought of it as an utter complete waste of time. He believed in stability, practicality, things that stayed inside the lines. Lila never did. Her mother had been the opposite, soft-spoken, full of color herself. When Lila was little, she’d sit beside her while she pieced scraps of Ankara into little dresses for her dolls. “Make it bright,” her mother would say, “so even rainy days remember the sun.” Maybe that was why Lila never learned how to live quietly.

Growing up, people had laughed at her dressing, the girl who mixed adire with sneakers, who dyed her tote bags, who wore gele to casual events. For a while, she’d hidden. Then one day, she realized something: if she laughed first, they couldn’t use her joy against her. So she did. Every single time. And the laughter became real again.

That was the day she stopped dressing to be accepted and started dressing to be herself.

By noon, she was in class. Lila glanced across the room at the easels, the scratch of charcoal, the smell of linseed oil, the hush of concentration. Everyone looked serious, intentional. Except one boy at the far end. He didn’t use color, just grey and black. His lines were clean but sad, like he was building cages instead of art.

She wondered how anyone could live like that, in silence. Her sketchbook lay open, chin resting on her hand, as Professor Reed spoke about “perception, art, and emotion.”

“Your semester project,” he said, pacing slowly, “will focus on Art in Motion, exploring how creativity and perspective shape human experience.”

The class murmured, scribbling notes. Lila’s pen flew across her page, tracing a quick swirl beside the word motion. She didn’t know exactly what her piece would be yet, but she could already feel it stirring, something that would move, breathe, and speak without words.

As she packed her things, Lila’s mind wandered back to lunch, to Ethan Cole, the boy who spoke like every word cost him something.

He hadn’t said much, but there was something about him that lingered. The way he looked at people without really looking at them. Like he was half in the room and half somewhere else entirely. She couldn’t tell if it was arrogance or sadness, maybe both.

Still, his silence had made her curious. People like that always did. The ones who guarded their calm like it was sacred. The ones who looked allergic to joy.

“You can’t paint life if you don’t feel it,” she muttered to herself, flipping her sketchbook closed.

She wasn’t sure if she was talking about him or herself.

That night, in her dorm, Tolu was eating chin-chin on her bed while Lila sat cross-legged on the floor, her sketchbook open. She flipped through pages of designs, adire swirls, Ankara cuts, notes on structure and texture.

Tolu glanced at her. “You’re not even resting. Didn’t class just end like five minutes ago?”

“Some of us have dreams, babe,” Lila said without looking up.

Tolu smirked. “And some of us like our sanity.”

Lila chuckled. “I’ll have time for sanity when I’m done with this project, my scholarship is riding on my grades and this project.”

Tolu interjected, “I’m sure you’ll crush it as you always do.”

She paused to text Tolu’s phone, a meme of someone drowning in fabric rolls with the caption: Me by next week.

Tolu’s laughter filled the room. “Omo, you’re mad.”

Lila smiled softly and returned to her sketchbook. Her pen traced the shape of a flowing dress, lines blooming into patterns.

“This project,” she whispered to herself, “has to work.”

Because it wasn’t just a project. It was her way of showing her father that fashion could build futures too, not just dreams. That it was a bridge between who her father hoped she’d be and who she was becoming. The room grew quiet except for Tolu’s steady breathing and the buzz of the old ceiling fan.

Lila stared at her sketchbook, the lines, the colors, the pieces of herself scattered across the page. Sometimes, when the laughter faded, the pressure pressed in like a hand on her chest. Her father’s voice. Her mother’s memory. Her own need to prove that she could make something lasting out of beauty.

She closed her sketchbook, palms resting on it like a prayer. Sometimes she wished her mother could see her now, chasing a dream that still scared her half to death. But she could almost hear her voice saying, “Make it bright, my dear. Always bright.”

So she did.

Outside, the city hummed, cars, crickets, the soft rhythm of life moving forward. And somewhere in that noise, she thought about Ethan again, the boy who looked like he’d forgotten how to see light.