That was in April 2017. Many, many months later, here we are. With the help of my endlessly enthusiastic agent, Eric Smith, and the incredible support of Daniel Ehrenhaft and the rest of the fantastic team at Soho Teen, we’ve found fifteen other incredible authors to contribute stories to this anthology, and I could not be prouder to have worked with them. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all.

When people ask me what this anthology is about, I’m often tempted to give them the complicated answer: it’s about race, about being different from the person you love—how it can matter and also not matter—and it’s about Chinese pirate ghosts, and black girl vigilantes, and colonial India, and a flower festival, and a garden of poisons, and so, so much else.

Honestly, though? I think the answer’s much simpler than that.

Color outside the Lines is a collection of stories about young, fierce, brilliantly hopeful characters of all colors. And I hope you fall as in love with them as I have.

Love,

Sangu

Turn the Sky to Petals

Turn the Sky
to Petals

Anna-Marie McLemore

I guess I could start with the flowers, the hundreds of thousands of red dahlia petals gathered into baskets at the behest of a rich man. But that would make what happened more about the rich man than about you and me.

This is the way I would tell it, what happened between us. This is how I would piece it together from what I saw and the things you told me:

We did not grow up far apart. My school played yours in a handful of sports, so we might have met. You had that season on the soccer team before deciding that the practices took too much time away from the cimbalom.

Me, I never played school sports. I never even tried. There was never one I loved enough to spend my tendons on it.

You know what I’m talking about. You knew the first time I told you. Because the feeling I know in my ankles—the countless small tears, the sensation of muscle wringing itself out—is one you know in your wrists, your lower forearms, parts of you that you need for the instrument that has you by the heart.

Your gringo teacher often told you what immense promise she saw in you. She said that you would elevate the cimbalom to the level of great orchestra. You winced every time, shrugging away the insult, because while she thought of it as a carnival instrument, you always knew it to be the collection of wood and metal strings that gives music all its colors.