"Yeah! Got picked on a bit when I was a kid because of that but after I bit one of the other kids hard enough to draw blood they stopped that."

"Grey schools have so much of a problem, and I don't know what should be done about it."

"Yeah. After that I actually got in some more trouble when I tried to stand up for other kids that were being bullied. First time I broke my arm was when a bunch of other kids decided to gang up on me but at least that the school punished."

"Well, it's good that they draw lines sometimes somewhere."

"It's just kids being kids. Some roughhousing is normal at that age. Do you remember when you were that age? Surely you wouldn't have wanted adults meddling. Oh he'll be better next week. It builds character," he recites.

"You'll never fit in with your peers if you call in authority figures over every little thing. She says you fell down the stairs, and let's be honest, that sounds like something you'd do. Of course emotions were running high after the big match. I'm sure your little friends were just upset that you didn't qualify for the next grade of team, they want to play with you, don't you want to play with them. Why do you even have encrypted documents."

"—encrypted documents?"

"So people wouldn't read my diary."

"...and why were they trying to read your diary, what the fuck."

"Because they were jerks."

Sigh. "Grey kids."

"In fairness, there were less jerky grey kids. They just weren't as memorable."

"I mean yeah but they also didn't do anything about the jerks. It's, like you said, a problem."

"I don't think I blame my fellow three year olds for not standing between me and jerks. That's a lot to put on a kid who has to keep coming back to school every day themselves too."

"I don't blame them, but... like, I'd thank them? And it would've been much easier to have had some help."

"Yeah. There were some okay kids who'd give me notes if I missed school and stuff, but it would've been nice to have backup and friends."

"To be honest the problem is more that the kids—don't really feel like they can, I think? Or, there's the whole environment set up, if the adults don't do anything or even approve of it, then the kids keep the status quo. And then they grow up into adults who think that's just a normal part of growing up, and the bullied kids won't actually go work at grey schools."

"Yeah, you get the teacher track orange kids floating around but they're not really embedded in the same way."

"Yeah. They mean well, but..."

"Have to be respectful of the other caste's culture. I wonder if oranges' teachers are less - conformist that way -"

"How do you mean?"

"Because an orange doesn't have to be respectful of orange culture in the same way, doesn't have to recuse their judgment."

"Ah, yeah, makes sense. But it's not even just that, because even if there was an orange that didn't recuse judgment they wouldn't be hired or would be fired fairly quickly if it looked like they were interfering with grey culture."

"There's probably room for the occasional teacher to spend their entire career trying to make a difference and playing career politics well enough to keep their job - or just start a weird little grey school with different rules where everyone knows what's up when they enroll - but yeah it's not a good overall pressure."

"And one teacher can't really change much large-scale."