And when she opens her eyes the next morning, she's not in the camp's bunks anymore. 

She's in a soft, comfortable bed, alone in a room. Birds are chirping cheerfully outside; the smell of cooking bacon wafts in. The vanity is carved with roses, almost ostentatiously feminine, and there's an old-style phone-- like it's from the 1950s-- and makeup. The closet is full of dresses.

There's no color anywhere. Everything is in shades of gray.  

....what. 

Well. She assumes she's dreaming. It's a nice dream even if it is greyscale. She gets dressed in one of the dresses, which for some reason fit, and spends some time playing with the makeup, which is sort of hard to do in greyscale but she can get it to look like something adjacent to her preferred aesthetic, and then leaves the room. 

"Hello, Raine," says a woman who for some reason is wearing high heels and pearls while she cooks bacon. "Did you have a nice sleep?"

"...yeah," she says. "I did." She's still kind of half waiting to wake up but this is — good, she thinks. 

"Well, eat up," the woman says, "you have a big day at school today. And the dance tonight!"

And Raine gets a plate of bacon, eggs, toast, and fruit. 

...okay. Sure, whatever. 

She eats about half of it, which is about twice as much as she'd eat in an average meal at camp, and — that's weird, actually, in her dreams she doesn't have a sense of taste. 

School, she supposes, however one gets to school. Maybe it'll be enlightening as to whether she's dreaming or not. Maybe it'll be enlightening about a completely different set of things. 

Apparently how one gets to school is by carpooling with Raine's next-door neighbor, who smiles at her awkwardly and blushes as soon as he sees her. A grayscale person blushing is a really striking thing to observe.

...cute. As long as she's in — wherever it is that she's in — she might as well take advantage; she sits as close to him as the car will allow. 

Eeep.

"Hi," he says. "Um. Are you looking forward to... school... today?" His voice gets a little high at the end as if he realizes that he has asked something very stupid.

"I think so," she says as cheerily as she can manage. "School's school." It's almost certainly going to be better than camp, but that's not saying much. 

"How's the dress you're working on coming along?"

The... what? 

Okay she can bullshit, she has bullshitted about school projects a hundred thousand times, "It's coming along!" 

"It's really cool that you can just like... make dresses. I keep accidentally hitting my thumb with a hammer in shop."

"Eh, is it really your sewing project yet if you haven't bled on it?" 

Nameless Carpool Boy seems slightly more comfortable. 

"I dunno, I generally prefer my blood being in my body. Mostly because when I see it I start getting nauseous. --I thought girls would be like that too?"

She considers making the obvious joke about girls and blood, and elects not to because she does not in fact have a period. 

"Probably some are! For me it's like, okay, my blood has literally gone into this project, it is my creation, all it needs is sweat and tears." 

"Sewing is more hardcore than I expected."

"Most things are when you get into them, I think." 

"I don't know, most things aren't hardcore at all. I'm a math person and there is nothing really hardcore about math. It's just memorizing a lot of stuff."

"I feel like I've known people who were hardcore about math! But yeah, I did say most." 

"Honestly I think most things are probably pretty boring. I'm glad sewing's not one of them."

She shrugs. 

"I'm sure for some people it is. For me it's basically impossible for making things to be boring." 

"Maybe I would feel that way if my chairs didn't keep collapsing whenever people sat in them."

"Fair enough!" 

If school teaches you how to make things Raine is more excited for it than she's been for school in.... honestly, ever. 

Helpfully, someone has pasted her class schedule into her notebook. (The notebook is not bright pink but has an aura as if it would be bright pink if colors existed.)

Her classes are:

1. Fashion and Design II
2. Home Living
3. Physical Education
4. Literature III
5. Painting
6. Concert Choir
7. History III