The Rainbow of Pens (Part Four)
Simon’s Choice
During that afternoon, Simon walks wistfully by the Penobscot River and through a nearly empty park with many evergreen and oak trees. He looks towards the sky and wishes for advice, or an opportunity to find his mother without Onitha. Certain clouds (whiter and lighter than the others) briefly part, showing a flock of geese and a couple of red-tailed hawks against the misty blue sky. As Simon walks down his street and inside, the rain has begun again and his eyes slowly fill with warm tears.
On the following day, Simon (not comfortable with the original idea of throwing the pen into his home’s garbage) decides to dispose of Onitha’s pen during school. Before he has a chance to do so, Onitha speaks to him again during a lesson, letting him know more about the subject than his classmates as they work, and later, distracting them by giving them sudden impressive magical sights to see in the schoolyard and sky from the windows (all of which are illusions made by her ink in the wind as well as from Simon’s finger-positions on her pen). During recess, she causes an angry argument between two boys (who have tried to ask Simon politely and with genuine interest why he draws during certain parts of class) by writing insults inches from their eyes and using her ink to absorb one of their voices and later echo it into the other’s ears to indicate that his friend had said the words.
I have been a careless, self-serving person lately, Simon realizes. I should have expected this to happen. Simon would much rather have advice for the best way to explain his imagination and why drawing is so special to him, and he instead has perplexed and caused discord between his classmates by having Onitha with him. He tells her that he does not like her solutions if they harm his friends or have him cheat for answers to lessons, and confesses his doubt of her truly knowing his mother’s whereabouts and condition.
"I’m sorry to do this, but I didn’t think that you meant for me to take revenge on people,’' he says before dropping the pen into one of the school’s garbage receptacles. Onitha simply warns him that this may be his only chance to search for his mother successfully, and that she could be in danger. "It doesn’t really make sense that you know these things about my mother and care this much about making me a great artist when we haven’t ever met or heard of you before," Simon answers as he leaves.
