The playroom at Sunny Nursery School was buzzing like a beehive. Children were building towers of blocks that came crashing down with a racket, drawing cars with enormous wheels, and in the play kitchen, they were cooking soup from sand and dandelion leaves. Laughter and cheerful chatter were everywhere. Only in a small corner by the sink was it quiet.
Lena stood there, looking at her reflection in the mirror. She gently traced her finger over her eyelids. One eye was deep and brown like a shiny chestnut that had just fallen from its prickly case. The other was fresh and green like spring grass after the first rain. All the other children had matching eyes. Two blue, two brown, two gray. Only hers were different. She felt a little... broken. Like a toy that had been accidentally given the wrong part during assembly.
“What are you staring at?” her friend Adam ran up to her and poked his head next to hers. “Oh, you have a little chocolate smudge,” he laughed, pointing to her chin.
Lena quickly wiped her chin and frowned. “I’m not looking at a smudge. I’m looking at my eyes.”
Adam looked her over. “What’s wrong with them? They’re nice. The brown one is like chocolate, and the green one is like a little frog.”
This didn’t help Lena. A frog and chocolate. What kind of a pair was that? She sighed and quietly shuffled back to the others, but she didn’t feel like playing. She sat on the carpet and just moved blocks from one pile to another.
Miss Flower, whose hair was like sunbeams and whose smile was as warm as hot cocoa, noticed her quietness. She was just about to go over to her when the door opened, and the headmistress stood there. A little boy, whom nobody knew, was hiding shyly beside her.
“Good morning, children,” said Miss Flower, and all the little heads turned to the door. “Starting today, we’ll have a new friend. This is Marco.”
For a moment, the playroom fell completely silent. The children weren’t looking at Marco’s new shoes or his t-shirt with a rocket on it. They were looking at his face and hands. Marco’s skin had a soft, light-blue color. It wasn’t a color like from a watercolor set, but a strange hue, as if the sky right after a summer rain had settled on his skin.
Marco nervously fiddled with the hem of his shirt and looked at the ground.
Miss Flower’s smile grew even warmer. “Marco, welcome. Come, we’ll find you a place to put your things.”
She took him gently by the hand and led him to his cubby. The children started whispering. “Why is he blue?” someone hushed. “Maybe he ate too many blueberries,” another guessed.
Lena didn’t whisper. She looked at Marco and suddenly felt different. That feeling of being broken began to shrink. Marco was different, too. And it wasn't just a small detail, like her eyes. He was entirely different. When Marco returned from his cubby, his gaze wandered across the playroom and stopped on her. He noticed her looking and smiled a little shyly.
After snack time, the teacher called them to the carpet. “Alright, friends,” she began cheerfully, “today we’re going to play at being painters and explorers. Tell me, what colors do you see around you?”
The children started shouting over one another. “Red! Like our toy car!” “Green! Like the leaves on the tree outside the window!” “Yellow! Like the sun!”
“Excellent,” Miss Flower praised them. “And now tell me, would our little garden outside the window be so pretty if only red tulips grew in it and nothing else?”
The children shook their heads. “No,” said Emma seriously. “There have to be yellow daffodils and blue bluebells too. My grandma says it’s more cheerful that way.”
“Exactly, Emma. The world is beautiful precisely because it’s so diverse. And it’s the same with us people.” The teacher looked lovingly at Marco and then at Lena. “Each of us is mixed from slightly different colors. And that is a tremendous gift.”
Then she brought out a special box. When she opened it, the children craned their necks with curiosity. Inside were small, safe mirrors, colored translucent foils, and a strange piece of glass that looked like a small triangular roof.
“This,” she said, holding up the glass triangle, “is a prism. It’s a little magician. It will show us the secret hidden inside a sunbeam.”
She drew the curtains to dim the room and shone a small flashlight on the prism. And then it happened. A beautiful rainbow appeared on the white wall opposite them. All the colors, one next to the other, spilled out as if from a bucket.
“Woooow!” came a chorus.
“You see?” the teacher continued. “Ordinary white light holds all of these colors inside it. And it’s similar inside our bodies. We have tiny, invisible colored specks inside us, called pigment. And nature, the most clever painter of all, has mixed them a little differently for each of us. For some, she put more brown specks in their eyes, for others, blue. And for Lena, she mixed brown into one eye and green into the other. It’s not a mistake. It’s her very own, unique rainbow.”
Lena took a deep breath. Her own rainbow. That sounded much better than “broken.”
“And for Marco,” the teacher continued gently, “nature mixed such a special blend into his skin that it’s a beautiful light blue. It’s very rare. Like finding a four-leaf clover or seeing a shooting star.”
Marco lifted his head and, for the first time, truly smiled. He no longer felt like an oddball, but like a four-leaf clover.
Then the teacher handed out the mirrors. “Now, everyone look at yourselves. What colors do you see? What color is your hair? Your eyes? Your freckles?”
The children examined their faces with interest. “My hair is like straw!” exclaimed Adam. “And I have freckles like poppy seeds!” added Emma.
Lena looked in the mirror, too. A brown eye. A green eye. Suddenly, they both seemed beautiful to her. One was warm and calm like the earth, the other lively and cheerful like a leaf. Together they created something entirely new.
“And now try looking at a friend through these colored foils,” the teacher suggested. The children took red, blue, and yellow translucent squares and laughed at how the world changed. Suddenly, Adam had purple hair and Emma had a green face. They discovered that if they put a yellow and a blue foil together, everything turned green.
As they played, Marco walked over to Lena. “Can I borrow your green eye?” he joked, holding a green foil to his face.
Lena laughed. “And I’ll borrow your blue sky,” she said, holding up a blue foil. They looked at each other for a moment through the colored windows and laughed.
Later, as they were drawing, the teacher asked them to draw a friendship garden. Everyone was to draw themselves as a flower. Adam drew himself as a tall, yellow sunflower. Emma as a pink peony with pollen freckles. Marco, without hesitation, drew a blue bluebell.
And Lena? Lena drew a strange flower that no one had ever seen before. It had one petal brown like tree bark and another green like moss. And it didn’t look strange at all. It looked interesting.
When they went out to the yard in the afternoon, Lena and Marco walked side by side.
“You know,” Lena said quietly, “I used to not like my eyes.”
“Why? They’re cool,” Marco replied, kicking a small pebble. “They’re like Planet Earth from space. A bit of soil and a bit of grass.”
Lena smiled. Planet Earth. She liked that even more than the rainbow. She took Marco’s hand. His palm was just as warm as hers. It was just a different color. And that was actually perfectly okay.
She looked at the other children as they chased each other on the jungle gym – brown-haired, blonde, curly-haired, with eyes of blue, gray, and brown. They were like a bouquet of wildflowers. Each one different, and yet together they formed the most beautiful and cheerful garden in the world.
And what about you, children? Tonight, when you're brushing your teeth, take a good look in the mirror. What unique colors will you discover there? Maybe you’ll find that you have a little piece of a rainbow hidden inside you, too.