Jamie let out a shaky breath. God, what was the matter with her? Kieran was just another girl, just one of hundreds of people Jamie followed online for all kinds of reasons. It just so happened that Jamie liked Kieran more than most other people she followed that she didn’t personally know. Maybe it was timing--she’d found her when she needed a distraction and Kieran had proved to be the best of them--or maybe it was just Kieran herself. She was everything Jamie wanted to be: brave, ambitious, creative, funny. She was amazing.

So what if all Jamie could bear to do was turn the damn thumbs-up blue.

Jamie slowly released the pillow she’d been hugging to stare at the short string of comments they’d shared. Others had replied to Kieran’s reply, but the YouTube starlet hadn’t written again. That wasn’t strange as Kieran tended to do fifteen minute Q & A bit post-upload and then bugged out for greener pastures when the ‘follow me’, ‘marry me’, ‘watch my channel plzzzzz’ comments started. None of that bothered Jamie, she hardly noticed, really. It was that thumbs-up, though. It was blue. She’d never noticed how blue before.

Get it together. It’s just an icon.

Shaking herself free of her preoccupation, Jamie clicked back to Corinne’s new music video to restart it from the beginning. Slowly, she leaned in to inspect the screen. She’d watched this video so many times she must have memorized each individual frame, and yet...had the singer’s space suit been that bright a shade of glittering gold at first? It was blinding. She smiled softly. Her best friend Nix would have worn it in a second, whether she could pull it off or not.

When Corinne began to dance in front of a bold blue flag (#0047ab; between a breath mint and a midday sky) Jamie was reminded again of the strange feeling that had filled her chest when she saw Kieran’s comment.

“I don’t even like blue!” she complained aloud to her empty bedroom.

Her phone buzzed again, another name in blue, not Kieran. Jamie replied absently, noticing for the first time how red the background to her own userpic was. She adjusted her screen’s brightness but the vibrancy remained. That’s not right.

She swiped down the screen, glancing over every userpic, all of them the usual suspects. Some were even friends of hers. Cecily with her barley-gold hair. Anderlee with his seafoam green high top fade. Sandra with her fire engine box braids. Hex codes #cdad00 , #1ed565 , #ce2029, respectively. She knew those colors.

She knew those colors as well as anybody who’d grown up learning the Master Guide of Grey Shades to High Pigment issued by the Greymann Institute before Grey Books came in vogue. For every color on the spectrum of visible light there was an equivalent shade of grey. Thanks to Kieran and other fashion bloggers, Jamie Lovely was fluent in coordinating them all, but she had never been able to see them before.

Gently, as though afraid her screen would fade back into grim grayscale, she scrolled from tab to tab watching 90% deep gray sink into bubblegum pinks or wash into lush peach yellow hues. It wasn’t just her computer. Her hands were cast a hyper electric blueish-white beneath the screen light. Her skin was light brown, freckled darker here and there. A quick selfie revealed her face to be slightly lighter and just as freckled--nothing new there save the shade of her eyelashes against her cheeks and depth of her earth brown eyes.

She got up from her bed to inspect her room. Her walls were red brick and stark white mortar. The curtains enclosing her bed were sheer gossamer white run through with fine gold thread. The soft fairy lights that lined the ceiling were yellow-gold and left her bedroom in a soothing haze. Her floors were a deep wood brown, brown like mud, shaped and baked in a kennel, then polished. Her throw rugs were deep navy blue that matched her sheets. A weird nautical theme she’d loved as a kid and hadn’t outgrown.

Her nightgown was yellow, too. She had loved yellow without being able to see it. She loved it now.

She could see it all. She could see every single color.

She turned back to her abandoned laptop, to the video still cycling through related video recommendations on her screen.

Jamie could finally see every color there was and, if she wasn’t entirely mad, she thought she knew why.