By the time June arrived, Brookvale shimmered with heat. The campus windows caught the sun and scattered it like a signal no one could decode. Emma squinted against the brightness as she crossed the courtyard, her lab bag slung over her shoulder, a pencil tucked behind one ear. Every step rang faintly against the tiles—sharp, rhythmic, deliberate.

Inside the lab, the air was cooler but dense with the scent of alcohol and ozone. Ms. Green was already drawing on the board, lines of color arcing across the black surface like fragments of a rainbow.  

“Today,” she announced, “we translate color into data. Emission and absorption spectra—how light reveals composition.”

Emma leaned against the counter. “So, light has a language now.”  

“It always did,” Liam said, setting down a case of lenses.  

“Then maybe we’re just slow learners.”

Ms. Green gestured toward the prisms on each table. “You’ll heat the samples until they emit visible light, then measure the wavelengths. Every element writes its own sentence. Find the meaning.”

The burners flicked on, small suns born in metal cups. Liam adjusted the spectroscope with the same focus he used for everything—steady hands, eyes like precision instruments. Emma, half-listening to the hum of other groups, noticed how the light refracted off his glasses into faint halos.

“Ready?” he asked.  

“Always,” she said. “Even when I’m not.”

The first sample flared orange. Sodium. Predictable, she thought, but still beautiful. The second shimmered green, then blue, like water learning to speak flame.  

“Describe it,” he said.  

“It feels…alive,” she said.  

“Light isn’t alive.”  

“It behaves like it is.”

He adjusted the dial. “That’s diffusion, not personality.”  

“Same thing. Everything spreads if you give it enough energy.”

He smiled slightly, the kind that never reached full definition.

They took readings in silence. Each line of color was precise yet ephemeral—records of energy caught mid-translation. On Emma’s notebook, the graph looked almost like a heartbeat.

Ms. Green stopped beside them. “Observation?”  

Emma said, “The spectrum widens when temperature increases.”  

Liam added, “Wavelength shifts toward blue.”  

“Interpretation?”  

Emma looked at him, then said, “Maybe light gets restless when it’s too warm.”  

Ms. Green smiled faintly. “Poetic, but not incorrect.”

When the teacher moved on, Emma exhaled. “She just validated me.”  

“I’ll mark the date,” he said.

The third sample surprised them. A violet flame burst bright, almost blinding, casting their shadows long across the wall. For a moment, everything else disappeared—the chatter, the hum, the clock. Just the light, holding still.

Emma shielded her eyes. “It’s too much.”  

“Intensity spike,” Liam murmured, adjusting the filter.  

“No, I mean—look at it. It’s like it’s trying to say something.”

He glanced at her. “And what does it say?”  

“That it hurts to be seen.”

He froze, the humor gone. “You don’t have to romanticize everything.”  

“Maybe I do. Otherwise it’s just numbers.”

They cooled the flame, watching the color fade to white, then to nothing. The absence felt heavier than the light itself.

Ms. Green dismissed them early to compile their data. The room emptied fast, leaving behind only the smell of burnt air. Emma lingered, tapping her pencil against the counter.  

“You ever think,” she asked, “that light remembers where it’s been?”  

“No,” Liam said, packing away the lenses. “It just travels.”  

“Maybe that’s what memory is. Movement that refuses to stop.”  

He looked at her, then down again. “You’re mixing philosophy with physics.”  

“And getting better at it.”

He almost laughed but didn’t. The silence that followed was gentler than most.

By dusk, Brookvale’s windows were mirrors. The setting sun turned the lab into a room made of reflections. Emma stayed after the others left, drawn to the spectroscope’s lingering glow. When she leaned close, the faint rainbow on the lens shifted, catching her eyes and splitting them into color.

“Still working?” The voice came from the doorway.

She turned. Liam stood there, hair slightly mussed, his expression softer than the light behind him.  

“Just verifying data,” she said.  

“Or rewriting it?”  

“Depends who’s watching.”

He stepped closer. “You know, Ms. Green would call this post-experiment contamination.”  

“Maybe contamination’s just another word for connection.”

He stopped a meter away, enough to feel but not touch the warmth from the table lamp. “You ever wonder why we keep staying late?”  

“Because equilibrium is boring.”  

“That’s not an answer.”  

“It’s the only one that feels true.”

He exhaled, slow. “You turn everything into light.”  

She smiled. “Maybe everything already is.”

For a moment, neither spoke. The hum of the vent filled the room like a low note that refused to fade.

When he finally left, she stayed, lowering the lamp’s brightness until the glass caught the faintest whisper of color—violet, then blue, then gone.

That night, her apartment was lit only by her laptop screen. She set a prism beside it, the one she had borrowed “for reference.” The room filled with fragments of light, scattered like half-formed thoughts.

“Hi,” she said softly. “This is Sugar. Tonight’s flavor is light. It’s what happens when energy finds a voice.”

Her reflection wavered on the dark screen. “Every color means something—sodium sings in orange, copper hums in blue, but people? We’re made of every wavelength that refuses to stay still.”

The chat scrolled quietly.

*ByteTheory: Chaos refracted becomes meaning.*

Emma smiled. “Exactly. Maybe that’s what love is too—chaos learning to reflect.”

She lifted the prism toward the camera, letting the light fragment across her hand. “You can’t hold light, but you can learn how it passes through you. Maybe that’s enough.”

Across the city, Liam sat at his desk again, the same notebook open. He looked at the spectral chart they’d drawn together, the violet spike still circled in red. Beneath it, he wrote:

*Observation: Excess energy releases color beyond range.*  

Then, after a pause:  

*Hypothesis: So does emotion.*

He stared at the words for a long time, then closed the notebook, the lamplight bending through the window into soft bands that crossed his desk like echoes of everything they hadn’t said.

Outside, night spread across Brookvale—not dark, but layered, full of invisible color.  

And somewhere between wavelength and silence, something continued to glow.