Once upon 1989, Jamie Lovely was born to a grey world. Yes, colors existed, an experience shared by billions of people at any given time, but they were beyond her perception. This was not a genetic anomaly. This did not render her strange. Color was a gift of love, a rite passage that came with age, a secret told to anybody but her. She was born without the ability to perceive the shades of the color wheel, as everyone was. The difference between Jamie and those who pored over The Greymann Color Institute’s Guide to Color Differentiation day by day was that Jamie had given up on seeing the rainbow. Colors came with love and love was just a precursor to loss. Jamie had seen enough of that. Twenty-seven-years-old and she had married her grief and the colorless life it promised. She had given up on love.

But love, fledgling and strange and incomprehensible, had not remotely washed its hands of her.

Here was where it started:

Jamie was awake at 2 am after staying in the shop till midnight to prep croissants for the next morning. She was nestled in her bed surrounded by the plushest butter yellow pillows (Hex code #eae455; butter at the perfect temperature for baking cookies) money could buy. She was scrolling through her favorite YouTube channels for something to watch. Honestly she knew what she was going to choose from the start, but she pretended for the sake of plausible deniability. When nothing else leapt out at her, she swiped back to her old standby: the best (the most daring, the funniest) beauty blogger in the game. She’d been watching Color Your World with Kieran Dillahunt since she was seventeen and Kieran was twenty, and in some ways she thought of the other girl as an old friend. They’d never really talked directly--Kieran had hundreds of thousands of followers on this channel alone and she had multiple channels for all her projects--but her videos had been there during the worst moments of Jamie’s life and she still considered them a comfort, though Kieran posted less frequently than she had back then.

That was why Jamie was surprised to get a notification that Kieran had posted a new video ten minutes ago. Kieran was just short of famous nowadays. She spent her time jet-setting between fashion events in NYC and LA and hosting parties in Ibiza or Dubai. She had two separate cosmetic lines on shelves at Sephora, was the face of Helzberg Diamonds UK, and had debuted a street fashion line with Adidas at Fashion Week the year before. In short, Kieran, better known by her online handle Dillahunting, was busy, usually too busy for YouTube anymore. Not that Jamie begrudged the older woman her success. Jamie wasn’t seventeen and mourning over her parents anymore; she’d finished high school and done the college thing, and now she was doing the single, self-made business owner who don’t need no lover thing. Both she and Kieran had moved on from living their whole lives online.

Good.

And yet, the moment Kieran’s new video loaded, Jamie’s face lit up like it was New Year’s Eve 2006. Kieran might have upgraded her accessories and swapped her cheap ombre home bleach job for a Vidal Sassoon blowout in decadent stormcloud (Hex code #4e656a; something between smog and a hurricane), but she was still the same girl who had titled one of her videos, Gel Liner: the Scourge of Our Times and stolen Jamie’s grieving teenage heart. For that, Jamie didn’t mind staying up a little bit later to give her one more view.

So she clicked play and settled in for half an hour of cheeky grins, south London drawl, gorgeous New York scenery, and wacky kitchen hijinks entitled, “Episode 239: Brass to Blue & Sassy Too.”

Kieran appeared with her hair in a Dutch crown and a dove gray blanket worn as a cape over her pyjama’d shoulders. It was 2 am in New York the same as it was in Knoxville; lights were all there was to see by. Kieran leaned close to the camera to speak conspiratorially, and it may as well as been the two of them alone.

“Have I got a show for you,” Kieran started, a mad twinkle in her eye. “Tonight we’re going blue, eyes and hair. Check your Grey Books: Hex code #4169e1. You’ll know it when you see it--trust me. You in?” She grinned like the kind of villain you root for before you learn that villains are bullies before they’re ingenious, and nobody wants to be #TeamBully. Jamie would be #TeamKieran, however, anytime.

Jamie flushed at her old crush on the woman rearing its mortifying head, and then laughed until her eyes watered as Kieran accidentally dyed her gorgeous hair something closer to royal purple (Hex code #7851a9; a shimmering violet that read metallic quartz on the Greymann Spectrum) than the blue she’d intended. Of course, her makeup was flawless. Kieran never missed a step there. Jamie ignored an odd pang at the thought of one more person she admired seeing the world in a way Jamie never could.

Jamie hugged her knees to her chest and smiled as Kieran ran down a list of events she’d be attending in the coming months. The woman was always so busy. Beauty conventions here, book signings there. She never seemed to stop. It worked for her, of course. She wouldn’t have been able to finance a move from Wellesley, where she’d attended college, to Manhattan otherwise. She wast on top of her game and had the beauty empire to prove it. Jamie didn’t envy her the money or the demands on her time. She only wished she could seem so happy as Kieran did all the time.

Jamie had a full collection of Kieran’s books, some of them even autographed. Her friends were kind enough to go on her behalf to get them done as Jamie hadn’t liked to travel much since her parents were killed in a plane crash a decade ago. Each autograph was identically sweet. To the lovely Jamie, hope to see you here someday! xox KD

It wasn’t going to happen, but a girl could daydream.

When Kieran had signed off the video with her usual wave and a grin, Jamie headed to the comment section. She’d already shared links on all her personal social media accounts (she was a big fan, okay?), now to leave a little feedback.

BumblebeeLovely I think this might be your best yet. Your eyes look amazing. I can never get my eye shadow to glow like that. You must be doing something right.

Simple, right? Easy as anything. Totally mundane. In ten years of commenting on Kieran’s videos she’d never gotten any sort of individual response. Not surprising considering how many comments her favorite YouTuber usually got for every video. Last she’d heard Kieran had had to hire an intern just to reply to a fraction of it, thus it wasn’t any real disappointment to her when she didn’t hear back. Her comment was buried instantly. Even after five months of radio silence, Kieran had plenty of adoring fans to keep her news feed in gridlock.

Jamie clicked on one of the Related Videos on the right and started to catch up on some of her other favorites while Corinne Bailey Rae’s latest single played in another tab on low volume. GingerBeer, her favorite baking channel, had posted something new while she was catching up with Kieran. She immediately declared her late night a business decision and gave up any plans of going to sleep before dawn. Tracy, her lead barista and patissier, could take the morning shift; she always knew what to do.

So engrossed was she in Ginger’s ginger-dusted cronut demonstration that she didn’t notice she’d gotten a reply until her phone flashed abruptly to life on her nightstand. Annoyed at the interruption, she grabbed it and flicked through her notice bar notifications, not surprised to find there were other people burning the midnight oil tonight. Color Your World had fans on every continent; it was probably morning already for some of them.

Her feelings changed when she saw the name of the person who’d replied to her.

Kieran Dillahunt herself had found her comment.

Jamie had to put down her phone for a moment while she caught her breath. She was twenty-seven-years-old. She owned one of the best bakery-coffee shops in Knoxville. She had paid off 50% of her student loans only a couple of years out of school. She had the best friend a girl could have. Jamie was an adult now, so why did getting a response from her teen idol make her feel like such a child?

BumblebeeLovely I think this might be your best yet. Your eyes look amazing. I can never get my eye shadow to glow like that. You must be doing something right.

---Dillahunting +BumblebeeLovely You’re always so sweet to me. I must have done something right to keep you as a fan. Thanks for all your comments over the years. They mean the world to me.

Jamie didn’t know what to say. The words weren’t there when she reached into her head for them. She was a talker, too clever for her own good if you asked her late father and just like her mother if you asked her mother’s parents. But when Kieran Dillahunt basically said, hey I’ve noticed you all along, Jamie’s fast-paced brain ground to a halt. She couldn’t find the words to say any of what she’d wanted to when she was a teenager, so she did the only thing she could do.

She clicked the little grey thumbs-up.

And she turned it blue.