Colors No One Else Can See, I

“If you were a number, you would be a seven.”

Jonathan seemed a little offended as she spoke those words, much to her regret. She bit her lips. She didn’t mean he was a seven out of ten. She didn’t mean he was an average man. Not at all. On the contrary, she was letting him one step deeper into her heart.

“I meant your name. Your name has a color similar to the number seven.”

“What are you talking about, Anne?” Jonathan frowned.

“Remember when I told you about how I see colors that no one else can see, for some reason?” she tried to force confidence in her voice. She knew exactly what would happen next: she would get laughed at or shunned for her eccentricity. Jonathan was a very close friend of hers. He was a very nice guy. But what did that have to do with him believing the weirdness she was blabbering about?

Jonathan woke her up from her thoughts when he nodded in her peripheral vision. “Well,” she went on, suddenly unsure of herself, “I just thought it would be fun to tell you that … if you were a number, you would be a, umm, seven.”

“Why would anyone ever be a number, though?” he frowned, staring into space. Anne realized it was definitely a mistake to have talked so easily about this in front of him.

Ever since she could remember, she could see colors in space—in her mind’s eye, to be more accurate. She never knew why or how. She just knew that the S was always yellow and that the 5 was the nerd of the family. The 6 was logical too, but the 6 wasn’t a nerd. She was more of a … wise owl that all the other animals sought out when they had a problem.

She didn’t tell people about that much, mostly because they called her a liar or just laughed her in the face. It hurt every time because she wasn’t making that up—it was too weird to make up, anyway. One friend in eighth grade found it fascinating that Tuesdays were apple green, just like March, but that was only one out of ten people that she’d told. Now Jonathan was the eleventh. She had hoped he would be different, that he would understand, or at least find it a fun, trivial topic to talk about, but she was wrong.

“I think you’re more of a five than a seven,” Anne said half-absentmindedly. “I think personality matters more than color.”

She was already gathering her stuff, trying her best to put her fake nonchalance on. She did her best not to look him in the eye. She didn’t want to see the strangeness he regarded her with now. She wanted to be able to convince herself that Jonathan hadn’t done anything wrong.

“See you tomorrow?” she said with her old air of confidence. Hardness, even. Perhaps. “I gotta run. Andrew needs my help for his quiz tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I’ll see you around,” Jonathan said with a sweet smile. “And … I’ll keep thinking about the five and the seven until we meet tomorrow and you can explain more.”

Anne smiled politely. She knew he was only saying that because he sensed that she was hurt. She knew he couldn’t care less about the fives and the sevens—and the rest of the dysfunctional family of numbers if he knew enough about them. “Yeah, keep trying to find the logic behind it,” she grinned and slid her backpack onto one shoulder and started walking away.

Damn it, she cursed as she realized she had forgotten her headphones at home. Her sister had borrowed them, and she’d completely forgotten to ask her about them.

Great, she sighed. This is just great. A boring ride home.

She took the subway like she did every day, but nothing blocked out the noise around her. Desperate for a distraction, she tried to make a symphony out of the sound of the wheels on the railway. It was dull at first, but then her mind fell into a stable pattern of thought. Her body relaxed, and her mind was having the time of its life with all the colors. True, the dark gray pattern that was cut by a faint orange line twice every half a second was little fun compared to the vibrant colors she saw whenever she had her earphones on and listened to her favorite band, but it was fun enough.

She thought again about Jonathan and decided that she was making a big deal out of it. After all, she didn’t have a name for the ‘phenomenon’ she had. She didn’t even know if it was a thing. She didn’t know if more people had it. She didn’t know how to look for people who shared her eccentricity.

Just enjoy it, she told herself as she lay her head back on the subway and let the dark gray and the faint orange fill her brain.

“Anne!” an excited voice picked her up from her inner world. “Anne, hi! It’s me!”

Anne looked up, a little dazed by the transition between her inner and outer worlds. It got her every time. “Oh, hi …”

She knew his name had a P. Or an L. It was a light blue name. But it was strong light blue, which suggested both a P and an L at once.

“Phillipe!” she said more loudly, a broader grin on her face. “I’m sorry, I just drifted away a little bit. You practically picked me up from a trance.”

“Oh, sorry about that,” he grinned back, but his eyes held a little guilt. “I just wanted to say hi. It’s been, what, four years?”

“Yeah,” she smiled softly, “since graduation. And please, do feel free to join me. I remember your home lay at the end of the line?”

He smiled with a frown. It was very impressive that she still remembered that miniature detail. In fact, it fascinated him that she remembered his name at all. They never really talked much during college. Ironically, they met more often on the subway than on campus. But he always held a certain fondness of her. She was … different.

“I haven’t seen your name on any book covers in the bookstores,” she started. “I guess that book of yours hasn’t come out to the world yet?”

“No,” he shrugged with a grin. “I’m trying, but … I don’t know, maybe I’m not good enough yet.”

“Oh, come on. You have such a beautiful way with words! I remember every single story you wrote. I think about them often.”

“That’s so sweet of you,” he smiled. “Thank you. Well, I kind of fell out. ‘Writer’s block,’ if you can call me a writer at all. Actually, lately I’ve been trying to overcome that. I joined this workshop where we just meet and discuss our writing throughout the week. It’s a bit hectic with work and all, but, umm, well, it … brings joy to me, to be honest.”

“Oh, okay!” she made a face that showed a lot of excitement. “Well, how does it work? I mean, do you just write about whatever you want?”

“No, I wish,” he chuckled. “No, we have writing prompts. I’m supposed to meet them tomorrow, and I still haven’t figured out what to write yet.”

“Well, what’s the week’s theme?”

“Number nine.”

“What?” she grinned. “That’s … I thought it’d be a bit more explicit.”

“No such luck,” he started laughing. “But I guess it can be anything. I mean, it can be a room number where horrible—or wonderful—things happen. It can be the time. It can be nine o’clock. And something special is supposed to happen then. And, to the world’s great fortune, I’m the one who’s supposed to write about that special something. It’s a bestseller already!”

She joined in his laughter. He had a very sweet laugh, very quiet even at its loudest. Faint orangish brown, like cinnamon and pumpkin spice and autumn leaves, but without the crisp. “I have an idea. Well, I mean, can you write about something fantastical, surreal, or does it have to be realistic?”

“I can write whatever I want as long as it has to do with number nine.”

“Well, I have an idea,” she said with nonchalance, pretending that the idea is still getting cooked up in her head, not that it was her everyday reality. “Number nine is a very elegant lady, you know, from the sixties or something. She’s wearing this, umm, slim, knee-length sky blue dress. Her posture is … quite enviable, I must say,” she broke out laughing.

She paused to see how Phillipe was reacting. She expected to find bafflement or something, but she found him quite attentive. His eyes were practically begging her to tell him more. “And …” she started, her tone slower, more unsure. “She’s carrying an umbrella. Maybe it’s about to rain. The street has quite a few puddles of water, but she’s far enough from any of them to have mud splattered on her skirt if a car goes by. But … she’s not really ready for the prankster number one.”

“Number one?”

“Yeah. He’s this little kid in shorts, a backward cap, and a yellow T-shirt. A bit mischievous. Not Loki mischievous, you know,” she laughed, “but the regular five-year-old kind of mischievous. He starts hiding behind her legs. Maybe they’re playing hide-and-seek or something.”

“With who?” Phillipe asked, almost whisperingly.

“Well,” she shrugged, “any numbers that you like!”

“Three, five, and eight. How’s that?”

“How about Two, Three, and Four?” she grinned, losing herself in the moment. “Two is the same age as One, his younger twin, and Three is just a bit older. She’s a girl, by the way. As for the Four, she’s … a teenager, almost. She’s in that age where she can’t decide what she is. Or maybe … Actually, you know what, she’s not playing with them because she wants to. At least not openly. She has to look out for her little brother, One.”

“Why not eight?” Phillipe asked with a childish pout. “I like eight.”

“Because eight is the grandma!” Anne said like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “She’s there to disperse the children, actually, and get One off Nine’s back, because trust me, Nine can’t move around properly in such a tight skirt!”

Anne started chuckling, but Phillipe’s lips were parted in a sort of gape. “Wow …” he said when he was sure that the story was over. “You … came up with all of this on the spot? Dude! I’ve been staring at number 9 for five days now. No luck. You’re a natural! How aren’t you a writer?”

“You flatter me,” she said shyly. “It’s cool. I … I’m only good with numbers.”

That was a lie. She saw numbers in colors, which made arithmetic a nightmare, because if she tried to add two blue colors, the result naturally needed to be some shade of blue. But that wasn’t always the case. For instance, 8 + 9 wasn’t 19, much to her frustration.

“Seriously,” Phillipe pressed it, “you’ve never thought about numbers before today? You never saw the nine as some aristocratic lady before?”

Anne seemed to struggle a little. She could tell Phillipe. Indeed, she wanted to. But what then?

“No,” she lied, hiding it with a sheepish smile. “I’ve never really considered this before. I’m just trying to help out a friend.”

“Well, can I text you later if I get stuck with any of the details? You’ll remember them better.”

“Of course!” she said delightedly. “But … wait, isn’t this a bit too weird for your writing prompt? What would the others say about this?”

“They’ll probably call me a genius, and then I’ll be king of the workshop for about five seconds before I give you all the credit and go back to my humble status as a struggling, mediocre writer.” His smile was beautiful. It was … proud.

“You let me know how that goes, okay?” she got up. Her stop had come. The doors were about to open. “It’s been nice seeing you again, Phillipe.”

Phillipe’s smile grew wider. It was the first time she noticed he had dimples. “Thank you,” he warmly said. “This was brilliant. I hope we can discuss the alphabet one day.”

“Ohhhh,” she said with a loud, carefree chuckle as she got off, “that should definitely be fun! They’re one crazy people!”

Phillipe could still hear her chuckle through the closed subway doors. It echoed in his mind long after she got off. When he went back home, he threw his things on the bed and sat down at his laptop immediately, a wide, idiotic grin lighting up his face.

As for Anne … she didn’t feel bad about her headphones anymore.

October 26th, 2019