by Christine Hindman

The blue glints at me from across the quad. Brilliant, iridescent, glittering like light on broken glass. The sight of it hooks the air from my lungs and sends blood in bright red gushes along my arteries, infusing the optical centers of my brain with oxygen to better interpret the image. Can it really be, this coruscating, dazzling blue?

The blue, the blue, the blue. Head up like a gaze hound, I track the blue through a jumble of students meandering the sidewalk on their way to class or a meal, flattening myself out to slip between gaggles of identically dressed girls, skirting around groups of rough-house boys, always keeping my eye on that distant spot of color. I begin to ascend the hill that rises between me and the tall, puerile male with this amazing ornament of hair, blue hair colored like sunlight through a Tiffany iris, the blue I need.

To find the blue in a freshman's choice of hair color is very queer, extraordinary, something I never would have looked for. I accidentally catch the tail of someone's olive-toned shirt with my backpack and jerk away as I grab the sandstone railing and puff up pink granite stairs. Panting, my body slanted uphill, the logical side of my brain curses the affliction that makes me do this, makes me run after this blue boy instead of running to art history to take a test. But the genetic aberration that makes me want this blue is as inescapable as the biology that gave me my mother's short, stout legs. So, I climb.

Now the young man is moving too, heading past a pigeon-painted bronze, strolling with several parchment blondes and dust browns, unaware of his hair or his stalker. At this distance, he reminds me of my brother Mark, the way he used to saunter into the house with his pack of friends as they shoved against each other, laughing with wide smiles. Distracted by a moment's memories, I lose the terrain, tripping on uneven cement, sprawling, jamming my knee into the sidewalk. I roll over, grab my leg. The pain is fire engine red for a few moments, but simmers down to robin's breast with me rubbing my knee and hissing through my teeth.

Getting to my feet, I wave off a concerned bystander and glimpse the blue as it disappears past some oleander bushes at the top of the hill. Despite the jabs of pain in my knee and the complaints of my ribs each time my backpack bounces against my spine, I scale the rest of the slope between us, running to the fountain where he had been moments before -- praying- but I do not see the blue. There are four buildings, four paths around those buildings that lead to streets which branch into an infinite set of possibilities. I turn in a circle of confusion. Which way?

Hughes Hall. It was the general direction he had been heading, so I move quickly down the broad sidewalk past the science building, searching the multicolored crowds like the mother of a lost child. Where is the blue? Why can't I see it?

There. The blue springs into sight. He had stooped for a moment, bent to pick something off the sidewalk. That's why I couldn't see it. Relief rushes through me like a wind. He is waiting at the curb for traffic to ease, so I have only a few seconds to catch the shot before he crosses. I set up right where I am, pulling my camera out of my back pack, pointing the zoom, steadying my shoulder against the building as the eye of the camera searches for, and finds, the blue.

It dazzles me. For a fraction of a moment, I forget to snap the shutter -- an undertone of gold mixed with the blue hair dye must provide that eye drop of aquamarine, just a minute touch of green playing with the blueberry darks and cerulean lights, all perfectly swirled into the blue I need. I force myself into slow, deep breaths as I push the lens to maximum, filling the frame with blue, snapping shot after shot, working the motorized film advance almost continuously, following the brilliant blue hair until the camera begins to rewind. When I take the camera from my face, I can see the blue disappear into a forest green Toyota and speed away.

It's an hour's drive home. Sightseers and construction crews test my patience once I enter the winding road along the shore to my parent's lake house. My parents let me stay here while I'm in school so I can have my freedom, they say, not mentioning now that Mark's gone, they have their freedom, too, if I don't live with them. Whatever. It was hard for me to live at their house anyway, especially after Dad moved Mark's stuff out of his room last year. Guest room. Sure, whatever.

Once I get to the lake house, I toss my backpack on a chair and head straight to my darkroom, formerly known as the downstairs bathroom, without stopping for the Coke my brain has been demanding during the trip home. Plenty of time for caffeine once I have unveiled the blue.

I lock the door and flip on the red light automatically, even though there's little chance I'll be disturbed by even a phone call, and plunge into the developing process, unaware of my surroundings until the chemicals, time and temperature have done their work and fixed the colors to the film. After a thorough rinse, I pull the film from the tank and clip one end to a wire, then soak up water drops from the film with a sponge, sucking liquid from the brownish medium, barely touching the film at all. I should let the film dry now. I know that, and I fight my impatience to witness the results, to see if I really got the blue. In the end, I decide it is more important to have the blue right than to spoil the image.

I hobble upstairs and bandage my wounded knee. I make myself a tuna sandwich, get a Coke from the refrigerator door and try to figure out what excuse I will give for missing my art history test. Will the truth do? Just explain about the affliction, why I had to have the blue. Maybe an art history teacher will understand that.

This affliction -- I am a tetrachromat -- was only a mysterious oddity for me until I entered a study at the university and found out I am a biological freak. Not the kind of freak Mark used to call me when I was fourteen and he was a sophomoric sophomore, but a real one-in-ten-million kind of freak. There is a long, technical explanation of what a tetrachromat is, but here is the simple one: I see colors using four wavelengths where most humans use only three. I can match colors with machine precision, better, depending on the machine.

They thought I was stupid in preschool: Which block is the same as this other block, Lucy? None of them were the same to me because the cardboard squares were cut from different dye lots and were as distinct to me as a circle is from a square. So, I tell the teacher two red squares do not match and she sends notes home to my parents. All because of receptor cones in my eye that vibrate at this extra frequency so I can make four distinctions between colors instead of three like a normal trichromat. A kind of super power, one of the researchers told me. Ha. The most asinine super power I ever heard of.

That's it then. I'll simply tell my art history teacher I am a freak of nature who can see three million different colors where she can see only three-hundred thousand, so naturally I had to skip the test. Right. I read, pace, check my watch. It's been two hours, the absolute minimum. I zip down to the darkroom.

The problem with being a tetrachromatic photographer is that the process is built for trichromat: film, paper, chemicals, filters, everything -- all in three colors. To get the blue, I have to mess around in the developing procedure, combine red and green filters during exposure, vary chemical mixtures and exposure times until this photographic farrago yields to my visual needs. This is when I miss Mark the most. Not because he could help me get the color right; he was as color blind as I am color aware. I miss him because he always supported my passion for photography, something my parents considered a hobby run amok, even after I'd sold two pieces to a local gallery. Mark bought me my first professional- grade camera for graduation and always asked to see my work, even when some of the pieces were likely as distinguishable to him as tomato juice on red construction paper. He would have been glad I found the blue.

After a couple of hours and many misses, I place the latest contact print on the light table and put my eye to the magnifier. This print is as disappointing as the others at first, none of the frames are rendering the color I saw in the quad. Then, in the middle of the page, I see it, the blue. I raise up, rub my eyes, take a slug of Coke and tuck my eye back to the magnifier. It is. It really is the blue. I got it.

I scissor around the photo paper frame, trying to keep my hands from shaking too much, and begin thinking of names. After all, I can't just call it Blue like there is only one. This is the blue of the moment, the one that matters, the particular, precise, exact shade I need. When the rectangle of blue is cut away from the others, I hurry out to the Rainbow Room.

The Rainbow Room is my name for the Quonset hut behind the lake house where my dad keeps his boat, the Model T he drives in the spring, my mom's Tanzanite-colored BMW (the one they were going to give to Mark then tried to give to me) and a few other odds and ends. Inside, glued to the curved, corrugated metal roof, is my rainbow.

It begins in the arc over the front door. To you, I suppose it would look like inch-wide strips of color beginning with deep, ruddy reds, which fade into blood, then fire engine, then vermilion, and then you are in the oranges without really being able to tell exactly where the change took place. To me, there are thousands of tiny blocks of color carefully attached to the curved ceiling, each with a name catalogued in notebooks in my darkroom, names like 1950's Green for the color of my grandfather's sunglasses or Kilowatt Yellow for the color of a burning filament in a clear glass bulb.

There are over 240,000 colored rectangles so far: pictures I have stolen from magazines, paint chips from auto body shops, lipstick samples from makeup manufacturers, anywhere I could find a swatch of color. With the exception of the blues, there are huge gaps in each of the color bands where I haven't accumulated enough colors yet, but I have only been doing this for a couple of years. I figure I have about a million to go.

As I maneuver the scaffolding between rows of white, metal light fixtures, their full spectrum bulbs pointing toward the ceiling, I think of a name for the blue, Blue Yonder, because it was always so far away from me. I steady the scaffolding, then carefully climb to the arch of the roof. There's a spray can of adhesive on the dusty, wooden platform and a tiny breach in the otherwise unbroken band just big enough for the hard won blue. I fish the rectangle from my shirt pocket and hold it out over the edge of the scaffold so I can see Blue Yonder by itself one last time.

The myriad colors shimmering in a rainbow vary by only a few hundredths of a micron in their wavelengths; that's one millionth the width of a human hair, one thousandth of the thickness of a sheet of paper, probably the difference between life and death if you measured it in distance instead of time. My eyes drift from the blue to the ceiling, from the borders of indigo to the beginnings of green. Blue Yonder seems an insignificant tremor in all that curved space. I brush away tears with the back of my hand, then tack the blue into place.

[The first story Christine Hindman remembers writing was a story about a blueberry pie -- from the point of view of the blueberry. That was in junior high (30 years ago!) and she has been writing ever since. Her professional writing experience consists of a short but fun stint as the owner/editor of a weekly newspaper in Lenora, Kansas. Now, she is taking classes and creating stories that help her understand the craft of writing, and herself, more fully.]