The Color of Tuesday

The argument started over Tuesday.

Maya had Tuesday in orange. Not the background color, not the paint she had chosen on purpose. She just knew it was orange. She had always known. She could not remember learning it any more than she could remember learning that fire was hot.

Soren stood three feet away on the scaffolding plank, holding a dripping brush loaded with green, and he said, "Tuesday is green."

"What do you mean, Tuesday is green?"

"What do you mean, Tuesday is orange?"

They stared at each other. Below them, the library wall stretched forty feet wide, sketched in pencil outlines of a calendar mural. Twelve months. Three hundred and sixty-five days. Mrs. Bowen, the librarian coordinating the project, was on the far end arguing with a paint supplier on her phone, one hand pressed against her ear, completely not paying attention to them.

"I mean the word," Maya said slowly. "The word Tuesday. When I see it, when I think it, it's orange. It has always been orange."

Soren set down his brush. He pulled his notebook from his back pocket, flipped to a blank page, and wrote TUESDAY in pencil. He looked at it.

"Green," he said. "Dark green. Like moss."

"You're not joking."

"I never joke about colors. Wednesday is yellow. Thursday is a sort of brown. Friday is blue."

Maya's mouth opened. "Friday is blue for me too."

"Saturday?"

"White."

"Red," Soren said. "Definitely red." He was writing all of this down now, two columns. His colors. Her colors. Most of them were different.

Maya sat down on the scaffolding plank, her legs dangling. She had never told anyone about the colors. Not because she was hiding them. Because she assumed everyone had them. Like having a favorite ice cream flavor or knowing which direction was north. She thought it was just what words looked like.

"Wait," she said. "Do you have them for numbers too?"

"Seven is purple," Soren said immediately.

"Seven is purple," Maya repeated, and something electric went through her. Not because they matched. Because they were both doing it at all.

She grabbed his notebook and wrote the whole alphabet. A, B, C, all the way through. "What color is each one?"

Soren went through them one by one, not hesitating. A was red. B was blue. C was yellow. He was not choosing. Maya could tell because she knew what choosing looked like. She did it herself when she picked paint colors for the mural. This was different. This was reporting. Like reading a thermometer.

She did the same list. Her A was red too. Her B was darker, almost navy. Her C was nothing like yellow.

Soren looked at the two columns. "Most of them are different."

"But some match."

"A is red for both of us."

"A is always red," Maya said, and then stopped, because she heard herself say always and wondered what she meant by it.

Soren was quiet for a moment. Then he said, "Does anyone else have this?"

"I don't know. I never asked. I thought everyone did."

"So did I."

They looked at the mural wall. Twelve months of empty days, sketched in pencil, waiting for paint. Maya had been planning the color scheme for weeks, but suddenly she realized something. Her color scheme was not arbitrary. She had not been choosing freely. She had been painting the months in the colors they already were. January was white because January was white. March was green because March was green. She thought she was making design decisions. She was transcribing.

"Soren. What color is the number four?"

"Four is orange. Why?"

"What about the number three?"

"Three is green. Sort of a yellow-green."

Maya pulled out her phone, balanced on the scaffolding, and searched: letters have colors in my mind. The results came up fast.

Synesthesia. From Greek. Syn, together. Aisthesis, sensation. A neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense automatically triggers an experience in another. Roughly four percent of people. Some hear colors when they listen to music. Some taste shapes. Some perceive letters and numbers as inherently, automatically, permanently colored.

Four percent. She did the math in her head. One in twenty-five.

She looked at Soren. Soren looked at her.

"There are six hundred kids in our school," she said.

"That's twenty-four people."

"Twenty-four people walking around seeing letters in color and thinking everyone else sees the same thing."

"Or not letters," Soren said, reading over her shoulder. "Some people taste words. Some people hear textures. Some people feel music as pressure on their skin."

Maya sat very still. She was recalibrating something fundamental. Not learning a fact but realizing that the inside of her own head was built differently from what she had assumed, and had been different her whole life, and she had not known because there was no reason to compare.

"The thing that gets me," Soren said, writing in his notebook, then stopping, "is that we both have it and our colors are mostly different. It's not like there's a correct answer. A isn't really red."

"A is really red," Maya said.

"A is really red to you. A is really red to me. But we might be the only two people alive who both have red A. Or there might be a million of us."

"But it feels so certain."

"That's the thing, though," Soren said. "It feels certain but it's not consensus. It's just how our brains are wired. You could live your whole life being absolutely sure about something that's only true inside your own skull."

Maya looked at the wall again. At the calendar waiting to be painted. Everyone who walked past this mural was going to see the colors she and Soren chose. And some of those people, four in every hundred, were going to feel something click or something clash, and they would not know why.

And some of them had never mentioned it, because they thought everyone already knew.

Mrs. Bowen hung up her phone and walked over, squinting up at them. "You two haven't painted a single square. What's the holdup?"

"We're redesigning," Maya said.

"Redesigning what? You had the whole thing planned."

"We need more colors," Soren said.

Mrs. Bowen looked confused, then shrugged, then walked back to her phone, already dialing the next number.

Maya picked up a brush. She loaded it with orange and touched it to the first Tuesday of January.

Soren loaded his brush with green and touched it to the Tuesday right next to hers.

Two Tuesdays. Two colors. Both completely, unshakably right.