No Blue In It

The lake had gone the color of a bruise, and the sky above it was doing something Maya could not stop looking at. Straight overhead it was still that clean, hard blue. But out where the sun was going down behind the water tower, it had gone orange, then a red that looked almost wet.

Same sky. Two colors. Nobody had painted it.

Soren was crouched over the paint bucket they had lowered off the pier and hauled back up full. Lake water, gray-green and cold, still swinging a little. He had a flashlight, the small bright kind, and he was aiming it down into the water from the side.

"Watch," he said. He clicked it on.

The beam went into the water and the whole path of it lit up faintly blue. Not the flashlight. The flashlight was white. But where the light cut through the murky water, the beam itself glowed a soft, dusty blue, like it was hanging there.

Maya put her face down near the surface. From the end of the beam, looking straight back into the flashlight, the light coming out the far side looked warmer. Yellow. A little orange.

"Same light," she said. "Blue from the side. Orange from the end."

"There's stuff in the water," Soren said. "Silt. Too small to see one piece. But the light finds them."

Maya sat back on her heels. Overhead, blue. Sideways to the sun, red. She looked at the beam. Sideways to the flashlight, blue. Straight through, orange.

Her stomach did the thing it did when two things she hadn't connected suddenly clicked into the same shape.

"It's the same," she said. "The sky and the bucket. It's the exact same."

Soren went quiet, then aimed the flashlight again, slower this time. "Say it."

"The air is a bucket," Maya said. "We're inside it. The little bits in the air, they throw the blue sideways. So when we look up, not at the sun, we're looking at the sideways light. The scattered part. That's the blue."

"And the sunset." Soren turned his head toward the water tower. "That's looking straight through the beam. All that air between us and the sun. The blue got thrown out already, kicked sideways to somebody else. What's left coming straight at us is the orange."

"The red is the leftovers," Maya said.

They looked at each other. The pier creaked.

Soren reached into his pocket for the little carton he'd taken from the cooler, the creamer for his dad's coffee. He unscrewed it and let three drops fall into the bucket, then swirled it with his hand.

"Why milk," Maya started, then stopped, because she already had her hand halfway to the flashlight.

Soren clicked it on into the milky water. The whole beam lit up, brighter blue than before, glowing along its whole length like a bar of soft light.

"Look at the far side," he said.

Maya cupped her hands around her eyes and looked where the light came out. It had gone properly orange now. Almost pink.

"There's no blue in milk," she said. "There's no blue in it. It's white. Milk is white."

"There's no blue in the sky either," Soren said. "There's nothing up there. It's just air and light and the bits." It was the part that would not sit down flat in her head. White milk, throwing blue. Colorless air, throwing blue. No blue anywhere in the actual stuff. The blue was not a thing you could scoop out. The blue was something that happened to the light on the way through, because the little bits, the ones between too-small-to-see and just-barely-there, grabbed the short blue waves and flung them off to the side and let the long red ones go straight on by.

"So milk is white," she said slowly, "because it's throwing all the colors sideways at once. All the tiny fat drops in it. Every direction. So it just looks white from everywhere."

"And the sky's only blue because the bits are the right size to be picky," Soren said. He was writing now, the little flashlight gripped in his teeth so he could see the page, and the beam wobbled and the blue bar wobbled with it. He took the light out of his mouth. "If they were bigger, it'd be white. Sky like milk."

"Cloud," Maya said. "That's a cloud. That's just when the bits get big enough to stop being picky."

Neither of them said anything for a second. A cloud was a piece of white milk sky. She had looked at ten thousand clouds and never once known she was looking at bigness.

Maya leaned over the bucket. The beam hung in it, blue along its body, orange at its tip, a whole sunset the length of her arm sitting in gray lake water and three drops of creamer.

"There's no pier," she said suddenly.

Soren looked up.

"There doesn't have to be a pier, or a lake, or a bucket. Anything with the right bits in it. Anything that throws blue." She was talking faster now. "Other planets. If they have air. Different bits, different size. The sky could be any color. Somewhere there's a kid looking up at a green sky and it's the same reason. It's just their bits."

Soren didn't answer right away. He was looking at the real sky, the enormous one, where the blue overhead and the red at the edge had started to bleed into a band of purple where they met.

"We're standing inside the bucket," he said. "The whole time. We've always been standing inside the bucket."

Maya tipped the bucket, just a little, so the milky water rocked and the hanging beam sloshed from blue toward orange and back. She did it again. The tiny sunset swung inside the pail, and above her the real one went out one shade at a time over the water tower.