When I think back on it, my memory of that day is still there, clearly planted in my brain. I’ve tried to get rid of it but it always sticks, like the maple syrup that makes it’s way onto your chair when your family eats pancakes for dinner, the way mine used to all the time. When I really think about it, though, I realize that it wasn’t that day that it all started. It was the day before, and it was all because of Rosalie Blanchard.

 

Rosalie was one of those girls at school that always gave me a death stare when I walked by. For a while I never knew exactly why she did it, but over time I decided she was jealous of me. She should be, after all, I kept telling myself. I have everything. Ambition is something I have never lacked, and back then I had tons of it. My friends and I were going to be models in the near future, and everyone knew it. Money has never been an issue, and we usually spent our weekends shopping at the mall to find the clothes we had seen in the pages of a fashion magazine.

Rosalie’s glasses were too big for her miniature face and were always sliding down her nose. She pushed them back up so often that after sitting close to her in math class for half a year I was ready to grab the duct tape and permanently attach them to her face. She would slide them up and I would breathe a sigh of relief, hoping they would stay when clunk, they would fall straight off her face and onto her desk. Again and again and again.

It was the same way on that memorable day, the day before the day that I remember. Again and again her glasses fell, disrupting the entire class. It wasn’t that I really cared about my math grades (I don’t think models need to know math),  but it was obnoxious. After about fifteen minutes of class, my friend Erin slid me a note. “OMG, this is so crazy. Wish I could just glue those glasses to her face!” I laughed and grabbed my pen to write a response. Unfortunately, luck was not on my side.

“Serafina, I’ll take that note in your hand.” Mrs. Wales was an unforgiving teacher, and one that I particularly despised in that moment.

“Mrs. Wales, it’s nothing. I mean, it’s not a note. It’s just… well, it’s a....a letter! To my uncle. I really need it to stay a secret because there’s some personal family stuff in it.” I rambled on and on, and Erin gave me a look. I quickly stopped talking and turned red.

“A nice try, Serafina. Pass it up, please.” I reluctantly handed her the note, which she immediately unfolded and read aloud.

Rosalie’s face turned bright red and her glasses slid down her nose and onto her desk with a hollow thunk. I felt bad, but also a prick of something else that I later realized was satisfaction. Rosalie had gotten what she deserved for bothering us, and it wasn’t my problem nobody else was brave enough to tell her how annoying she was. Still, seeing her face made my stomach feel hollow.

After class, Erin disappeared without an apology, so I decided not to give one either. Rosalie had other ideas, however. She marched up to me in the doorway, blocking my exit.

“You know what?” she said defiantly, looking me in the eyes, her own eyes red and puffy. “You and Erin and all of your fashion model friends may be pretty and stylish, but that’s all anyone can say about because there isn’t anything inside you. You’re empty, all of you.” She took a deep breath. “Some of us don’t have money like you. Some of us can’t afford nicer glasses. You live in your little bubble where you’re some kind of princess or something, and everything’s bright and colorful and happy. Well, guess what?! The world isn’t like that! It’s all an illusion, everything you have, all those bright, happy colors, so I suggest you leave me alone. Your world will be a whole lot brighter if you treat people like they deserve to be treated.”

I couldn’t believe she had talked to me that way. If she only knew how hard it was to be me. To have the family that I have. In case you were wondering about my family, my father is… he’s gone. He died, about 5 years ago. He was sick, and they couldn’t make him better. When he died, I locked myself in my room for weeks, barely eating, slowly fading away. My mother, on the other hand, couldn’t accept his death. The warm, kind woman I had never known life without had hardened her facial features into a mask and never took it off. At first, it wasn’t a physical mask. She was looking for someone to blame for his death, and her face never changed from it’s hardened expression. First it was the doctors. They couldn’t fix him. She stormed into their office, shouting and screaming but never crying. That was the thing that scared me the most. She never cried. Not when he died, not when the doctors made her leave, and not when she turned her stone cold gaze on me, and I knew that she was never going to be the same. And she wasn’t.

She blames me for his death. I’m not sure why, but I know she does. I knew it even before she broke into my room and took all of the money I had saved up for college, because my father had said to save it for something special. She spent that stolen money on makeup, of all things. She always wore it, so much I could barely recognise her anymore. It’s been that way for years. She’s never smiled at me, or told me that she loves me. Her emotions are hidden behind her mask.

Rosalie stormed off, and I stood there in the doorway, my eyes filled with tears.

“She’s right, you know.” I hadn’t realized Mrs. Wales was still in the room. “You leave that girl alone.”

 

The next morning I was still thinking about Rosalie’s words. They echoed in my head the way sound ricocheted around the beach caves my parents used to take me to when I was little. When my family was happy.

I was so absorbed in my own thoughts that I didn’t notice, at first, what had happened. It took me a minute, as I sat there in my bedroom, to realize something was wrong. Then, slowly, I saw it. Or actually, I didn’t. I couldn’t see colors.

I screamed. I hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t even heard myself scream. But I did, my mother told me, and in a tone that said that she didn’t appreciate having her beauty sleep interrupted.

“The colors! The colors! I can’t see them! I can’t see them!”

“Serafina, that’s such a story. Haven’t I told you not to tell stories?” my mother said, exasperated. Her long nightgown had once been pale blue, but now it was gray. So was her dyed yellow hair.

I hadn’t realized how important color was until I couldn’t see it. My mother looked different without it, like all the layers of artificial beauty had been peeled away, leaving behind a hint at the woman I remember. The woman that used to care about me.

 

The doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me. My mother acted like that was my fault, like I was lying. I think she knows I’m telling the truth, though, because otherwise she wouldn’t have taken me in the first place. She wouldn’t want to waste money that could be used for her own beautification.

 

I was sent back to school later that day, after the doctor turned me away. Everything looked different now that color was gone. My friends, who had once stood out among the crowd, now looked so similar to everyone else that I barely recognised them. I spent the day in a daze, looking at everything as though I had never seen it before. It wasn’t until the end of the day that something clicked in my mind. Something someone had said. I knew who I had to talk to.

 

I found Rosalie in the library with her nose buried in a book. The idea to see her hadn’t worried me, but once I had actually gotten there I had started to have second thoughts. I was slowly backing away when she whirled around to face me.

“What do you want?” Her expression was stone cold, and reminded me of my mother. In fact, when I blinked, I saw my mother standing there, in her place.

“I….I...um…” I blinked, and she was Rosalie again.

“I told you yesterday to LEAVE ME ALONE!”

She was furious, and I didn’t blame her one bit. She deserved to be mad. I ducked my head. Rosalie seemed to notice that I wasn’t there to hurt her, and her stone cold expression softened just the slightest bit.

“Actually, I came to ask you something.”

“Really? ‘Cause I don’t do homework help. Sorry.”

“It’s not that. I wanted to ask…What did you mean about illusions the other day?”

“It was just something to say to make you leave me alone.”

“Was it? Because this morning when I woke up, I couldn’t see colors anymore. Explain that.”

Rosalie’s eyes widened.

“Remarkable,” she said, staring at me. “I don’t believe it.”

“What? WHAT?!”

“You have lost the illusion of color. You must have. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

“Color is an illusion?”

“No, of course not. But you… As I said before, you live in a bubble. Or did, at least. But when I told you about it, I guess the bubble burst. The colors you thought you could see were just an illusion built by that bubble. Now that it’s gone, you can’t see them.”

 

Nothing Rosalie had said made sense, but it was more logical than what the doctor had suggested, which was that I was delusional.

“Can I get them back?”

She took a moment to ponder this, then said “Maybe. Some people (your friends, for instance), only see color as an illusion. I, on the other hand, was trained to see the real colors. I could do it since I was very small.”

I decided not to say that she still was very small.

“So… how do I do it?”

 

A week later, I was sitting on the school roof, which is off-limits to students. I can’t see why, though, because it has a 4-foot wall all the way around it. I think it was made so students could eat lunch up here or something, but the rumor is that the teachers thought “Our school is so high up that all with all these suicidal teenagers, we’ll have a huge death toll on our hands.” Or something like that.

The thing is, though, the roof was really pretty. Well, not the roof itself, since nobody’s been up her since the janitors the last summer, but there was a really great view. Rosalie told me to meet her up there, so I could get the colors back.

After a few minutes of staring at the grey city below me, I heard the clatter of the big metal door to the roof. Rosalie climbed through the door and sat next to me.

“Hi, Serafina.” It was weird to hear a girl who used to hate me say me name without even a hint of distaste in her voice.

“Hi.”

“Are you ready to see color again?” She smiled, and pointed up. “Tell me, what colors can you see in the sky?”

“Grey.”

“I’ll tell you what I see. I see pink, orange, yellow, purple...and so many more.”

She stared out at the sunset, seemingly lost in thought. The dull gray glow of the sun setting deeper into the sky made Rosalie’s eyes sparkle dully.

“So… how can I see the colors, too?”

She jumped a bit, as if she had forgotten I was there.

“Right, right. So. Like I said before, you can’t see colors because your illusion of the world  disappeared, so now you can see without, shall we say, a protective bubble filtering out what you want to see and don’t want to see. You can’t regain those colors because they were never there to begin with. You have to find the real colors.”

A thought occurred to me.

“Why are you doing this? You hated me just last week.”

Rosalie smiled. “I have my reasons.”

“So you do still hate me! I should have known this was a load of crap. All that illusions stuff… I can’t believe I bought into it.”

“That’s not it at all! You’re right, I’ve always disliked you… But I’ve also never had a friend before. I figured if I helped you…”

I smiled, and for a second I could see the colors in the sunset before they faded back to grey.

 

Rosalie and I have been best friends for a year now. My old friends never quite understood why I abandoned them the way I did, but Rosalie was right- they’re all empty. I have the colors back now, too. They’re even brighter than before.

I said I would never forget the day they disappeared, which is true. But what’s more important is the day I got them back.

 

I sat in the car with my mother, on the way to the pool. She wasn’t swimming, of course. But I was meeting Rosalie, and in a surprise turn of events, she had agreed to drive me. We sat in silence a while, until she pulled up at the pool. As I climbed out of the car, she said,

“I just wanted to let you know, Serafina… I’m not mad at you.” I stared at her in shock, one leg out the door.

“ I was just mad, I guess, for all these years. Your father was a good man who never deserved to die. I took out my anger for his death on you.” She paused. “I’ve been seeing a therapist, and he helped me understand that. I’m so, so sorry, Serafina. For everything.”

I guess I was smiling when I got out of the pool locker room, because Rosalie grinned at me.

“I’ve never seen you quite so happy. What happened?” When I told her, she hugged me.

“Oh Serafina, I’m so glad for you!” She looked out towards rippling blueness of the pool.” You know, that pool isn’t going to swim in itself.”

As I plunged into the icy water with my best friend, the world finally felt right. As I fell, the grey grew brighter and brighter, until I couldn’t see it at all.