Page 31 of Second Round

“I’m sorry, Jackie. Let’s sit down forminute.”

We sat back down at ourtable.

“I’ve gotta tell you something.” I exhaled. “I’m not into this stuff because I’m colourblind.”

“Oh my gosh, that’s terrible.” Jackie was as shocked as if I told her I was missing a limb. She pointed to her belt. “What colouristhis?”

“Yellow?” Iguessed.

She shook her head. “It’s fuchsia.” Whateverthatlookedlike.

“Look, I don’t want to spoil everything you planned. I guess I should have told you right away, but it’s hard for me….” My voice trailed off. It wasn’t really that big a deal, obviously I could function perfectly well in life. I just saw things differently from other people. But it wasn’t like I had lost anything Ieverhad.

But this whole place triggered crappy memories of my grade school art classes. Nobody likes to feel like afailure.

Jackie threw her arms around my neck. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t have screwed up more. And you poor thing, I can’t imagine what it would be like to go through life and not be able to see all the beautifulcolours.”

While I liked the feeling of her body against mine, I wasn’t so keen about her feeling sorry for me. I was beingawuss.

I pulled Jackie onto my lap. “It’s not a big deal. How about you guide me, and we’ll do somethingtogether.”

Her face lit up. “Really? Areyousure?”

“Yeah. But only one thing, and then we go for adrink.”

“Deal!” Jackie was all happy again. We walked over to the pottery shelf with unfired dishes. “Look, you could make a dish for Charlotte. Like a cereal bowl. You could paint a cat on thebottom.”

I shook my head. “No way. Charlotte could draw a better catthanme.”

“Okay, then you can do stripes. Anyone can do stripes. We’ll get different sized brushes for each colour. I’ll look after everything. Take these bowls back to our table and have adrink.”

I went back to the table and opened my beer. Jackie bustled over with a pan of paints and somebrushes.

“Okay, since she likes purple, I got a dark purple and a lavender. I added yellow, that’s a complementary colour so it will make the purples pop.” She pointed to each colour as she said them. “All you need to do is rotate between them. I got a few different widths of brushes for you. You can use one for each paintcolour.”

I nodded and got down to painting. She was working on two different bowls, one for each ofherkids.

“What colours do you see?” Jackieasked.

“I can see the yellow. I knew that was yellow before you said it. But the purples look kind of blue to me. Everything is more grey, at least that’s what I’ve been told.” Our eyes met and now all I saw was curiosity. “I’ve never known anythingdifferent.”

Jackie shook her head. “I love colour so much. I can’t even imagine what that is likeforyou.”

“It’s not a big deal,really.”

“Does it cause problems in real life? Like traffic lights—how do you know whentogo?”

I shrugged. “The lights are in the same position, and they glow. Once I got in trouble for running a guy wearing a no-contact jersey in practice. Coach was yelling at me, ‘Didn’t you see his red jersey?’ ‘Uh no,coach.’”

She laughed at that, and then we both kept painting. It was surprisingly hard to paint a straight line. But I found myself enjoying this. Not so much that I’d keep hunting for my fucking inner artist, but it wasn’ttorture.

“Sorry if I was being a wimp before. When I was a kid, I hated art class so much. I got laughed at allthetime.”

“It was the opposite for me. Art was one of the few classes I didwellin.”

“Oh, I can’t believe that. You must have been good in gym, you were a good skater,” Ipointedout.

She nodded. “I was good in gym too. But nothing academic. I’m a bigdummy.”

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