See, there are some things about driving that become automatic. You don’t think about checking in your mirror and glancing over your shoulder when you change lanes; you just do it. It becomes second nature. And it’s second nature to brake when you see a stop sign. There are three mental triggers to a stop sign. They do that on purpose, I guess, to make sure you don’t miss it. First there’s the shape. Then there’s the word “STOP” itself. Then there’s the color. If any one of them is missing, you might not consciously notice, but you also might not hit your brakes.

“What’s up with that?” I asked Norris, pointing out the sign.

“What’s up with what?” he said, completely oblivious.

I pointed to the stop sign again. “It’s blue.”

Then he looked at me like he was waiting for the punch line of a joke. Finally he said, “Your point?”

So I spelled it out to him, as if to a moron. “I almost didn’t see the stop sign because it’s blue. Who ever heard of a blue stop sign?”

Again, there was that punch line look from him. “What are you talking about?” he said. “Stop signs are always blue.”

The color of a sign is a little thing. Unimportant in the bigger picture. Inconsequential. Like the color of a person’s house. If I were to ask you the color of your next-door neighbor’s house, I’ll bet you wouldn’t even be able to tell me for sure, because it’s not on your radar—and shouldn’t be. You have more important things to think about. The color of stop signs shouldn’t matter.

Except that it does.

My parents had both been at the game, but came straight home after congratulating me on the win. Now Mom was posting embarrassing pictures about it, and Dad was watching his latest binge TV series when I arrived.

“Mom,” I asked, trying to choose my words carefully. “What would you say is the exact color of a stop sign?”

She looked up from her laptop, and, just like Norris, she had that look on her face like it was some sort of trick question.

“Blue,” she said. “Just . . . regular blue.”

“So, no shades of any other color?” I prompted. “Like maybe . . . red?”

She furrowed her eyebrows and took a deep breath, like she sensed the coming of a storm. She closed her computer. “Are you feeling all right, Ash?”

“I’m fine,” I snapped. “I just asked a question. Why do you have to go and think something’s wrong just because I ask a question?”

She kept her cool, even though I hadn’t. “Because it’s a strange question,” she said.

I opened my mouth to argue how unstrange this question was, but realized it was no use. The more I tried to defend it, the stranger it would seem.