“There’s more going on than just the stop signs,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Like I’d rather not talk about it over the phone.” Actually, I didn’t want to talk about it at all, but maybe with Katie, I might open up. Then she could call the men with white coats, or whatever color they wear these days, and have me taken away for my own protection, because God knows I needed protection from myself in the worst way.

“Can you come over?” she asked. “There’s something I need to show you.”

I had only been to Katie’s house once before, for a party. As I recall, in my old life, I had some beer at that party. In this life I had some beer and sold drugs to her cousins. Katie didn’t know that about my current reality. Something to be thankful for.

Her house was a bit nicer than my old one, but not by all that much. Katie, and probably all my friends, saw me as “the rich kid.” Maybe the only one in my gated community who didn’t go to some private school—because my dad believed in staying loyal to his alma mater. And because they named the new gym after him.

“I’m sure I wouldn’t have noticed this if we hadn’t talked about it,” Katie said, leading me to the kitchen. “But once I saw it, I couldn’t get it out of my head.”

We sat down at the table and she opened up a little kiddie coloring book, full of thick black lines around fully clothed animals. She turned to a page that featured a comical traffic accident, if such a thing is possible. An angry duck was yelling at a sheepish sheep, while a panda policeman tried to keep the peace. The page was only partially completed, without much attention to detail. The sheep was the color of urine, the duck the color of puke, the sky was a scribble of cornflower blue, and none of the colors stayed within the lines.

“This is my brother’s,” she told me. “He’s five.” Then she pushed the book closer to me. “Tell me: What’s wrong with this picture?”

As it was an intersection, there was a stoplight. The bottom light was colored lime green, the middle light was the same urine yellow as the sheep, and the top light was purple.

“Why purple?” I asked.

“Look closer,” she said.

I looked at the page again, and now I could see it wasn’t purple at all. Her brother had filled in that top light with red—but then had gone over it again with blue. The colors had just blended.

“His first instinct had been to make it red,” Katie said. “But once he saw his mistake, he fixed it.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“I did, but he just shrugged.”