It was a long day. It had started out ordinarily enough, with a dully ringing alarm sounding right next to the girl's sensitive ears as the turned over and opened blue eyes watery like waves to take in a light blue ceiling decorated with flimsy paper snowflakes and neon stars that glowed in the blueness at night but didn't in the half-light from the window. It had continued with steaming black coffee and a pair of rubbery eggs that tasted of grass and snow and rotted corn and burned her tongue but warmed her stomach. Next came more blue: blue mittens lined with scratchy wool, deep blue suede jacket, powder blue boots with black ties that held her feet snug and tight. Baby-blue fleece earmuffs with floury white lining. When she was done, she looked like a big sky-blue marshmallow, big and soft and warm. The outside was clear and snowy, a blue sky that went on forever but was hiding behind a smooth paint of marble-white clouds. The snow on the sidewalk could have been the tundra; the wind blew white dust all around her: swept off the ground, not sprinkling from the sky. It was a thin layer, pure white, and empty of any footprints except her own, each shaped and spaced perfectly by baby blue boots. The snow was arranged in hills and mountains, sharp points and overhangs and cliffs and craggy peaks. The wind whistled as it blew, and huffed in her ears in time with her deep breaths as she pulled along her oversized blue bulk. She wetted her lips; they tasted like salt from sweat and treated fabric and leftover snow and rotted grass. The saliva dried on her face. Everything smelt of warmness and salt and winter.

It was a long day; so long, in fact, that the rest of it passed without need for mention. There was placid white paper and grey paper and yellow paper, and dusty smudges of graphite, and hallways that smelt of vacuum cleaners or the furnace or chalk dust, and a locker that smelt of grey dust and red rust, and a cafeteria that smelled of ketchup and beans and brownies. There was yelling and talking and tinny-voiced murmuring and bellows and French 1 and Honors German and English Language and Literature, and compositions read aloud and tapping feet. There was the flutter of pages and the echo of bouncing basketballs, the drip of running water and the crunch of balled-up paper towels, a thud as they hit the sleek black vomit-scented plastic bag in the bin. There were the bells to wake her up, and lectures to put her back to sleep. There was black hair, red hair, white linoleum floors, green chalkboards, brown carpets, light blue walls with sporadic bright displays of glue and paper and straying outside the lines, blue walls and blue ceilings with icy fluorescent lights.

It was a long day, and by the end of it, it had been stretched too far, like it was too many days with not enough details blended into one, divided by a night where she hadn't slept and starting with a day that had never really dawned. By the time it was half over, time was slowing down, and before she knew it she was outside again. She was dressed like a blue marshmallow for the next time that day, two times however many days in a school year, and her breath for that many times was blue and smoky against a background of placid white snow and grey snow and yellow snow, and dirty smudges of ice, and streets that smelled of asphalt and exhaust and fried chicken and exhilaration. Old footprints had been covered, disturbed, destroyed in a flurry of powder from a heavy step.

The sky was no longer powdery blue, but naval officer-blue with buttermilk and cotton poking out as the gold buttons. It was blue salt on the snow, blue cast to the ground: a blue screen in front of the heavens, making blue shadows on the tundra peaks and the slushy blue sidewalks. It was a nighttime that wasn't yet night, at the time of day when time has stopped and can't be found if you're going to go outside looking for it. There were sounds, probably, but she didn't hear them: horns and rattling axels and the splash of slush, and a dog, somewhere, and a bird, and thin ice breaking under a leather-clad woodsy-looking foot and spilling veins of grey water in all directions. There must have been smells, under the air, like dinner cooking and exhaust fumes and probably salt and sweat, but she couldn't pick them out. It was too cold to see or hear much, and her fingers were numb in their sky-blue gloves with cotton ball white and cotton candy pink and cotton plant green lining, but her cheeks were made soft and smooth as porcelain and most likely white, and she rubbed one with numb wooly hands and smiled because her cheeks looked good when they glowed with the blush of indoor heat and she probably smelled like clay and synthetic doll hair and embroidered doll clothes and white pleather boots and the clean factory where they were all made. Wool earmuffs made her head itch, so she took them off, and then her gloves because she couldn't feel her hands, and then came her coat and under it was a navy blue sweatshirt, splattered with white paint from a class where there had been the scent of wet brushes and a puddle on the floor by the sink and a squeal and laughter and snowy landscapes with calligraphy initials in the bottom right-hand corner. The specks had dried and the ties were uneven and she left that on, because it was warm and soft and light. Besides, she was a fashion model of the night, now, with cold-struck cheeks and night sky blue sweatshirt and sweatpants, navy like the dark, and then for a few minutes everything was footstep, step, stomp, step, breath, step, mist, step, cold, step, warm, step, squirm, step, snow, step, breathe, step, turn, step, until she was home and shrugging off her backpack and stamping off her boots and sitting down to a dinner that tasted of beans and cheese and plastic blue plates and paper napkins that fluttered to the floor like snow angels, and she was nudging the grey and white cat whose hairs were stuck to her clothes, sitting in yellow light with yelps and yells and steam and a kitchen timer that rung right next to her ears when the quesadillas were ready and woke her up to the navy blue tablecloth and light blue walls, smiling and eating with lips that were losing their blue, across from a cheery blue family in a room with blue wallpaper in a world with a blue sky. It was a long day.