The Infinite Noise (The Bright Sessions, #1)

by Lauren Shippen

Quiet. Blue-green. Not sharp like red and orange, but deep. Endless. It fills me up, empties me out. Clears out the sludge, the pins and needles, but makes me tense. Restless. I open my eyes. Find his. Adam.

I’m gripping so hard on the precious thing in my hands so that it doesn’t float away that I just might break it instead.

He’s about to bolt—the soft breeze has come and the fragile thing is being blown out of my hands.

“If he’s blue and I’m yellow, being around him makes everything green instead of just a mess of a bunch of different colors smashed together and I guess … I guess I just really like being in that green place. It’s just really … things are clearer when they’re green. They’re easier to understand. Like getting to the green helps understand the yellow even better, you know?

That huge, powerful ocean is still there. I thought I could banish it. I thought that not keeping secrets anymore, that giving in to our butterflies, would wipe the black days away.

Adam was my anchor, keeping me from spinning out, and I was a boat for him on the vast, deep ocean that is his emotions, and things were so good that I started thinking about us in cheesy-ass metaphors, apparently.

I’m determined to be here for Caleb. To be “green” as he calls it. To be normal.