Author's Note: I blame Nickel Creek for this (Green and Gray), but while that put the idea in my head, Dave Matthews' Grey Street is far more responsible. And props to whomever knows where the title comes from.
In the first grade, Lucy Fabray dreams in black and white.
Her life is full of color and energy and vibrancy. School is an incoherent and muddled spectrum, bright and loud and fun. The classrooms have bright blue carpet, the walls in the hallways covered in murals of every color, the seats in the cafeteria so orange they must be brighter than the sun. Every day is an adventure, from the books the teacher reads to them to the shrieks of laughter from her friends on a playground covered in soft green grass and littered with shiny plastic and metal.
Church is quieter, softer, more contained. Deep red carpet in the aisles, pews of rich cherry wood with dark blue leather-bound prayer books and black Bibles with pages leafed in gold. The stained glass behind the pulpit has every color imaginable, rocketing bright patterns across the whole church when the sun sets behind it.
When the organ plays and the choir sings, though, everything is even brighter than normal, and it's all she can do to restrain herself to simply bouncing on her toes between her parents instead of bursting out into the aisles to dance.
Home is dark and somber, but filled with laughter and singing and so many books that she never wants to leave. The white leather chair in her father's study is Lucy's alone, with a cheerfully patterned blanket always waiting, neatly folded, for her to return with her latest book. Each time she curls up in the chair to read, wrapped in the blanket even in summer's heat, she falls into the black and white of the words on the page, her imagination painting them with color.
Her dreams are a quiet respite, calming in their monochrome, from the excitement of her life. Even in the dark of night, her room seems to glow with color—from the slivers of moonlight sneaking in around the curtains to the soft yellow glow of the nightlight in the hallway across from her door, the lights melting together across the bright purple of her comforter and the clean white lines of her dresser and bookshelf. It's not until her eyes are shut and she's slipped off to sleep that she calms and relaxes, the simplicity of black and white washing over her in her sleep. Her dreams take her around the world and beyond it, on grand adventures like those she's only read of, but they remain happily, simply black and white.
Lucy Caboosey dreams in color. The world is no longer bright or inviting. It's nothing but sneers and mockery, peers throwing paper balls at her and taping signs to her back, teachers telling her to turn the other cheek and maybe try joining one of the soccer games at recess instead of reading. The laughter that once graced her home is now replaced by high, thin giggles, her sister abandoning chubby little Lucy in favor of gossip magazines and toenail painting sessions with her high school friends. The white leather chair was replaced years earlier, when her father felt it prudent to make the house more presentable for wining and dining clients from work.
The carpet of the church and rays of stained glass light at sunset offer the only color in her waking world, and she goes along with her mother almost every day, while Catherine is busy with her friends, and escapes to the quiet emptiness of the pews while Judy busies herself with whatever bake sale fundraiser or auxiliary luncheon needs planning. The quiet appeals in a way that the choir's singing once had, offering peace and simplicity and a lack of judgment, a place for a sixth grader to curl up alone with whatever book she's reading this week. She prays, some days, soft knees bruising on the cold slate of the floor as she asks for God to fix her, to make the world better, to take her somewhere better because she if God loved her as much as He's said to, He would whisk her away and let her abandon the taunts and distant family for a happier world.
Even that sanctuary, though, slips away, as her prayers remain ignored and school gets worse ("Lucy Caboosey," they whisper. "Lucy the elephant. She only reads so much because her parents feed her for every book she finishes") and home remains stagnant ("Not now, Lucy Q," her father will say. "I don't have time to go to the library today," her mother always says. "Go away, shorty!" her sister grumbles). Books are left unopened in the pew next to her as she stares at the stained glass and the cross. Would Jesus be disappointed in the elaborate plots for revenge she concocts?
The weight of the cross pushes against her chest even when she sits in the very last pew, the glass behind it threatening in its inexplicable patterns, until the guilt becomes too much and she stops coming along with her mother. She abandons the muddled mess of indecipherable light spreading from the stained glass
After that, the only color she finds is in dreams. When she sleeps, she's the most beautiful girl in the world, and people beg for her time and attention. She's thin and blonde and so pretty that the bright lights of the world bend to make room for her.
Quinn dreams in icy blue and cool green and Cheerios red.
The high school world is bright and shiny and glitters in a gilded manner. Sterile white linoleum with splashes of color, the perfect clean red lines of cheerleading uniforms and letterman jackets, the vibrancy of red dye number six as it washes over that short loud girl, the stuttering goth girl, the kid with the Jewfro, the wheelchair kid. It's nothing but color everywhere, but she moves through it feeling like a gray cutout.
Being beautiful makes nothing easier, and even though she's certain that fifteen is too young to think of the world as gray, it's all she sees. The black and white of her childhood dreams is nothing more than a fantasy of simplicity, the real world nothing but a muddled grayscale with flashes of false brightness.
Her dreams are nothing more than washed out memories now, exhaustion from the demands of maintaining straight As and being the cheerleading captain and traversing the landmines of social structure wiping away her mind's ability to take her to Narnia, to Middle Earth, to any of the hundreds of fantasy lands she created in her own imagination. Instead she falls asleep and travels back to the leather chair she read in, the sun-bright chairs in the cafeteria in the first grade, the first day she walked down McKinley's hallways to a sea of students parting around her figure and beauty.
She makes a point to know where she stands socially at all times, eavesdropping and cajoling information out of those below her. She knows that there are some in awe of her, who believe she will go anywhere; some hate her, the way she hated those who bullied her; some pity her, convinced she will peak at senior prom and never do anything else. The words turn over and over in her head every night as she lays in bed, awake despite her body's fatigue and her mind's desperate need for respite. She sinks into recurring dreams of drifting through a grainy gray world, coated in frozen blue and highlighted with slashes of red as she screams at the people who stare adoringly at her; they simply nod and smile and wave, leaving her trapped in something cold and blue that she can't escape.
She would set her whole world ablaze just to get away from it all, to take it all back to the better beginning, to bring happiness and monochrome back to her life. But instead, all she has is cheerleading and beauty and a precarious balance on a shifting grayscale.
The first night she sleeps in her new dorm room in New Haven, wrapped up under navy blue sheets and a bathed in the soft shifting lights of a digital picture frame—a going-away gift from Rachel and Tina, handed over with happy tears and already fully loaded—she doesn't dream at all, instead sleeping peacefully through the night. She balances classes with finding groups and clubs to join—the acapella group is out of her each, but there's a small Episcopal church just off campus that welcomes her into their choir, and she somehow winds up in the Student GSA (as much to guilt Santana into joining the one at her own university), taking some freelance photography assignments for the prestigious newspaper, and training to become a group fitness instructor at the gym—and weekly Skype sessions with the therapist from Lima she'd found with Rachel's help earlier that year. Her schedule is hectic and the leaves change more beautifully in Connecticut than they ever had in Ohio, basking her whole world in almost violent colors that are sun-bright and riotous. She's too tired to dream, her therapist says, but the color at Yale is enough to satisfy her.
The first time she goes back to Lima—Christmas, trading one blanket of snow for another in a different state, the brilliance of the Yale campus for the dreary dankness of Lima—and sleeps in her mother's house, she dreams in black and white. When she wakes up the next day, for the first time since a third grade bully named Steve dumped a soda in her backpack and called her a fatty, even the dull colors of Lima, Ohio look vibrant.