He made his way towards the building in which he was due, and saw coming towards him a woman of exquisite... intelligence. A real eight-point-oh on the cerebral scale. She had it all-tight jeans, a pencil thin waste, enormous... well, she was obviously gifted and could probably figure pi in her head to a thousand places, she even had. blue hair.

Jeff furrowed his brow a bit in a confused grin. Now why would she want to go and ruin such a fine ensemble with blue hair? Maybe it was the latest emulation, in accord with some hot rock group or politician. Jeff didn't find much use in such things, such hero worship. Most of them, when you got up close, were nothing more than drug-sustained public relations successes, and that went for the rock stars, too. Well, to each his own. To possess a body like that, Jeff could ignore pretty much any hair color at all.

He walked through campus, noticing that more than one head was blue now. Funny, he hadn't seen it on the bus. Maybe it had something to do with some kind of inane sporting event. The Fighting Panthers were gold and blue, traditionally, and maybe there was some kind of big game today. It's nearly wintertime, Jeff thought. Does that mean football? Basketball? Floor Hockey? Jeff wasn't sure and he didn't much care. Athletics had about as much place, Jeff believed, at a university as, say, orangutans. Or English majors. Whatever their color.

Or maybe it was one of those silly coming-out stunts. "Wear Your Hair Blue if You're Gay Day." Or something like that. They were always trying to pull off faky camaraderie like that. Jeff certainly hoped that the woman, past him now and yes, he had checked her from behind to make sure she was smart both coming and going, wasn't a lesbian. But so what if she was- maybe she'd let him watch. Jeff chuckled.

Inside Harter Hall, Jeff pushed against the flow of juniors slowly expanding out of the classrooms, and the frantic freshman dashing madly for the bathrooms. Most of them had blue hair. A few, wrestlers maybe, or boxers for all Jeff knew, had no hair at all, but there was a definite bluish tinge to their scalps, like blue hair wanted to grow out. Jeff rolled his eyes. Ah conformity. Well, that's how cattle act, he thought, right?

Jeff sat in his usually spot, off center, second row. Slackers in the back, the nerdly eager right up front, and the no-longer-cool indifferent off to the sides. Jeff knew where the cool was at, and he sat there. Certain that most of the folks in his Applied Partial Differential Equations class regarded him as a sort of leader, the guy who knew just enough, but not too much. When they saw that Jeff wasn't sporting a blue head, they'd see the folly of their ways and rush home to wash it out.

Professor Brown walked in, and Jeff winced. The man's head, right down to the bushy beard and mustache, was entirely blue.

Jeff sat in the tutoring room at the calculus lab, doing everything in his power to ignore everyone around him. It was becoming more and more difficult to do so. Their chatter was inane, as usual, and loud, as usual, and it was all Jeff could do not to comment, correct, and chastise. That everyone was wearing blue clothes was certainly not helping, either.

After math he had dashed to the bathroom himself, and checked the mirror. No, thank god, his hair had not been blue, but the same old dashing brown under which he had been born. That was a small relief. He had walked to work, up three floors, noting with ill ease that several people were wearing blue. Blue coats, shirts, sweaters, pants, shoes. Everything was blue. He walked into the lab, and spied Andy, who was determinately grading a test.

"Hey, Andy."

Andy looked up, his eyes tired. "Hey Jeff." He went back to his test.

"What's with the hair."

Andy looked up again. "Yeah, whatever Jeff." Too often Andy had been the butt of Jeff's jokes. And with good reason: Andy was knob.

"No, seriously. Why'd you dye your hair blue?"

Andy sighed at his test. "Sure, Jeff, okay."

Then Anna walked in, the exchange student from Peru. She and Jeff had dated before, but their personalities clashed and it didn't really work out. Still, she was quite the thinker, and Jeff knew she was still hot for him, too. "Anna, hey."

"What." Anna rolled her eyes.

"What's with the hair?" He asked, staring, admittedly, not at her head.

"Jeffrey," she said, sticking out her chin and looking at the ceiling. "I do not have time for you today."

Jeff feigned shock for her benefit. "Fine. Gosh."

Anna walked back out of the room. She was wearing blue shoes, blue socks, blue pants, a blue sweater, and her earing studs, Jeff saw, were blue.

And now he hovered over a test himself, trying hard not to notice that it was blue too, that the student had taken the test in blue ink, and that his own pen, which was supposed to be red, was writing in blue.

The room was quiet, except for the occasional guffaw at a stupid mistake, or sigh of disgust at a really aggressive mistake. Andy was there, and so was Gary, and Sarah, and Natee, who was in charge that hour. They all sat in blue chairs, with Jeff, at a blue table, grading blue tests. "Jesus!" Sarah shouted suddenly.

Jeff looked up instinctively, and Natee said, "What? Dumb mistake?"

"I don't how many times I've told them. Sine x over x is not just sine!" Jeff saw that her fingernails, gripping the blue pen, were blue, completely blue, not painted blue, just blue.

Natee laughed. Jeff saw that the man's teeth were blue, and, much to his disgust, so were his gums. "What did they put, then, sine of one?"

"No, just sine." Sarah shook her head, and rolled her eyes. Their whites were completely blue. "The answer is just 'sine'."

Gary looked up. "I had a better one than that, yesterday. Some student canceled the x'es, like in yours, and then added cosine to the sine to get co times sine squared." The guy's forehead was blue. Jeff felt his own head swim.

"No way," Natee said. "How can they even get into college?" He shook his head and went back to his test, and Jeff saw the light blue dandruff flakes as the fell on Natee's blue t-shirt. He couldn't take it anymore.

"Christ!" He said, standing up suddenly and stalking out of the room.

Gary watched him go. "What's his problem?"

Jeff walked past the brownstone blue Foley hall, along the blue sidewalk. He trotted across the quad, squashing blue grass into the blue mud. He put on his sunglasses, dimming the world to a bluish-gray mist. He went into the campus activity center, his eyes on the darkened tiles as he made his way up two floors to the cafeteria. The rich smells of lasagna and corned beef reminded him that he hadn't eaten all day. He picked up a tray and moved through the line. Protein, obviously, was the answer. Jeff was short on protein, and it was doing weird things to the rods in his eyes. Or the cones. Or whatever. A good meal, maybe a little nap, and he'd be fine. He grabbed a plate of lasagna from the counter, some garlic bread, and a great big wet coke. He set his jaw and paid for his food, then sat down in a dark corner. Out of habit, he removed his sunglasses.

Everything was a bright shiny blue. The lasagna was blue, with blue cheese, blue pasta, and blue red sauce. The garlic bread was blue, and he could see the blue butter melted into it. His coke was a blue pond in which blue ice cubes swam around blue bubbles of carbonation. Jeff held his breath. His appetite was gone. He violently pushed the tray off of his table, ignoring the loud crash of broken glassware and bouncing forks. All conversation in the dining area stopped. Jeff looked out at the crowd of blue faces regarding him. Their blue shirts and coats, their blue eyes. Jeff looked over the edge of the table and saw the steam rising from his mess, and the steam was blue. Suddenly, Jeff was sick. He ran out.

He ran into the bathroom away from the dining area, locked himself in a stall, and held his eyes shut tight. He refused to think about anything blue. He thought about white satin sheets. He thought about little green turtles in an aquarium. He thought about oranges. He thought about running over hot white sands, under a deep, bl- no, he thought about popsicles, purple ones and green ones and yellow ones and the kind that was blu- no, he thought about hamsters with their brown and white fur, and little yellow birds, and black ostriches, and bluejays- NO, he thought about orange basketballs, and white soccer balls, and racquetballs, the blue ones. No. Oh. No. Jeff tried to think about nothing, as he sat in the stall, rocking back and forth, eyes shut tight.

Jeff was walking home. He had decided not to take the bus: he could barely make out the bus driver in his blue seat next to the blue windows. Now, thankfully, it was dark, and the sky was a deep navy. The occasional street lamp emitted warm blue light, so Jeff avoided the blue sidewalk and cut through the park. It was a conspiracy of some kind. Maybe they had slipped him a drug. After all, he was Jeff Webb, one of the smartest and most talented young men at Johnson State. Obviously, they were jealous. Obviously, they meant to drive him crazy. Jeff hugged himself to stay warm, his breath pluming out of his mouth in a white stream that turned blue when the light caught it.

Well, it wasn't going to work. He'd show them. He'd ignore their blue world. He'd go on as if nothing was wrong, and that would confuse them. He's use their little trick against them. He'd get to like the blue, get to depend on it if he had to, make them wish they'd never messed with the likes of Jeff Webb. And then, when he knew who they were, when he knew what they wanted, then he'd get them good. Turning things blue was a mean trick, He'd get them for that. Turning his food blue was even meaner. He'd get them for that too. Then he'd get them for the bathroom. He'd get them, and when they got done being gotten, they'd know they'd been got by Jeff Webb. They'd know not to turn him blue, not ever again, not ever.

Jeff stumbled over the blue curb into his yard, shuffling through the blue leaves. Blue light spilled out of his blue window. He went to his front door and unlocked it, and walked into his blue living room.

He could barely make out his roommate Gregg, who was entirely blue and sitting on their blue couch, watching television. Jeff went to his room, but come right back out. No way he was going to undress and sleep in that blue bed. He collapsed on their blue lazy boy. He closed his eyes and tried to hum, but couldn't, so he just sat.

"Hey, boy." Gregg said.

"Hey."

"Why the long face?"

Jeff rubbed his eyes, his face. "What?"

"Why so blue?"

Suddenly, Jeff saw red.