Blainehated Tuesdays. He didn't trust them, not a single bit. Tuesdays were black and blue, purple and painful like a developing bruise. They smelled like antiseptic, horribly clean and stinging with a sickening artificial purity that he could compare to nothing other than the smell of pain and grief and.....and.....

Tuesday.

"No,"he thought tiredly to the word on the top of the waiting room calendar,"it's just a day. You have to stop this."

But he couldn't, because Tuesday was untrustworthy. Tuesday was unnatural, Tuesday madehimfeel unnatural.

Yes, Tuesday was the day that Blaine Anderson would figure out why he was such a freak. Today, after 17 years of this miserable existence the called life, he would finally get an answer. A real answer, not 'Oh Blaine you're not a freak, you're just special'. No, he didn't want this to be sugar coated out of sympathy.

He just wantedanswers.

Blainelooked down at his watch and wondered anxiously when it was his turn to be called.8:42,a watch surrounded by scars. His appointment was at 8:50, but he always prided himself in being punctual (along with very, very few other things). As he sat on the royal blue and red plastic chair in the waiting room of Dalton Mental Hospital, his mind wandered to this time the week prior in the same hospital, under similarly discomforting circumstances......

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Now Blaine, I want you to read these words and then describe the – I'm sorry, are your parents present?"

Blainelooked at her with a face of confusion and slight worry.

"Um, no ma'am," he said in a quiet, soft spoken voice, "they have prior engagements."

She paused and gave him a look that obviously stated 'what kind of parent would miss this?'

"Evidently," he continued, "choosing new flooring for the dining room is much more important."

She gave him a split second look of pure pity before slipping on a more professional mask, one of determined neutrality that had surely been molded and mastered long ago.

"Well, that is a shame. Now, getting back to business. Blaine, I would like for you to read the word on the flash card and then answer a few questions pertaining to that word. Do you think you can do that for me?"

He nodded. "Yes, Doctor Avrid."

"Perfect," she stated with a smile, "you may begin."

Blainelooked down at the first word in the stack of cards.

"Glass."

"Okay," she said as scribbled something on her yellow memo pad, "Now, what color is the word?"

He looked at her questioningly, wondering why he was being asked such a simple question. However, he answered with a sigh. "Blue."

"Blue?"

"Yes."

"Could you describe the certain hue of blue for me?"

He pondered the color for a moment, propping a head on his hand as he did.

"Um, It's sort of..." he considered the word in his mind, "Electric, almost. Like......Like..."

He looked up at the doctor, her face displaying a fixed expression of extreme patience. As his eyes wandered around her immaculate office, a color by the window caught his eye. He stood and walked toward the color, the liveliest, brightest color of liquid blue.

"This," he said victoriously "This is the exact same color."

She sat there for a moment, looking at the spray bottle in his hand as if waiting for an explanation.

"Oh," she said in realization, "So, a Windex color blue, then?"

"Yes ma'am, can't you see it?"

"Interesting...." She said, clearly ignoring his question, "very interesting...why don't you come back to your seat so that we can finish this exercise?"

Blaine sat the bottle of window cleaner back on the windowsill before returning to his seat, wondering what was so "interesting" about it.

"You may continue," stated the doctor with a kind smile.

Blaine flipped to the next card and smiled when he saw the word written on it. Whenever he saw this word, he felt light, almost weightless, as if the burdens that he didn't know he carried were suddenly lifted.

"Music."

"Great and what color is the word?"

"Green, with a navy outline."

The doctor smiled at him, not a fixed plaster smile or one of fictitious amusement, but one of a sort of elemental wonder. "You seem to like this one," she inquired, looking at the boy sitting in front of her, beaming and even letting a small chuckle of agreement. "May I ask why?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, describe what music is like. Describe what music means to you."

His smile faltered slightly. "It's..." he struggled to explain, "It wouldn't make any since to you. To anyone, really. Apparently no one else thinks about music like I do. "

Her smile grew, and out of it slithered a dare in a challenging tone. "Try me."

His grin grew back even bigger and more illuminated than the first.

"Okay, well to me, music is.....truthful. It's bare; it's unashamed of being exactly what it is."

"What kinds of music do you like?"

"Pretty much all music. Well, I take that back, I hate rap. Rap tastes like sand. But other than that, I like any kind of music. My favorite instruments are acoustic guitar and piano," he added, glancing shyly back up at her, only to see that she was watching him with a wonderful intensity, as if she was drinking his words as they poured out of his mouth, "acoustic guitar is like chocolate cupcakes, or sometimes caramel depending on the style, but piano," he said with a dreamy glisten in his eye, "the piano tastes like wine."

"Always?"

"Always. Oh, and metal music gives off the most horrible taste of batteries, but the sound and the color of it are so worth it.

"I just," he continued, "I like how truthful and how purely honest music is. Music will never lie to you. Weather it's happy, pissed off, depressed- it doesn't matter. Music will never try to tell you 'I'm okay' because that's - for lack of a better word - bullcrap. Nothing is ever just 'okay'. 'Okay' implies that everything is normal, but when you think about it, life is never really normal, is it?"

"No," said Doctor Avrid with an understanding nod, "I suppose not."

He looked at her really looked at the woman sitting in front of him. There was not even a faint trace of doubt on her pointed olive face. She seemed to believe him, for now, and for that he was grateful. That being said, this could just be part of her job; to tell people like him "no you're not a freak" and act like everything is okay when it most defiantly is not.

"Look, doctor, you don't have to act like this is all normal. That's the reason I'm here, isn't it? To figure out what's wrong with me? To figure out why I'm insane like this-"

"Blaine," the doctor interrupted, standing up and abandoning her desk to occupy the chair next to his, taking her yellow memo pad with her, "you are not insane. I can say that, I'm a doctor. I have a Ph.D. I know what insane looks like and you, Blaine, do not fit that picture."

"But how come this happens to me? Why am I like this?"

"That, Blaine," she said kindly, "is why you're here. Why don't we continue?"

He looked down at the stack in his hand, and as soon as he saw that hateful word on the next card, he could already feel the darkness pulling him in. This word – this taunting, spiteful word on this card was a word that he had both lived his life by for and hated with all of his black, angry heart. A strong, burnt red dripping into a merciless black. He felt himself falling into it, the word consuming him, the outside pulling him in.

He dropped the cards as if they were on fire.

He felt his reality being turned into something twisted and warped. The taste of tears, he couldn't tell if they were actually even caused by the his own tears streaming down his face or if it was this sick game that mind constantly played on him day in and day out. A bleeding red, a merciless black. The smell of dried blood.

That's when panic took over, and Blaine's world disappeared.

"I never felt, I never felt," he kept saying, "I never felt-"

"CAN I GET SOME ASSISTANCE IN HERE?! Blaine, its okay, your okay, calm down-"

"-I never felt, never, never felt-"

"Blaine, its okay. Everything is going to be okay. What started this? Can you hear me?"

Blainewas already gone, completely submerged in panic

"-Lies, never, I never felt, he lies, never, never-"

Doctor Avrid looked down at the ground, notecards with plain, black script littering her office floor, the one closest to the top gripping her heart and giving it a painful tug

Love.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Anderson?"

Blaine's head shot up at the sound of his name.

"Oh, that's me."

"Doctor Avrid will see you now."

He let out an anxious sigh as he looked at the time.

8:53,a watch surrounded by scars.

"Thank you," he said to the nurse as he headed for the door to the office that he had occupied just a week prior.