Hayley, Bane, Wren, and I always said we’d do it. Ever since freshman year, when Hayley, the new girl from Arkansas, stared up at San Francisco’s towering hills and blurted out the first idea that came to mind. Had it been any other person, it might have been something like, ‘Wow, that’s steep. It must be hell to drive here.’ But no.

“What do you think would happen if you poured, like, a gallon of paint down that?” she’d asked, awestruck, and for a moment we’d all just stared. Paint? Why?

“Because it’d be awesome. Like watching the waves coming in, except in color.”

It was too good an image to pass up, not to mention the lure of that particular brand of relief we teenagers find in cracking rules and regulations wide open.

As luck would have it, Bane worked at a hardware store, and had been begging the failed mixed colors off the paint guy all year, while Wren and I had cajoled the elderly art teacher, Mrs. Havershin, out of the extra paints she was left with at the end of the year. We hadn’t counted our booty, but I guessed there were at least a dozen cans stacked up in the back of my car, jostling around and letting out high clinking noises as we drove down Irving, making for the hills of the Presidio.

“Do you think we’ll get caught?” Wren asked from the back seat, fingers curling around the back of my headrest as I flicked around a tight corner.

“Nah,” Bane laughed, “Nothing’ll touch us tonight.”

Perhaps the only time he’d ever been right. When we reached our chosen target we found not a single car on the road, which, even for two o’clock in the morning, was unusual in the city. They say New York is the city that never sleeps, but if so San Francisco is a close runner-up

“Come on, come on,” I hurried, throwing the side door open so the three of them could uncurl from the back.
With a truly mighty tug, I had the trunk unlatched as well and began throwing out screwdrivers blindly, glad I didn’t hear the thunk and cry of one impacting forehead or foot. Opening tools in hand, we all grabbed a paint tin at random, prying them open and watching as the liquid swirled about in the dull glow of the streetlights.

“We’re actually going to do this?” Hayley asked, slightly awed. I grinned,

“Hell yes we are.”

“Wait!” Wren dropped her can suddenly, slopping light pink over the rim to christen the street with its first color of the night, hurrying back to the car where she pulled out two enormous shakers filled with glitter. She grinned, going down the line and solemnly depositing a fist-sized mountain of glitter in each of our cans to stir about with our fingers.

“There,” she stood back to admire her handiwork, “are we ready?”

Three nods. We all stepped forward, glancing down the sloping street with an almost painful hesitation. Of course it was Bane who finally summoned the courage to begin.

“Four.”
He counted down slowly,

“Three.”

A car engine guttered then caught somewhere to our left.

“Two.”

We sucked in a collective breath.

“One.”

I leaned so far forward I thought I might tumble down myself.

“Zero.”

A cascade of color raced from my fingers, coating my palm and dripping onto my shoes before leaping down the hill in a stream of thick, electric-blue sparkles that danced in the streetlight. Bane let out a great whoop and Hayley clapped. I was smiling ear-to-ear. No one said a word as we watched the colors fall, but there was an almost unearthly comfort that seemed to attach itself to the sight of four colors – blue, red, brown, and yellow – rolling down in their erratic patterns. Towards the middle, they began to merge and mix, creating a marbled mass that kissed and touched and drew away until, as they reached the bottom, they were more one color than four. It was a bit melancholy at the end, watching my electric-blue swallowed up into the brown morass, but the sight of its lightning trail dancing three-quarters of the way was enough to lift my heart.

“Oh, that was f---ing awesome!” Bane howled.

“Quiet, Bane,” Hayley chastised, glancing tentatively around at the stolidly wealthy houses around us, but she was laughing helplessly herself.

“I agree with Bane,” I put in, watching a few last drops of paint drip from my hands like Christmas lights illuminating the inky pavement.
“Let’s get another,” Hayley whispered.

“’Cause we’re untouchaaaaabbblllleee!” Bane sung out, dancing something that resembled a hip-hop routine on the slippery pavement until Hayley hit him across the head, dragging him to retrieve another bucket.

We spent two hours on the streets that night, watching paint drip down pavement, trying to forget what the future looked in a blur of color, but perhaps finding more than we lost. After each dump, we all stepped back to examine our masterpiece of paint as it bled its way to the bottom, watching our own color’s progress and arguing over which was the prettiest. Hayly was particularly fond of our second mural, with her violent yellow dancing in back-flips and cartwheels over Bane’s brown. Bane, on the other hand, kept bringing up pictures of the fifth on his cell phone, citing his brilliant red, sluggish stripe that had held its own all the way until the bottom, where it met its inevitable fate swallowed by the chaos. I was still trying to blink the phantom streaks of blue from behind my eyelids.
By the time we reached the last set of colors, we were skirting the occasional car in the pre-dawn and the talk had died down to the essentials: the occasional crow of triumph and the countdown.

“Four.”

Wren grasping the last bucket of light purple.

“Three.”

Hayley with her burnt orange.

“Two.”

Bane leant forward, slate-grey bucket in hand.

“One.”

I watched the first drips of aquamarine spill across my fingers.

“Zero.”

And then, the cascade.