The Summer Imagery of Blue Slush

Blue raspberry slush is one of the defining summer images in Billie Fay’s story: at once a cold, sugary treat, a playful way to color her body, and a recurring measure of desire and grief. Billie seeks it out in the heat, drinks it so quickly that it freezes her brain, and later discovers that its taste brings Pierre back to mind. The slush’s vivid blue sweetness does not simply decorate the romance; it makes the distance between summer’s imagined magic and heartbreak’s persistence tangible.

A summer ritual of sensation

The image first takes shape as an immediate craving. On a hot day Billie wants a slush, and specifies that it must be blue. She is amused by having a blue tongue, while the heat, her dress sticking to her thighs, and the still air make the walk to the convenience store feel intensely physical. The cold drink answers that heat, but its color also turns ordinary consumption into a small performance: the pleasure is visible on her body.

At the store, Billie reads the words at the beginning of her book a second time; they affect her just as strongly as before and leave her still hotter and thirstier. She drinks the slush in one go, freezes her brain, and finds her tongue far too dark blue, the corners of her mouth blue too, and her teeth sky blue without clouds. The comedy of the overbright stain belongs to the same register as her summer longing. She is not merely drinking to cool down; she savors the bodily evidence of the moment, even when the pleasure briefly hurts.

The treat sits among other small choices through which Billie prepares to be seen. Before the tent party, she fixes her nearly dry hair, warms her cheeks by pinching them, and moisturizes her lips with Orange Crush-flavored lip balm; she has one lip balm for each soda flavor. Later, when she sets out for the cégep in a mauve dress and uncomfortable sandals, her attention turns to whether Pierre might like the way she looks. The slush belongs to this material world of color, flavor, clothes, and cosmetics: inexpensive, immediate things that help her give shape to an imagined summer self.

Blue color, fantasy, and desire

Billie’s blue mouth fits the story’s youthful habit of making feeling concrete. She imagines a future lover whose hair would be just the right, almost colorless shade, and pictures cutting it with craft scissors; she also imagines what kind of person she might become beside him. These fantasies are not settled plans but private scenes of possibility. Against that inward romance, the slush offers an actual, bright color she can taste and carry on her tongue.

That contrast becomes sharper when Billie encounters Pierre. After drinking the slush, she traces a half-circle with her left foot, a subtle invitation for him to continue walking with her. The gesture follows the vivid blue stain: both reveal how emotion moves through her body before she can make it into confident speech. Her imagined romantic world and the awkward encounter share the same summer atmosphere, but the fantasy is more obedient than reality. Pierre is not the figure she had invented, and attraction does not resolve into the simple magic she hopes for.

From pleasure to involuntary memory

After the relationship disappoints her, the slush changes from a source of pleasure into a trigger for recollection. For seven days Billie tries to forget the taste of Pierre’s kisses, the sound of his voice, the color of his eyes, and the shine of his hair. She also tries to reject the details she resents—his muscles, jokes, questions, and Converse shoes—but the effort does not work. Whenever she drinks slush, the memories return. The same drink that once made summer vivid now makes forgetting difficult.

The pattern is striking because the taste is not an abstract symbol imposed from outside the scene. It is a repeated physical act, linked to cold, sweetness, speed, and the familiar brain-freeze Billie gives herself by drinking too fast. Pierre’s memory arrives through that routine rather than through deliberate reflection. Slush therefore becomes a sensory bridge between desire and loss: she can try to dismiss him in thought, but the taste brings back the intimate impressions she has been trying to put away.

Continuity through heartbreak

In autumn, Billie continues to drink blue slush in one go and freeze her brain as usual. The season has altered her mood: she has stopped ballet, no longer wants to dress up or read love stories, and takes only a few bites of her father’s favorite meals. Yet the slush remains part of her routine. At the convenience store, the clerk Mathieu catches her attention; he is a boy with freckles like hers, and she gives him her phone number. She thinks she might kiss him sometimes, while recognizing that he is ordinary to her and nothing like Pierre.

That return to the drink does not mean the heartbreak is finished. Billie still feels sad when she sees photographs of the friends who have gone to Montréal, and she wears a green dress to go out dancing with Daphné, applying mascara again after seven days. The blue slush persists beside these small attempts to resume ordinary life. Its meaning is consequently double: it preserves the pleasure of summer as a bodily habit, but it also carries the memory that pleasure cannot be recovered unchanged. The blue stain fades; the association does not.