#ciyh

Color in Your Hands has updated.

Adam isn’t standing with his sculpture in the campus museum. He’s standing next to his car, hundreds of miles away, staring at a light blue trailer with a crooked, rusting 28 mounted to the side of it next to the box window of his childhood bedroom. The paint has completely peeled away from the front steps, leaving them washed out, gray and sun-bleached. There’s a pile of newspapers on the steps, and the mailbox was overflowing down where the drive to the trailer park turned off the main road. His old bike is desiccated and abandoned in the yard with crabgrass and dandelions growing up through the spokes of its flat tires,as if through the ribs of a corpse left to rot in the sun.

Even knowing no one is inside, he stays put, planted to the parched grass and cracked soil that he came from.

“I’m gonna go.”

Kavinsky stands and drops his spent cigarette onto the floor. It starts to burn the cheat, stained carpet fibers. The smell is smoky and a little chemical before he grinds his shoe against the butt. “You’ll never make it across campus like this.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Ronan replies. Navigating around the coffee table is perilous and Kavinsky follows him around from the other side. Even nearly too drunk to stand, Ronan still has a lifetime of boxing, the better half of a foot and more than a hundred pounds on Kavinsky does on his best day. He doesn’t feel threatened, not really, but he’s also not processing at full power and Kavinsky is always dangerous.

“You’re so cold,” Blue says. She takes his hands and holds his fingertips between her palms, blowing warm air against them.

“That’s the warmest they’ll get.” Noah sighs, put upon. He can see his breath in the air. “Bad circulation.”

She has snowflakes in her hair and on her eyelashes and he wishes he could take a picture of her. “Is that from being dead or just because your body doesn’t body right?”

“Both? Neither? I don’t know.”

She laughs, then he laughs, and she releases his hands. He feels bereft.