The Colours We Give | On hold

| 16 |

tassel

"WHY ARE YOU STARING AT MY LIPS?" I ask Arashi, who's looking at them with a soft expression spread on his face. It makes me feel faintly awkward.

"I thought they were bleeding," he says, removing his gaze at once. I immediately roll my tongue over them. I don't taste any blood. "I thought they were bleeding," he says again. "They're not."

I roll my tongue over once more, just in case. It's not a secret that I have dry lips. Dad's always forced me to carry a baby case of Vaseline lip balm with me wherever I go, but I keep forgetting I have it, because I don't use it until my lips look like they're going to crack open. 

I take it out from the front of my bag and apply a finger-coat. When I'm done, I offer it to Arashi. He shakes his hands in refusal, still not directly looking at me.

"Is your finger okay?" he asks me, looking concerned suddenly. 

I stare at him, confused. "Yeah, why?"

"You have a lump on your finger," he says, telling me it's on my middle finger by showing his.

"Oh this," I laugh. "It's just a side-effect of the way I hold my pencil. It appeared when I was in fifth grade or something. Mom took me to the doctor and she explained that it's because I place my grip too hard. Nothing serious."

"Oh," he says, understandingly, and then we turn back to the quiet environment like before. He rests himself on the bark of the tree, taking help of his good hand. "How do you do this?" he asks then, pointing to the first question on his paper. His Chemistry teacher, Mr. Irwin, had once again given them the same assignment as us AP students. I truly feel for him this time, because I myself am stuck on only the fifth question.

I show Arashi my sheet. He stares at it for almost a whole minute until he finally says, "I don't get it."

I nod understandingly. "Okay, which part?"

"Every part," he answers. "From where did you get this formula?"

"In class. Didn't Mr. Irwin teach this today to you guys?" I ask.

Arashi squints hard, looking at the paper. "Did he?"

He takes my sheet and copies the formula onto his. Laughing, I say, "It's fine. You know it now."

I go back to finishing my work. Since it's hard, Letterhead's only prepared ten questions. They're mostly problem based and have quite large calculations, so Arashi's phone lies on the ground with the calculator open on it. I've been the only one to use it until now.

Arashi makes it obvious that his head is not in this right now. He focuses his vision on a spot on the grass, spacing off. Tracing it, I realize he's looking at a dandelion barely holding onto its puffballs. It kind of amazes me too, because there's a pretty strong breeze blowing. 

He rattles the pencil in between his fingers. The breezes suddenly grows speedy, plucking out every last puffball present on the dandelion. I look at the naked flower, and then at Arashi. His eyes suddenly look like they're glazed with honey. He stops playing with his pencil and writes something on his plaster with it.

It was shocking to see him come to school with a fractured hand and bandaged head. The first explanation that came into my mind: car accident. But when he clarified that he slipped on a pamphlet and fell out of his window, I was beyond shocked. You're joking, I told him thrice. No, I'm not, he answered thrice.

Arashi could've died.

Every time I think about it, all my actions stop for a moment. Losing a friend like that is something I don't want to experience. Ever.