I couldn’t figure out how he made his sunsets look so good. I glanced at my canvas—my sunset looked like a rainbow, all bands. If looked away quickly, I could see borders between them, like a three-year-old would draw. Eight weeks of class had been no help to me, no matter what the teacher said.

Arthur’s canvas was an even gradient from the deep violet that surrounded the stars all the way down to the saturated pink-blue kissing the ground. He hadn’t bothered to render the sun, as I had, a yellow-white semicircle; he’d suggested that if you were to peer over the horizon, the sun would be down there, waving and offering you an ice-cold cola. Arthur didn’t need this class.

I had just decided that murder by paintbrush was the most poetic end for him when he leaned over and began to mix some blue into the yellow on my palette. “You want to blend them a little more, and keep adding as you go,” he said. Bastard couldn’t even give me the satisfaction of thinking how much better the world would be without him.