by Siera Maley
“I’m just listening,” I told her idly. “It sounds interesting, actually. My life’s pretty boring.”
“I don’t believe that. You live here.”
“San Fran’s not that exciting if you don’t let it be,” I told her. “My dad and I have a routine, and we follow it. There’s not that much to share, I guess.”
“What about your mom; where’s she?” she asked me curiously. I stiffened, and, thankfully, she picked up on it. She immediately looked mortified.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry, Harper. I wasn’t thinking.”
“It’s okay,” I said. There was a long silence as we awkwardly finished our ice cream together. I wanted to move past it, but I didn’t know what else to talk about. So I elaborated instead. “She, um… died in a car crash four years ago.”
Chloe let out a deep sigh and bit at her lip. “That’s awful; I’m so sorry. I need to think before I speak a little more often.”
I knew that this particular topic of conversation wasn’t exactly first hangout material, but Chloe was easy to talk to. She talked a lot; she was all energy and earnest pseudo-rambling, at least around me, and for a moment I could only attribute to temporary insanity, I guess I thought it’d be a good idea to open up to someone other than Robbie. Or maybe I just wanted to open up to her.
“We were really close. She went out to have dinner with a friend and just… never came back.” I shook my head, gaining a sudden sense of clarity. This was way too much too soon. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about it.”
“I wanted to be your friend,” Chloe insisted. “You can talk about anything you want. Especially someone you love.”
I offered her a weak smile, and then bent down to feed the remnants of my cone to Baxter. “Thanks. It’s okay, though. What’s your favorite movie?”
She studied me carefully, and I kept my expression neutral. “You sure?” she asked.
“C’mon.” I reached out to nudge her hand with mine, and her eyes jumped to the contact. I felt embarrassed that I’d opened up to her about my mom. Sure, Chloe was nice, but that didn’t exactly make it natural to start discussing my dead mother the first time we hung out together. Especially given that hanging out with her was almost certainly an awful idea in the first place.
I could tell she was still stuck on the subject, so I reached out with my index finger and ran it along her pinky before withdrawing my hand. Her eyes flew to mine and, almost microscopically, her eyebrow rose in a silent question. I cleared my throat uncomfortably, already regretting touching her at all, and then repeated, “Favorite movie?”
She blinked twice, and then, to her credit, recovered quickly. “Charlie’s Angels.”
I laughed despite myself, caught off-guard. “No it’s not!”
“Drew Barrymore, Lucy Liu, and Cameron Diaz beating up bad guys? What more could I want?”
“Fair enough. Okay. Your turn.”
“My turn to what?”
“Ask me something,” I insisted.
“Like what?”
“Like… my favorite food, favorite color. I don’t know. Anything.”
“Okay. Let me think.” She furrowed her eyebrows, staring hard at me for a moment and then, straight-faced, declared, “Your hair’s in like a super messy bun right now, but it looks amazing. How do you do that? Seriously. I look like an ogre if I don’t spend half an hour in front of the mirror.”
I laughed at her and turned my nose up. “That secret stays with me.”
“No! Please? I’m jealous.”
I felt a flush creeping up my cheeks and saw her grin. She knew she was making me nervous. That only made me more nervous. “Thanks,” I mumbled.
“No problem, Harper,” she said. That sly, amused look from the day I met her was back. My gut told me the way she was looking at me was a good thing, even if my head disagreed. “Okay.” She cleared her throat and wrapped the remnants of her cone up into a napkin. “A real question: where do you work?”
I forced a laugh. “God. It’s this fast food place called ‘Daily Fries’. It sucks. We serve clogged arteries on buns, pretty much. I mean, I’m all for high-calorie, tasty food, but the stuff we make is toxic.”
“You hate your job?”
“Loathe it, ugh.” I wrinkled my nose and shook my head. “Who likes working in the fast food industry?”
“Why don’t you quit?” She asked the question like she genuinely didn’t know the answer. I thought it was obvious.
“Because I need the money. My dad wants me to start saving up for when I go off to college. I can’t quit.”
“Well, you could get a job you like,” she suggested.
“It’s not that simple.”
“It could be. You won’t know unless you try.”
I laughed and joked, “Can you sew that inspirational quote onto a pillow for me so I can look at it every day before I wake up?”
She pressed her lips together like she was trying not to laugh and then tossed her balled up napkin at me with a pouty, “Don’t make fun of me.”
I grinned a grin I couldn’t make go away, and for another moment, I forgot what I knew about Chloe’s fate. That was something no one had ever managed before. It’d taken less than a couple of hours, but just like that, I was officially invested.
I should’ve aborted my idiotic non-plan right then and there, gone home, and saved myself the heartache. But something kept my brain from working properly and kept me there with her outside the theater.
Maybe it was the same omniscient power that had given Chloe her number. Maybe, just like there wasn’t a way to stop the numbers, there also wasn’t a way for me to come to my senses and leave Chloe alone.
At least, if there was… I’d spend months struggling to find it.
* * *
I’d always imagined that my first real crush would be like it was in the old movies my dad and I watched together. Love was Robert Walker as soldier Joe Allen running after Judy Garland’s bus, calling out to her to meet him under a clock tower, or it was Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer swaying together in the moonlight, or Claudette Colbert tearfully telling Clark Gable that she couldn’t live without him. It was foreign: unattainable. I mean, I couldn’t really even let myself get close enough to a girl to start to like her as a person, let alone as a friend or anything more.
Chloe shattered that image with a smile and a laugh, and after just a day together, I was wondering why I’d chosen now to let my guard down. Maybe a part of me really liked the attention: the way she was obvious about wanting and enjoying my company. Probably a part of me really liked her, and liked the way she so clearly liked me back. Liked me first even, because it was fairly obvious after just a few conversations that she hadn’t been so pushy about hanging out with me without a reason. When I watched romances or read stories, I inserted myself into the main character’s dilemma. I was the piner: the one loving someone and waiting for them to love me back.
But this was real life. And in real life, I was the love interest.
Chloe was interested in trying out laser tag, as it turned out. I took her a week later. And although Robbie came along, I offered to pay for her, since she’d paid for ice cream the week before. She let me.
Even with Robbie there, it still felt like a date from the moment it began. Maybe it still was. We were two girls who liked girls, even if Chloe didn’t know that I was gay, and she certainly didn’t mind not knowing it, because she flirted with me anyway.
The night before we went out, she called me at ten o’clock. I paused The Wizard of Oz to answer my phone, surprised to see her name on the screen. We’d exchanged phone numbers after ice cream, but had only texted a few times since then. She always initiated contact, and I couldn’t force myself to ignore her messages.
“Hello?” I wasn’t sure how casual I could be. We weren’t really friends, and she was definitely more comfortable around me than I was around her.
“Hey, what are you up to?” she asked me. “Busy with
your boyfriend?”
“This obsession has got to stop,” I joked, taking a cue from her tone. “I can’t tell if you’re teasing me because you think I’m dating Robbie or teasing me because I’m not dating Robbie and therefore am single.”
“Maybe it’s both?”
“The Wizard of Oz.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what I’m watching. The Wizard of Oz.”
“Oh. That witch terrified me as a kid.” I heard a crunch on the line, and furrowed my eyebrows.
“What are you doing?”
“Eating a carrot. Gotta make sure my vision’s at its best for laser tag, obviously.”
“So you like carrots,” I observed. “Mental note taken.”
She laughed. “What, just in case you need ideas for birthday presents?”
“No,” was all I said. I didn’t want to think about when her birthday was. I didn’t want to know at all.
“So what kind of movies do you like? I’ve seen a lot of action flicks, but only because I mostly hung around guys back where I used to live.”
I shifted my phone to my other ear as she bit down on another carrot. Then, before I could stop myself, I declared, “You’re gay.”
The crunching stopped. There was a short pause. And then, “Was that a question?”
“I’m sorry.”
“For… pointing out the obvious?”
“I don’t think it was obvious,” I half-lied.
“Sure it was. I’ve always wanted to live in San Francisco, and I wore a rainbow bracelet the other day.”
“The true reason you moved here comes out,” I joked, trying to ease some of the tension. She ran with it, mercifully.
“Ah, yes. I definitely got my parents to pack up and relocate just so I could pick up girls more easily. The new puppy is also a ploy. It reels them in, you see?”
“Makes sense.” I nodded and smiled, though she couldn’t see it. There was another pause, and then she cleared her throat.
“Alright. Well I was just bored, so I thought I’d call my new friend. We are still on for laser tag tomorrow, right?”
“If you really want to.”
She groaned. “Oh my God, I do! I knew I shouldn’t have worn pink on our walk. I’m totally a dork, I swear. I mean, I’ve never shot a laser gun before, but I’ll learn. Do you want to invite your other ‘friend’?”
My gut reaction was to say no. I didn’t want Robbie there. But I also realized, deep down, why I didn’t want Robbie there, and so I agreed. “Sure. I’ll text him about it.”
“Cool. Pick me up at two, right?”
“Right.”
“And my little dog, too,” she croaked. “Not really though. I was just quoting your movie. Sorry. I’m dumb. Okay, bye.”
“Bye.” I forced a laugh, and she hung up. Then I pressed the phone to my chest, squeezed my eyes shut, and let out the deepest sigh of my life, mentally cursing myself.
Robbie came over the next day about half an hour before I was due to pick up Chloe and hung out with my dad for a while, who seemed a little wary of him. I saw Robbie’s eyes glance to my dad’s forehead when they first greeted each other and was already expecting a comment on it once we were alone, especially given that we’d never explicitly discussed my dad’s number before.
As we sat outside on the front porch and he smoked a cigarette, he told me, “You’re lucky.”
“In the grand scheme of things, probably not,” I pointed out. “Neither of us is.”
“That’s true. But your dad will be around for a long time. And he seems like a cool guy.”
“Yeah.”
We sat in silence for a moment, and I coughed as the cigarette smoke invaded my lungs. Robbie apologized and scooted away from me. I could tell he was deep in thought, but didn’t know what was on his mind until he spoke again.
“So what’re you doing with this girl, Harper?”
I leaned forward and put my chin in my hands, sighing. “I don’t know.” I hesitated, and then added, “I think she might be interested in me.”
“So you’re using me as a buffer. I guessed as much. Why don’t you just tell her you’re not interested?”
“Because.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.” I paused, and then corrected, “No, I’m not. But only…”
“Because she’s going to die soon?” I squeezed my eyes shut, and my heart dropped as he turned to look at me. Hearing it said aloud made it so much more real than it seemed in my head. It ripped me right out of my own little world, where Chloe and I were on track to become best friends with a mutual crush, and dropped me right back into a reality that had declared her dead in who-knew-how-many months.
I bit my lip and nodded, but I still couldn’t help but doubt that reality. Chloe was so alive now. She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t depressed. She was a perfectly functioning human being who seemed to really enjoy living. It seemed so unlikely that she’d have less than twelve months left. “What if her number’s wrong, Robbie?” I asked him, even though I knew what his answer would be before he responded.
“The numbers are never wrong.”
“I know. But… maybe hers could be. Maybe I could change it this time.”
“That’s not how fate works, Harper. If she were to die at sixteen and had never met you, then that was always going to be the way her life went. But since she met you and her number’s sixteen, she was always going to meet you, and meeting you – as well as anything you do to her or with her – won’t stop her from dying at sixteen. You can’t make a decision that’s already been made.”
“For someone who claims to be an Atheist, you sure do sound religious when you talk about this stuff, you know,” I told him.
“I don’t base it on some religious predetermination by a God. I base it on my own personal time theory. This is the present for us, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a present in the future. And in that future present, this is the past. The past can’t change, so everything’s already set in stone. Fate knows the future, so Fate knows its past, which is our present.”
“That makes no sense, you pretentious idiot,” I groaned out. He put out his cigarette and shrugged his shoulders.
“It’s just a theory. But we haven’t seen a number change, so I’m automatically more right than you are.”
“Well, I hope that makes you feel better,” I bit out.
“Not at all. It makes me feel like shit, actually.” He got to his feet. “Let’s go meet your friend, okay?”
“Okay,” I murmured, but I was dreading it now. When Robbie saw Chloe, her number would no longer be a message for my eyes only. It’d be a lot like how coming out had been. Sharing it with other people; saying it aloud… that made it exist in a world outside of my mind. That made it real.
We said goodbye to my dad before we left, and he seemed particularly interested in how long we’d be gone, which was unusual. But I was too worried about Robbie meeting Chloe to dwell on it. Having him confirm her number was bad enough, but what if he saw something more? Something I hadn’t noticed? A slight limp in her step, a twitch in a muscle. Something that could somehow indicate she wasn’t long for this world.
I hadn’t spent much time with her yet, but she was so lighthearted and just… normal, and it was impossible to imagine her life would be cut short by anything other than a terrible accident, especially after her adrenaline junkie confession. But terrible accidents were much easier to prevent than medical anomalies. That was a comfort, albeit an extremely miniscule one.
Chloe’s father answered the door with a knowing look in his eyes and spent a lot more time introducing himself to me than to Robbie. Robbie was an afterthought. Robbie wasn’t the person Chloe’d come home raving about, and the knowledge that came with Kent Stephens’s excited greeting and eager shake of my hand made my heart thud harder in my chest.
“It’s nice to meet you,” I managed to get out before Chloe appeared behind her father. She grinned at the sight of me and, instinc
tively, I smiled back.
“Nice to meet you too, Harper. You guys will be back before dinner, right?”
“Yes sir. I’m driving,” I told him.
“She won’t run me over this time, I swear.” As if to remind me further of that particular mishap, Baxter started barking in the background while Chloe slipped past her father and out through the front door. Kent looked like he wanted to talk more, but with Baxter fighting to get outside to be with Chloe, he thought better of it and bid us a quick goodbye.
“You told him about that?” I asked her when he was gone.
“More in the context of Baxter’s latest antic,” she reassured me, and then turned to smile at Robbie. “Hi. You’re Robbie?”
“Yes.” Robbie’s eyes were fixed to her forehead, and I shifted uncomfortably, willing him to just be normal. I could see the fleeting worry in his eyes and knew instinctively that he was thinking of his sister, and of how young she’d been when she’d died.
Chloe, I was beginning to notice, liked to take control of awkward situations. She bailed Robbie out with a quipped, “So how long have you two been dating?”
I scowled at her, and Robbie shot me a confused look.
“She’s kidding,” I explained.
“Not entirely! No way are you single. C’mon, you can tell me. If we’re gonna be friends, you’ll have to start being honest with me eventually.” She raised an eyebrow at me, straight-faced, and I tried in vain to keep my scowl on and resist blushing yet again in her presence.
Robbie bumped my shoulder, abruptly startling me out of Chloe and I’s staring contest. “If we get there before three o’clock, there’s a discount. Laser tag’s half price from noon to three.”
“Sounds great,” Chloe cut in before I could speak. “Let’s go.”
She left without waiting for a response, walking straight to the car with her purse swinging off of her shoulder. Robbie nudged me and, sounding far too empathetic, murmured, “She’s not even trying to hide that she likes you.”
