by Siera Maley
I trembled as I did what he’d asked. He carried her all the way out of the water, even as harsh coughs wracked her body, and as he laid her out on the towel, he asked her, “Chloe, you can breathe, right?”
She nodded feebly, but she was trembling even worse than I was. I fell to my knees beside her and brushed her hair out of her face, hands shaking. Another series of coughs expelled more water from her mouth, but the ones after that were dry. As she slowly got her breathing back, I kept a hand on her forehead, my thumb moving back and forth over the center. I didn’t realize until she spoke that I’d been covering the number on her forehead with my palm.
“Got my foot stuck on something,” she managed to get out, and then let out another series of short coughs. “Tangled, I think. I’m okay.”
“We should think about taking her to a hospital to make sure,” Robbie told me. “I don’t know a lot about what nearly drowning does to someone.”
“I’m okay,” Chloe repeated. Her voice was hoarse and weak. “I coughed it all up.” She closed her eyes and took in a slow breath, and then exhaled just as slowly. When she spoke next, her voice was a little stronger. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
Robbie and I exchanged looks, and I saw him relax a little. But his gaze held mine long enough that when it slid to my hand on Chloe’s forehead, I knew we were thinking the same thing. As Chloe kept breathing slowly beneath us and her eyes fluttered shut, I stared down at the back of my hand. In that moment, only two thoughts were running through my head. Over and over again, back and forth, until I was sure that when I blinked I could see them in sentence form behind my eyelids.
The first was that Robbie had just prevented Chloe’s death. The second was that I hadn’t been able to do a single thing to help.
I moved my hand, and felt my rib cage cave in and crush my heart. My head dropped and I let out a sob as, at last, the tears I’d been holding back began to flow. And no matter how many times Chloe murmured, “Hey, I’m okay, I’m okay, Harper,” I couldn’t bring myself to stop. I couldn’t even look at her.
16.
* * *
Dad sat with me on the couch for a little while after Robbie took me home. Deborah made me a mug of hot chocolate while he rubbed my back, but none of that helped. I didn’t want to be home with them. I just wanted to be with Chloe.
Robbie’d gotten her parents’ phone numbers off of her cell phone and called them, and by the time we’d gotten back to Chloe’s house, they’d been poised to take Chloe to the hospital themselves. Thankfully, that was just precautionary; she’d been practically back to full health by the time we’d gotten back, other than a couple of coughing fits every now and then. She didn’t understand why I was still so upset.
I could tell that once Chloe was with her parents, Robbie wanted a chance to talk to me. Or comfort me. I didn’t know. But that wasn’t his place, even if he was the only one who could do it properly given the circumstances. Chloe nearly drowning had been a shock to my system, but seeing her number still there, unchanged even after Robbie had saved her, had done the real damage.
It meant that Robbie was right. It meant that Chloe had never been meant to drown today. When her time came, no amount of planning would stop it. I couldn’t stop it.
Chloe was going to die, and she was going to die soon. And there wasn’t a single thing I could do about it.
* * *
“Sooo… predictably, nearly drowning sucks.”
“I can’t right now, Chloe,” I sighed out, phone pressed into my ear as I lay splayed out on my bed. “I’m sorry. Not yet.”
“You don’t have to apologize. I get it; it’s too soon.”
“No, I do have to, because joking is how you deal. But I just can’t joke about it.” I paused as my throat tightened, and tried to push the feeling away. “I just remember looking past Robbie and you were gone and we couldn’t find you. And now I can’t even see you.”
“Hey,” she replied, her voice taking on a soothing tone I hadn’t ever heard from her before. “Hey, I’m okay now. It was a freak accident and I’m okay. I promised I wasn’t going anywhere, remember? My parents are just a little freaked and they don’t want to let me out of the house yet. At least they let me see you for a few minutes yesterday…?”
“It wasn’t enough,” I muttered.
“I know. But I’m just gonna take a few days to cool off, and then I’ll be over to go on that camping trip with your dad and his girlfriend. Our double date camping trip.”
I forced a laugh and wiped at my eyes. “Okay.”
“Will you be okay tonight?”
I nodded, and then remembered she couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Robbie’s over right now.”
“Good. Tell him thanks for the thousandth time for what he did. Even though I was totally just about to save myself, I swear.”
“Chloe-”
“Okay, sorry, no jokes. I’ll text you all day and call you a hundred times until the weekend comes, alright?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
The call ended on her end with a soft click, and I put my phone down and looked over at Robbie, who sat at my desk chair with his head in his hands. He shot me a sympathetic look.
“Feel any better?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. How can I feel good about this? I mean… you were right.”
“I didn’t want to be.” He avoided my eyes, picking at something on the back of his hand, and then asked, “So where do we go from here?”
“We?” I echoed.
“If you think I’m letting you go through this alone after what just happened three days ago, you don’t know me at all. I carried her out of the water and watched her cough up a lung. She called me a nerd and made fun of my comic books, so I’m in this with you now.” He gave me a small smile when I let out a weak laugh.
“I’m glad you’re my best friend,” I told him.
“Me too.” He sat back in the chair and folded his arms across his chest. “We’re strong people, Harper. This won’t be fun, but we’ve been here before with people who were family. We can get through it again. And this time, we can stop being in denial and stop making lists and taking extra precautions that won’t change anything. This time we can help someone use the days they have left the way they should be used. In a way that doesn’t waste them. And I know that it’s morbid, and that it’ll be hard, but-”
“But if we were Chloe, we’d want it this way,” I finished for him. “I know. I can do it.”
“You don’t have to do it alone,” he reminded me. “In fact, I’m not going to let you do it alone. If…” He paused and seemed to struggle through the next word. I was long past choked-up; I’d given up stopping the tears several minutes ago, on the phone with Chloe. “When,” he corrected at last. “When she doesn’t make it through the summer, I’ll be right there with you helping you deal.”
I nodded silently and wiped at my eyes. I could tell he meant every word.
A long silence passed between us, and I sniffled one last time and then told him, “Chloe says thank you for saving her. Again.”
“Tell her anytime,” he replied, and he sounded so sincere that, for just a moment, he made me forget it was impossible.
* * *
Having Robbie around made everything much easier that week. It made life in general feel so much more manageable. And during that week, I think I finally started to realize that just spending time in the presence of a single person over and over again didn’t necessarily make them a friend.
Robbie’d been a person in my life, and he’d been someone to talk to about our shared experience, but we hadn’t ever really clicked just because we could. Days spent playing laser tag or reading comic books together had been few and far between and had completely stopped right before I’d met Chloe. I’d forgotten what it was like to have a real friend before her. I’d figured Robbie was it: someone I just went through the motions with. Someone I just spent time with, even if most of the time I d
idn’t enjoy it, and even if it didn’t make me feel particularly good.
Chloe made me feel good. And Robbie would never be Chloe, but knowing that he was there for me, and that he was trying to bite his tongue when his more cynical side started to show, and that he actually cared about what happened to Chloe, made me think I could eventually be okay when she was gone. Like maybe he could actually be a friend I’d enjoy having around, and like instead of being a fleeting streak of color in my black and white world, Chloe’d started a new era where I could see more than just a few different shades.
I considered giving up old movies.
I considered kissing her the next time I saw her.
* * *
Deborah stayed over the night before we were due to go camping. She, Dad, and I made polite conversation over dinner, and then Dad picked out a movie and went to go pop popcorn, leaving me and Deborah alone in the living room.
“That’s a cute shirt,” she told me, breaking a long and awkward silence. I glanced down at my oversized pajama shirt and forced a laugh.
“Thanks.”
I sat back in the small chair I’d been relegated to and stretched my legs, letting out a yawn. Tomorrow was a big day. It was the first day I’d get to really see Chloe again. The last thing I wanted to do was spend the night beforehand staying up late to watch a movie with my father and his girlfriend, but I felt like I had some ground to make up with my dad. The least I could do was pretend to stay awake through a movie.
“How is your friend? Have you heard from her?” Deborah asked me.
I tilted my head back and forth and listened to my neck creak. Then I cracked a couple of knuckles. Finally, I said, “She’s okay now.” I paused, and then added, “I didn’t know Dad told you about that.”
“Well, I’m glad he did.”
I snorted and shifted to face her. “Why? You hardly even know Chloe.”
“I know she’s a good friend of yours.”
“Yeah, but you hardly know me, either,” I pointed out.
She looked pained, and opened her mouth to say something else, but Dad reentered the room, two bowls of popcorn in his hands. He set one down on my lap and then moved to sit beside Deborah with the other.
“Alright, let’s get this thing rolling,” he said, and raised the remote to point it at the television. He pressed play, and the movie began.
I drifted off halfway through, somewhere between daydreaming about Chloe and me alone in a tent and remembering what it’d felt like to look out at the water and not see her there.
When my dad shook me awake at the end of the movie, I couldn’t remember which had made my heart pound faster.
* * *
Chloe rang our doorbell at nine in the morning the next day, while I was halfway through putting my hair up in my bathroom. I abandoned it immediately to race downstairs and throw open the front door.
She was there, a backpack on and sporting a grin that mirrored my own. When she launched herself forward into my arms, I was mostly ready, and when she threw her arms around me, I hugged her back even tighter. Her lips brushed against my shoulder as she murmured, “I missed you,” and for a moment, everything felt right in my world.
Then she pulled away, caught sight of my hair, and literally pointed and laughed at me. I swatted at her arm and tugged at the elastic that’d been holding my hair half-up. With a quick pull, it was released, and down fell my hair in every direction, making Chloe laugh harder.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I deadpanned.
She grabbed my hand and led me upstairs, declaring, “I’m going to help you get ready.”
And that was how five minutes later I found myself sitting on a stool in my bathroom with Chloe’s face inches from mine and an eyeliner pencil pressed to my eyelid.
“This seems unnecessary. We’re going camping,” I pointed out.
“Don’t complain; I’m doing it for you,” was all she said.
I closed my mouth and let her finish. Her face was far too close to mine for me to truly be complaining, and to be honest, I kind of liked the attention.
“God, you’re beautiful,” she sighed out. “If I wasn’t so busy wanting you, I’d so want to be you.”
“I missed you,” I told her again, and then watched her reach for a container of lip balm in my makeup bag. She dipped her index finger inside and then looked directly at me for a moment before her gaze dropped to my lips.
“Open.”
I laughed at first, and then what she was asking sank in and I barely managed to choke out a “What?”
“Open. Your mouth,” she elaborated. “It’s going to get cold tonight and your lips are going to get dry, and then they’ll crack, and then you’ll be glad I had the foresight to do this.”
“Pfft. Foresight my ass,” I muttered, but did as she said. She hid a smug look – although not very well – and then leaned in close and made a big show out of slowly tracing my bottom lip with her finger. I swallowed hard when she was done.
She leaned back and stared at me for a moment, and then arched an eyebrow. “Aren’t you gonna rub them together?”
I blinked at her. “Huh? Oh.” Reddening, I rubbed my lips together and then leapt from the stool. “Okay, so now-”
“Hey, I wasn’t done,” she cut in gently. “You can’t leave without a mirror check. Duh.” She took me by the shoulders and turned me around to face the mirror. I didn’t spend more than a second looking at myself. Chloe and I stared at each other in the mirror for a moment, her hands still on my shoulders, and then I took a quick breath and turned around to face her. She instinctively moved away to give me space, but I shook my head quickly and grabbed her side, holding her close. She glanced down at my hand and then at me, and it occurred to me that for all her bravado, she looked just as nervous as I felt.
I opened my mouth to try to speak, realized I had no idea what I was doing or what I wanted to say, and then closed my mouth again. Chloe didn’t seem to want to make the first move. I didn’t really blame her given how that’d gone for the past month or so.
I fixed my gaze to her lips and watched her lick them. It felt like it took all the strength in my body to move the couple of inches forward that it took for our noses to brush. I saw her close her eyes and so I closed mine, then wondered how I’d kept them open in the first place, as heavy as they felt now. My twenty-pound hand somehow made it from her waist to her cheek, and I stepped in so close I was sure I could hear her heart beating. Or maybe that was my own.
“Girls, are you-? Oh.”
Chloe turned her head so sharply her ponytail swung around and whacked me in the side of my cheek. Flushing deeply through a wince, I didn’t have to look to see it was Deborah standing in the bathroom doorway. She was even more embarrassed than Chloe and me, judging by the look on her face. She was so red that for a moment I wondered if Dad had even told her that I was a lesbian.
“I’m sorry, Harper, your dad asked me to come check on you, I’ll tell him-” she rushed to say, but Chloe cut her off, sounding surprisingly calm.
“It’s okay, we’ll head down now. We were just, um, finishing up Harper’s makeup. For the camping trip.” She scratched at the back of her head awkwardly and then shuffled past Deborah without looking back at me. Once she’d gone, Deborah and I stood alone in the most uncomfortable few seconds of my life.
“I’m sorry,” she said at last. “I didn’t know-”
“That I liked girls,” I finished for her.
She smiled feebly, still as thoroughly embarrassed as I was. “No, I knew. I didn’t know that you and Chloe were-”
“We’re not,” I said, stopping her. “So… thanks.”
I slipped past her and headed for the stairs, willing my blush to fade before I reached my dad.
When I found him, he was with Chloe in the living room. She was talking to him like everything was fine, but she couldn’t quite look me in the eyes.
“Alright, Harper, ready to go? All packed?” he asked me when
he caught sight of me.
I nodded. “My bag’s by the door.”
“Great.” He smiled at Deborah, who must’ve shown up behind me just then, and asked her, “Would you like to lead the way?”
“Lead the way?” I echoed. “Are we taking two cars?”
“Yes,” said Dad. “You and Chloe can take your car. That way if the two of you wind up chickening out, you can leave without us.”
“I won’t chicken out,” I insisted, but I mostly just didn’t want to ride alone with Chloe. Her facial expression said she felt the same way, and she even chimed in to agree with me.
“Yeah, Mr. Locklear, don’t worry. We’ll be okay.”
Dad seemed skeptical, but after a few-second pause, Chloe’s input seemed to win him over.
“Alright, but I don’t want to hear any complaints.” He headed for the door and I trailed after him, avoiding eye contact with Deborah along the way.
I’d gotten out of being alone in a car with Chloe. Now if only I could get out of being alone in a tent with her all night, because it certainly looked like it was going to be a long one.
* * *
A half-hour drive precluded our arrival at the campground, but I convinced Dad to crank up the music during the drive, so it wasn’t bad.
We pulled into the campground and unloaded our stuff from the back of the car. Dad and Deborah carried most of our gear, but my backpack wasn’t exactly light, and I wasn’t looking forward to carrying it all the way to our campsite.
Deborah led the way down a trail near the parking lot, and Dad brought up the rear, leaving Chloe and I to linger awkwardly in the middle. Eventually, the distance between the two of us and both Deborah and Dad widened, and Chloe decided it was time to acknowledge me.
“So, um… I didn’t mean to.” She paused like she was hoping I’d say something, but I didn’t. Sighing, she continued, “If I did anything, I mean… I was just-”
