Colorblind (5 page)

I opened my eyes and registered a new kind of beeping even as Chloe jerked back away from me, surprise registering on her face. Her vest was beeping and flashing red, and behind her stood Robbie, his gun poised and pointed at her. His face looked almost comically grim as he leaned to the side just slightly, pointed his gun at me, and pulled the trigger several times in succession. My vest lit up just before the voice came over the intercom again. “Alright, guys. Time’s up. Close game; it was a one-point difference in the end. Come on out and check out your scores.”

I looked from Robbie, who clearly knew exactly what he’d just happened upon, to Chloe, who was red-faced, embarrassed, and hadn’t taken her eyes off of me. And then I moved quickly, brushing past the both of them and hurrying out of the maze.

“Harper!” Chloe called after me, but I ignored her. I burst out of the smoke, shrugged off my vest and returned my gun, but didn’t glance at the scores. Instead, I went directly to the bag I’d brought, fished out my car key, and handed it to the very confused employee who’d been watching me the whole time.

“Give this to my friends,” I told him.

And then I ran.

I sprinted all the way home on foot, over three hours earlier than I’d planned on leaving the arcade. I ran until my legs were sore and straining and until my throat was aching and dried up from panting and until my heart was thudding so hard it felt like it was trying to tear its way out of my chest.

I collapsed on the sidewalk at the entrance to my neighborhood twenty minutes later and pulled my knees up to my chest, struggling to get my breathing even. I buried my head between my knees and resisted the urge to vomit. The earth was spinning, and I had to squeeze my eyes shut to make it stop. With them closed, all I could see was the surgeon from four years ago, and his grim expression as he’d told my dad that my mom’s injuries were too extensive. They’d done all they could. He was so sorry.

My ears rang as I blinked rapidly and forced my eyes open again. Then I scrambled to my feet, stumbled to the bushes by the stone sign that bore the name of my neighborhood, and coughed harshly into them, my stomach churning.

At last, I steadied myself, confident I wasn’t going to throw up, and took a few deep breaths. The past week felt like a bad dream. I wished it
had
been a bad dream. I wished I had a different pair of eyes.

I pressed my palms into my eye sockets and bit back a frustrated scream. “She’ll be fine,” I forced myself to say. “She’ll be fine, she’ll be fine, she’ll be fine.”

It was easier to repeat a lie than to face how stupid it’d been to speak to Chloe in the first place, but I still didn’t believe it for a second.

* * *

I finished my walk home slowly. I wanted to recover before I saw my dad. I wanted to be able to look him in the eyes and tell him that Robbie’d forgotten an errand he needed to run, and that we’d left early so he could get it done this evening. I wanted to be able to say that it’d been a lot of fun and that Chloe was safely home and Robbie was in a hurry and was getting into his car as we spoke. And then I wanted to turn on an old movie with my dad and drown out the sound of Robbie pulling into the driveway with my car and then taking the hint and leaving in his without saying goodbye.

I wanted all of that, and I got none of it.

Robbie and Chloe, as I’d expected, didn’t immediately assume I’d run straight home, and so I beat them back. That was what I’d hoped for, and I was relieved that I could put off talking to either of them about what’d happened back in the arcade. Their absence meant that I could bury my phone in the bottom of my purse and ignore their messages until Monday, in Robbie’s case, and potentially forever, in Chloe’s.

I knew I looked sweaty, but I could attribute that to nearly half an hour of laser tag. So that was okay, too.

What wasn’t okay – or wasn’t expected, at least – was that there was a car I’d never seen before in our driveway. It was parked next to Robbie’s, and it was a red four-door. A car fit for someone closer to my dad’s age than mine. A car I was certain I’d never seen before.

I fumbled for my keys as I walked up to front door, just in case it was unlocked. It wasn’t. I opened it quickly, already trying to double-check my explanation to make sure it was usable in front of a formal guest. Dad worked from home, but he still had coworkers. Maybe a simple conference call wasn’t enough for whatever he was working on at the moment.

“Dad?” I called out as I entered the living room, and my eyes fell to the couch. Dad shifted hastily, detaching himself from the woman sitting with him and running an anxious hand through his hair. But it was too late. I’d seen them, and I was staring now. They’d been kissing.

The woman turned to look at me, eyes wide with surprise. But she recovered quickly and offered me a shy, vaguely embarrassed smile. “Oh, is this Harper? I’ve heard so much about you!”

My dad and I were having a silent conversation of our own as she spoke. I swallowed hard, my whole body tense, and he shot me a pained look, still rubbing at his head. “Harper-”

I turned swiftly and hurried out of the room, taking the stairs two at a time as he called after me. I threw open my bedroom door and then slammed it shut behind me once I was alone inside. I locked it and then turned away, pressing my back up against the door. And before I could even register what I’d felt, seeing the two of them together, tears were streaming down my cheeks, and I couldn’t prevent them from coming.

Eventually, I stopped trying.

Chapter Four

Dad tried several times to come talk to me, but I stayed shut up in my room for the rest of the day, buried beneath the piles of blankets on my bed. I kept my phone on my nightstand, turned on, and spent my evening listening to the buzzes of new text messages, or else to the sound of my ringtone as presumably Robbie or Chloe tried to call me. Dad came by at one point to talk through the door about what had gone wrong today at the arcade rather than what’d happened when I’d gotten home, so it was obvious Robbie’d reported back to him rather than letting me off the hook. I was eager to put off dealing with it, so I didn’t respond to my dad.

I cracked first for Robbie, when he called me shortly after midnight. He sighed with relief when I answered him, a dull “hello” my only greeting.

“I was worried about you,” he told me.

“I’m perfect,” I deadpanned. “You can stop calling.”

There was a long silence. At last, he told me, “Chloe was really upset.”

“I don’t care,” I mumbled. “I hardly know her.”

“Yeah, you do care. You like her.”

“I hardly know her,” I repeated.

“You still like her.” When I didn’t argue, he added, treading carefully, “It’s okay to like her, you know.”

I rolled my eyes. “You’re so full of shit. You’re the one who told me to stay away from her in the first place.”

“That was my advice. It doesn’t mean not taking it makes you wrong. I get it, okay? I get it better than anyone. Sometimes your head and your heart don’t say the same thing.”

“Look, it’s not like I’m in love with her. We just met. I can just… tell her I’m not interested. Tell her to leave me alone. I never have to speak to her again, and then when she…” I trailed off, swallowing hard, and couldn’t bring myself to say it. Instead, I let out a shaky breath and admitted, “She was going to kiss me.”

“I know. I saw. I stopped it.” He was silent for a moment. “Maybe I shouldn’t have.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. I set the phone down on my bedspread and put him on speaker, then placed my chin in my hands. “My dad’s seeing someone,” I told him.

“I know. She was here when I pulled up.”

“How can he do that? He didn’t even tell me about her.”

“Well, maybe he was worried that this was how you’d react.” He seemed to hesitate for a moment before continuing. “It
has
been four years since your mom, you know?”

“That shouldn’t matter.”

“Of course it does. People move on, Harper. He loved your mom, but I bet she’d want him to be happy.”

“You don’t know anything about my mom or what she’d want,” I bit out, and he fell silent. I rubbed at my face until I was sure my cheeks were red.

“That’s true,” he said at last, “but that’s the way life works. You like Chloe now, but if you were to date her, you’d want to eventually date again after she was dead, wouldn’t you?”

“Why do you have to be such an insensitive asshole?” I snapped, cheeks flaming, and quickly hung up on him. Then I threw my phone across the room and watched it hit the wall with a satisfying smack, where it broke apart into several pieces.

Breathing hard, I lay back down, pulled my covers over my head, and willed myself to wake up to a different world in the morning. One where Robbie wasn’t so cynical and straightforward and my dad cared about my mom and Chloe didn’t have less than a year to live. But that wasn’t going to happen.

Chloe didn’t know
anyone
in San Francisco. She had no friends. And she didn’t deserve to die feeling alone in a new city.

I couldn’t fall in love with her, I knew, but trying to help her was the only real option I had. I couldn’t just ignore her now, and if I couldn’t keep her alive, I could at least be there for her when she died. The last months of her life being happy ones were more important than anything I’d go through while helping make them happy. That was the right thing to do, even if it would be hard.

And besides: maybe, by some miracle, I’d do something to keep her alive in the process.

* * *

I answered Dad’s sixth knock on my door around noon the next day, when I was finally somewhat prepared to hear him out. I was
so
angry at him – angrier than I’d ever been at anyone before, in fact. He’d given me that big speech at dinner all those nights ago about not regretting one minute of his relationship with Mom, but with the way his date had talked about me last night, it seemed like he’d been seeing her without telling me for a while now.

I understood loving someone and then loving someone else later. But Mom had been everything to me and him before she died. Four years had passed, but it felt too soon. Maybe it always would.

He didn’t bring up last night when I opened my bedroom door. Instead, unable to look me in the eyes, he told me, “You have a visitor at the front door, honey.”

“You sure it isn’t for you?” I bit out as I brushed past him. He stiffened and didn’t respond.

I was so busy trying to rile my dad up that I hadn’t actually considered who my visitor was. Right around the time I reached the front door, I realized it was probably Chloe. I was ready to hear my
dad
out, but Chloe was a different story.

I paused, my hand on the knob of the front door. There wasn’t really any turning back now. I exhaled heavily and pulled it open.

She looked up sharply and seemed surprised to see me standing there. In her hands was a sealed Tupperware container full of chocolate chip cookies, which she offered to me with a small, nervous smile and a proposal of, “Peace offering?”

“I’m allergic to chocolate,” I told her, but accepted them anyway. “My dad will eat them, though.”

“Oh, wow. That sucks. And explains the vanilla cone.” She stood silently for a moment, chewing on her lip, and then seemed to collect herself. She shot me a pained look. “So… as it turns out, I sometimes do this thing where I flirt with a girl and then mistake discomfort due to lack of interest for discomfort due to nervous sexual tension, and then wind up trapping straight girls against walls and trying to make out with them. And then scaring the crap out of them and literally making them flee from me for several miles. On foot.”

“Has this happened more than once?” I asked, dumbfounded.

She hesitated, and then admitted, “Well, no. You’re kind of the only one. I have a pretty good gaydar. You don’t have a boyfriend, you laugh at all my lame jokes, and I’m pretty sure you’ve actually spent more time blushing around me than
not
blushing around me so far. Turns out you’re just kind of a nervous person, I guess.”

I sighed, taking pity on her. “Yeah, I am. And also gay.”

She furrowed her eyebrows, caught between looking thoughtful and inquisitive. “Well, now I’m confused. You didn’t kiss me.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Nice ego.”

She flushed abruptly as her own words sank in. “I didn’t… I mean… That came out wrong.”

“I think it kinda came out how you meant it,” I corrected, shooting her a sympathetic look and a smile.

“Okay. Maybe it did. I’m passably attractive and aware of it; sue me.” She sighed, running a hand through her hair. “God, I shouldn’t have come onto you during freaking laser tag. There are better ways to start out.”

My smile faded. I set the cookies on an end table just inside by the front door, and then let out a sigh and leaned against the doorframe, my arms folded across my chest. Chloe’d relaxed now, and looked like she wanted to ask me to hang out for the day. “Chloe, I like you. But I think we should just be friends. I can’t date you,” I told her.

Her own smile faded. “…Oh?”

“I’m sorry.” I bit at my lip. “I’m just not looking for a relationship.” She opened her mouth and I added, “And I’m not looking for something casual, either. You’re nice, okay? I want you around for a while.”

She studied me for a moment, her mouth falling shut, and then, slowly, a smile tugged at the corners of her lips. “Okay. But I’m still going to flirt with you. Does this mean we can have sleepovers and pillow fights in our underwear?”

“You haven’t had many female friends, have you?” I guessed, half-kidding.

“I used to call the girls that slept over at my house my friends back when I was in middle school. I’m not sure that counts, though. We probably got a little too friendly.”

“Oh my God.” I shook my head. “We are polar opposites. I have pretty much no experience with girls,
and
I’m older than you.”

“That could change,” she pointed out, winking. “And not much older, I bet, unless you’re, like, eighteen. You’re what, a senior next year? I just finished up my sophomore year, but I barely missed the cutoff to be in your grade; I’ll be seventeen in August.”

I’d realized what she was about to say just before she said it, but I wasn’t quick enough at tuning her out. It took everything I had to keep a practiced smile on my face at the realization that she was only three months younger than me. August. She was turning seventeen in August.

That meant that Chloe didn’t have twelve months to live. She didn’t even have six.

She was going to be dead by the end of the summer.

* * *

Chloe left without coming inside after our conversation on the porch. I think she was more put off than she’d seemed by my rejection, and as I took the stairs up to my room, I wondered if I’d have been better off letting her think I was straight. Now the idea would always be in the back of both of our minds, even if I never let us actually go there.

I was upset with Robbie, but I knew I had to call him now. He was the only one I could talk to about Chloe.

I used my house phone, but he had the number saved and knew it was me. He seemed hesitant when he answered. “Harper?”

“Forget about last night,” I told him. “I was pissed off and emotional. It doesn’t matter anymore. Chloe turns seventeen in August.”

He was silent for a long time. I picked at the comforter of my bed as I waited for his thoughts. “…How are you?” he asked at last.

“That’s it?” I countered. “No advice? No telling me I should’ve known better?”

“It’s not your fault you like her,” he murmured. “Sometimes that stuff can’t be helped. It happens. Against our better judgment.”

“I guess.” I let out a breath. “The only good thing about this is that it has to be an accident. Right? I mean, barring the infinitesimally small chance that she has some rare brain tumor that’s suddenly going to kill her, it has to be an accident.”

“Another car accident,” he mused quietly. I felt my heart clench in my chest.

“Well… I can watch out for that.”

“How? By making sure she never uses a vehicle over the summer?”

“I don’t know. I could drive her everywhere, maybe…”

“No,” he cut in, so forcefully it startled me. “If it really will be a car accident, you shouldn’t get into a car with her, Harper.”

“Unless my age of death is 17, I think I’ll be alright, Robbie.”

“You can still get seriously injured,” he reminded me.

“So if I can’t stop an accident by driving her myself, how do I stop it?” I asked, realizing too late that his answer would be indicative of his usual philosophy.

“Harper, I don’t think you can.”

“I’m going to try,” I insisted. “Even if I have to be her chauffer all summer and spend every hour of my spare time being with her and checking up on her.” I set my jaw. “Everything I didn’t and couldn’t do for my mom.”

Robbie didn’t respond, but I knew what he was thinking. He didn’t believe I could do it. I was determined to prove him wrong.

Later that day, Dad finally got to have the conversation he’d wanted. I initiated it by entering his office and offering him my SIM card. “Do you have an old cell phone I can put this in?”

He sighed and nodded, taking the card from me. Then he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap. “Harper, you know I love you dearly,” he began, “but I think we both know that things have been different since your mother passed away.
I’ve
been different, particularly.”

He paused, and I stared at him, waiting for him to go on. “Deborah and I met online a few months ago. She lives in the area, and her husband passed away in a fire a couple of years ago. He was a firefighter. Talking to her…” he trailed off, shaking his head. “Everything I’d been through, she’d been through. She could relate to it all. I haven’t had that with anyone other than you.” He shifted in his chair and looked to me pleadingly. “I think you’d really like her if you gave her a chance. A lot of the qualities I admire in her are ones I admired in your mother.”

“She’s not Mom,” I reminded him gruffly. “She’s never gonna be Mom.”

“I know.” He nodded. “I know. And when you were born, your mother and I promised each other that if anything were to happen to either of us, the other one would do the best job they could in raising you, and try as best as they could to be happy.” He smiled proudly. “And I’ve done a damn good job with you. I love you so much, Harper. Now it’s time for me to work on the other half of that promise.”