Colorblind (2 page)

But I guess maybe there was always a small chance his 83 would find a way to turn into something higher. Maybe if enough time had passed. Maybe if he did something,
anything,
differently one day. Maybe if he did something that God or Satan or fate hadn’t been counting on.

And I wished every day for that. To have some proof, or even just some
hope
that we weren’t all essentially sitting around waiting to hit our predetermined expiration dates.

It’d be nice to have some evidence that we control our own destinies, I think.

Chapter Two

I met Chloe Stephens a day after chicken tender night, when I nearly hit her with my car.

I was lost in my own thoughts on my way to work, and had barely made it down the street from my house before I had to slam on the brakes.

She’d been chasing her escaped puppy across the street, and I came so close to hitting her that when we locked eyes through the windshield, I could see the light splash of freckles across her face and the color of her eyes. It was the first time I could remember looking at someone’s eyes before their forehead. Hers were a bright blue. Her hair was blonde, and pulled up into a messy ponytail, with a couple of stray tendrils framing her face. She was cute.

She cradled the puppy in one arm and a leash attached to a collar in the other. I didn’t make the connection until later that the dog must’ve slipped his collar while she was taking him for a walk.

I think she was – quite understandably, really – stunned at first, because she didn’t move from out in front of my car. I shifted the gear into park and scrambled out, and felt my cheeks heat up as I rushed to apologize to her.

“I’m sorry; I didn’t see you,” I explained hastily, my eyes still on her very, very blue ones. “You’re okay, right?”

She blinked back at me, a little wide-eyed, and then turned red right before my eyes. “No, I’m sorry. That was my fault. I’m still getting used to having a puppy. Baxter here doesn’t like to listen to me.” She gestured to the dog in her arms.

“He’s cute,” I said, mostly because I didn’t know what else to say. The puppy was some sort of golden lab mix, and he was struggling to get out of her arms, so she knelt down and placed him on the ground, then reattached his leash and collar.

“So do you live around here?” she asked me.

“Yeah, just down the street.” I pointed to my house as she straightened back up.

“Cool,” she said casually, and smiled at me as though I hadn’t just nearly killed her. “My parents and I just moved in last week. I’ve always wanted to live in the city… especially in California. The weather here in San Francisco is so nice.”

“Yeah, well… beware the people. I don’t think they’re as nice as they are in small towns,” I warned her. “Everyone’s always in a hurry.”

“Right.” One corner of her lips quirked upward into a smirk. “I hear they nearly hit you with their cars.”

“Ouch.” I pressed a hand to my chest, and she laughed at me. Then we shared a smile. There was something about her that made me comfortable in a way I wasn’t used to feeling. I’d heard before that sometimes two people could meet and instantly click: instantly know they’re going to get along. It was like that with her.

“Alright, well…” she said at last, still cradling Baxter to her chest, “Um, I guess you probably have somewhere to be, but it was nice to meet you, other than the whole near-death experience thing. I’m Chloe, by the way.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said again.

“It’s fine! I’m fine…?” She looked at me expectantly, and I realized she wanted my name.

“Harper. Okay. Enjoy California, I guess.”

“Oh, I will. Bye, Harper.” She gave me a wave and moved to turn away, and I remembered her forehead at the last second. My eyes darted up, and in hindsight, maybe they shouldn’t have. Maybe I should’ve let Chloe Stephens be the one untainted human interaction I’d had in years. The one person whose company I’d just enjoyed for a few easy, simple seconds without pondering depressing, existential-crisis-inducing things like her age and cause of death.

But I glanced to her forehead and swore I saw 16, and then she’d turned away. Was walking away. And then my curiosity was getting the best of me, and I was suddenly doing something I told myself I’d never do. I was caring.

“Hey!” I called after her, and she paused to turn back again. I wasn’t looking at her eyes anymore. The 16 on her forehead held my focus as I struggled to think of something to say. I’d only called her back to get another look at her number. “Um… if you need someone to show you around, I’m free most days in the afternoon,” I finally blurted out.

She smiled at me again, almost slyly, and then nodded. “Okay. I might take you up on that, Harper.”

“Okay. Cool.”             

I watched her go, and then, when she was back inside her home, I clambered back into my car and let out a heavy breath. I reached up and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that my knuckles turned white, and immediately berated myself. I’d spent so long keeping to myself, and the first person other than Robbie that I’d reached out to was a girl who’d be dead within the year. She
had
to be sixteen years old already. She looked my age, and I was seventeen.

Robbie was going to be disappointed in me.

* * *

“What exactly do you think you’re going to accomplish?” he asked me just a few hours later.

“I don’t know,” I murmured. “It just came out. I just word-vomited all over the place. I saw a cute girl and turned into an idiot. I didn’t even notice her number at first.”

“Who does that?” he countered, looking confused. We were on break again, and it was so hot out that I could see sweat dripping from the tips of his dark, shoulder-length hair. “You have the power to see when people will die, and you met someone and
didn’t
immediately look to see?”

“She had nice eyes,” I mumbled, and only felt dumber when he raised an eyebrow at me.

“Seriously?”

“
And
I’d almost run her over, too, so I was a little distracted, okay?”

“Her number was 16
after
you almost hit her?”

“Yeah, clearly she wasn’t meant to be killed by me,” I told him, rolling my eyes. “Obviously it’s something else.”

“Something else that’s happening soon,” he reminded me. “The smart thing to do would be to not get attached.”

“I’ve never been that smart,” I said.

“Just don’t be dumb,” he told me. I nodded, understanding. No initiating contact. That was mostly fine with me. I didn’t
want
to befriend a cute girl months from death. That sounded like a tragic Nicholas Sparks novel waiting to happen…. but only if she somehow found me attractive.

“She was probably straight, right?” I asked Robbie, half-kidding. He smacked me on the arm in response and rolled his eyes at me. I smiled back, and it helped. And then I tried my best to forget about Chloe, because if I thought about her too much, I’d wind up dwelling on the fact that she was a real person with a real life who had real parents that were going to be devastated when she
really
died.

As long as I didn’t think about her, and as long as I didn’t see her, I’d just hear about her death through neighborhood gossip, and maybe my dad and I would talk briefly about how unexpected and sad it was, and then we’d move on. Life would go on with or without Chloe Stephens, after all. It waited for no one. It never had.

* * *

My dad was a lanky, black-haired man with thick-rimmed Harry Potter glasses and a timid voice that all but confirmed he’d been kind of a dork growing up. On rainy days back when I was younger, I’d sometimes liked to sit on the couch with him and watch
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and we’d joke around about how he and Giles would’ve been best friends were Giles a real person.

Dad got even quieter after we lost Mom. He worked from home now, so he spent most of his time during the day in his office on the computer. But he did come out to make dinner most nights, and occasionally we’d watch an old movie together. I knew he loved me, but I also knew he didn’t like being a single dad.

I didn’t look much like him. I had Mom’s brunette hair, only mine was a slightly darker shade than hers, and a little less naturally wavy. I also had her dark brown eyes. Dad used to like to joke that he couldn’t tell my pupils from my irises, but he’d stopped when he’d realized it was making me insecure. But everything had made me insecure back then. For a while, I’d been obsessed with being perfect. I’d thought that maybe if I was flawless, I’d live forever. Ten-year-old logic, huh?

During dinner maybe three days or so after I’d met Chloe, Dad perked up out of nowhere and told me, “Oh, right. I can’t believe I forgot. A girl stopped by looking for you today while you were at work. It was just half an hour or so before you got home, actually.”

“A girl?” I repeated quietly, although I obviously knew who it’d been. I hadn’t talked to any girls other than Chloe lately. Or ever.

“A very cute girl.” He wiggled his eyebrows at me, smirking, and I rolled my eyes at him.

“Dad, c’mon.”

“She seemed very eager to see you. And she brought a dog along. I didn’t know you’d made any new friends; does she work with you?”

“No, she’s new to the neighborhood. I nearly ran over her and her dog the other day.”

His eyebrows pulled together, and he studied me, concerned. “I thought I told you that if you were using my car you needed to be careful.”

“I was! She ran out into the street! Besides, she’s obviously fine now. It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Well, just make sure you’re not texting and driving, or whatever it is you kids do now.”

“What did she want specifically?” I asked, rolling my eyes again. “Like, what did she say?”

“Well, she asked if you lived here. I told her yes, but that you were working and would be home soon if she’d like to wait. She suggested I just tell you she stopped by, and I said that I would, and then she left.”

I looked away from him and picked at my food with my fork. “Okay.” There was a long silence, and then I asked him, “Do you think I should spend time with her?”

“Of course. You could use a new friend. Especially with it being summer. You have to do
something
with your free time other than working with that older guy – who I
still
have yet to really get to know, by the way. And that doesn’t mean I don’t think he seems nice, but I don’t like the idea of your only friend being in his twenties. You’re seventeen.”

“Yeah, but…” I trailed off, and then shrugged my shoulders. It wasn’t like I could just tell him what I knew about Chloe. There was no telling how quickly my life would spiral out of control if I did. It just wasn’t ever going to be an option. I’d made a few comments about it when I’d been much younger, and the adults had laughed it off back then. They thought it was funny that I was convinced I had a special power. Now I was old enough to know that I’d never tell. “I don’t know,” I finally said. “What if we don’t click or something?”

“Well, you’ll never know unless you try.”

“What if we do click and we become friends and then it ends badly somehow?”

Dad was quiet for a moment. I think, to some extent, he understood what I was getting at, because when he finally spoke again, he’d softened and reached over to take my hand with his. “Harper, I know that things have been rough. We’ve both been through a lot. Loss is… it’s hard. But that’s no reason to cut yourself off from the rest of the world just because you’re scared to lose someone again.”

“If you could do it all over again with Mom,” I asked, looking up at him, “would you?”

“Of course.”

“What if she’d died earlier? Like, giving birth to me or something?”

“That doesn’t change my answer,” he replied simply.

“What if you’d only been friends, and she’d still died ten years earlier?”

“Harper, people are not milk cartons,” Dad sighed out. “You don’t pick and choose the ones you think will last the longest without going sour. If it feels right, you just go with it until it doesn’t feel right anymore. And sometimes when something goes wrong, it hurts. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it in the first place.”

I sat back in my chair, my eyebrows furrowed and my eyes on my lap, and let out a quiet sigh. Dad cleared his throat and stood, moving to clean off the dishes on the table.

“Spend some time with a girl your age who wants to get to know you. Even if it’s just friendship, and even if it’s just for summer. You could use the company, and I think it’ll be a reassuring experience for you when nothing bad happens and you make a great friend. She seems like a nice girl.”

“I don’t know, Dad,” I mumbled, reaching up to rub at the back of my neck. “We’ll see.”

* * *

Chloe Stephens, as it turned out, was persistent.

She came around the following Saturday, Baxter in tow, and rang our doorbell three quick times in succession right around noon. Given that it was a Saturday and my dad was in his office, oblivious to the world around him, I was forced to stumble out of bed and zombie-walk my way downstairs to the front door.

It hadn’t even occurred to me that it’d be Chloe at the door, mostly because I was still half-asleep and hadn’t really been doing any thinking at all. But as it was, I leaned forward to open the door, my hair a mess, my eyelids droopy, my body barely covered by shorts and a tank top, and then found myself face to face with her on the other side.