I Fell in Love with Hope(16)

“Oh,” Hikari says like I’m a pleasant surprise on an otherwise uneventful evening. “Hi, Sam.”

“What are you doing up there!?”

“It’s quite the view. I thought I’d see what it has to offer at night.”

“We have windows for that, you know!?”

“Don’t be silly. How can I befriend a breeze behind a window?”

“The breeze is going to push you over the edge, please. I–”

“Look at the stars, Sam.” Hikari upturns her chin to the sky, wonder aplenty in her eyes. As if the wind isn’t playing with the material of her nightgown and caressing her hair in a sweet, almost threatening way. “They’re so faint tonight.” A sigh works through her. “Don’t you wish you could brighten them?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Stars aren’t eternal. They should burn and shine with everything they have while they can,” she says. “Those five right there. You see them?” She leans back and points up at flickering specks of white against the black. “You can almost draw a five-point star between them.” Her head shakes like it’s a shame. “They’re edging to show their light. I can feel it.”

Hikari looks back at me again. When her body weight shifts back on her heels, I shiver. Every movement she makes is like a finger hooked on a grenade pin. My lungs cease when her hand so much as reaches for the pencil at her ear, and adds a detail to her drawing.

I realize then that she’s doing the same thing we were when watching smoke rise from cigarettes and foam bubble in beer bottles. Admiring a weapon.

Truth is, I’ve been thinking about her. What else would I think about? When I grabbed Neo’s box, and he lay drugged in his bed, I thought about how Hikari would give him something to smile about before the strenuous journey. While roaming, I thought of every word she said. I thought of her yellow, her voice so flirtatious and playful, her conspicuous bandages, and that scar. I wondered if she was sad about her parents and what she would do with her spoils. I wondered if she thought about me. Every time I pictured her and listened to her in my head, all I thought about was this urge I haven’t felt in years—this urge to want.

“Please,” I beg, and from the breath alone, Hikari finally notices my panic. “You’re scaring me. Can you please get down?”

Hikari’s glasses reflect me in a much kinder way than the night would. Her contagious smile curves to one side, and under different circumstances, it may have reached me.

“Since you said please,” she whispers, sitting on the ledge, shifting on her seat, and hopping back onto the safe side like you’d hop from a swing. “You followed me.”

“Yes, I’m sorry.”

“Why?” she asks. “I would’ve been disappointed if you didn’t.”

Flipping the pencil in her hand, Hikari eyes me up and down. I draw to her wrist, the white band around it, glossy and reflective with her bandages to match. One of them seems fresher than the other, specks soaked red at the seams.

“Why did you steal that sharpener and screwdriver?” I ask.

Hikari shrugs, circling me. “Why does anyone steal anything?”

“To sin?”

“To be human?” She smirks, reminding me that to her, I’m merely an instrument of amusement, a plaything, a puzzle she wants to solve because she doesn’t know how she fits with it quite yet. “Although you aren’t very good at being human, are you?”

“I feel like I’m supposed to be offended by that.”

“You probably aren’t very good at being offended either. You’re quite awkward.”

“I’m starting to think you’re quite mean.”

“Give me your story, Sam,” she demands. “Sate my quite mean curiosity, and maybe I’ll tell you why I stole what I stole.”

“Something tells me your curiosity is quite greedy.”

“Tell me about the Hit List,” she says, and her scent and voice surround me like a whirlwind, obscuring everything else until I’m sure I’d tell her anything she wanted to hear. “What’s it for, other than thievery? Who are you killing?”

“Time,” I say.

“Ooh,” she mocks. “Crafty enemy.”

“Disease.”

“Cruel enemy.”

“Death.”

I didn’t notice I was stepping backward till my heel knocks into Neo’s box, the cardboard and contents jostling like a sound of pain. I pick it back up, dusting it in apology.

“How do you kill Time, Disease, and Death?” Hikari asks.

“You steal what they stole.”

“Cigarettes and Beer?”

“Moments,” I correct. “Childhoods. Lives.”

Hikari stops her circling. She looks at me for a long while, that breeze that loves her so, filling the silence. I should tell her more. I should tell her of our great plans to escape this place, to go to the ends of the world and back. It’s C’s plan, Sony’s plan, Neo’s plan. It’s our plan to reach a place we don’t have to steal at all.

“You really think I’m mean?” Hikari asks after a while.

I shrug. “A little.”

“Mm.”