I Fell in Love with Hope(17)

“Neo’s mean too.”

“Is he?”

“Constantly.” I hold his box closer to my chest. “But he needs me.”

Neo barely cleared the requirements for his surgery. His doctors wanted to operate for years. His spine is beginning to displace his organs, organs weak enough from malnutrition. They had no choice but to risk it. It’s scaring me more than I care to admit. That his heart, after tonight, may only be mine.

It helps to just focus on a mean girl and her pretty words.

“He’s well read,” she says, eyeing the titles of the scattered paperbacks in the box. “Hamlet, Lord of the Flies, Slaughterhouse-Five, Wuthering Heights.”

“Wuthering Heights is my favorite,” I say, inclined to impress her.

“You say I murdered you. Haunt me then,” she says, the way she introduced my name to the sky. A lyric. A line from a poem. Prose. It stills in me. Clears my vision, drops my jaw, till I pick it back up, swallowing down my wonder.

“A stupid wish,” I mumble.

“Is it?”

“The dead do not haunt, no matter how much you beg them to.”

“Sam?”

“Yes?”

“Why are you wandering the night with Neo’s books?”

“It’s complicated,” I say. “Neo never asks for anything. Salvaging his stories is the least I can do.” Hikari asks with her eyes that I say more. “His parents are here for his surgery. They don’t like his books. Or his stories,” I explain. “They love him, I think, but-”

“But sometimes parents love the idea of their child more than the person they are.”

A harsher edge of Hikari’s puzzle piece emerges. She stares at the books, her fingers toying with the nightgown, bunching the material near her thigh. “That kind of love is suffocating.” Like fingers closing around a wrist.

“Why are you wandering the night on ledges,” Hikari. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall?”

“Of course, I am,” she says. “But fear is just a large shadow with a little spine.”

My fear snarls at that. It resents her, tugs me further by the rope, possessive, but I pay it no mind. Her gravity is stronger.

“You’re a writer,” I breathe like I’ve found another treasure of the world.

“More of a reader,” she says. “Hamlet was my worst influence.”

“Does reading make you happy?” I ask. I want to know all things that bring her joy.

“Reading makes me feel,” she says.

Feel.

Emotions and I don’t have the best relationship. It’s a distant, bitter affair—a divorce. Emotions are disgusted by me. They’re a gust of wind on the other side of that ledge, and even if they toy with my hair or stroke my skin, I ignore them. Emotions are with the ghosts I buried, husks of what they were, hollow hauntings. But who knows? Maybe Shakespeare can dig them up.

“I haven’t read Hamlet yet,” I say, peering at the cover.

Hikari looks at me like she has a devious idea, and you already know I’m done in by it.

—

We read on the rooftop for an hour. At first, in the white noise. In the breeze, an intruding, whorish bastard who can never stop copping a feel. I ask if we can go inside and read in the warmth. It’s a lie. Hikari keeps the roof plenty warm. I just want to get away from the wind. I’m jealous of how free it is to touch her.

Hikari agrees, and we settle in the crook of a hall I know where very few pass. It used to be an extension of the cardiology department, but now it’s more of a dead-end spot where doctors come to take a phone call or have mid-shift breakdowns. Either way, I like it. There’s no wind. It’s a place where hearts were once healed.

Hikari and I sit against the wall. I’m the one who holds the book. She’s the one who assigns theatrics. She claims certain characters, gives me the role of others, and we read aloud. It’s less passive than I’m used to, with lots of existing involved, but I like it. I like hearing her voice travel, the dramatic pauses, and the dedication she takes to her audience of one.

Sometimes, she scoots closer to me. A funny feeling tingles in my chest when she does. I think she likes hearing my voice too but in a different way. She likes the stuttering when I peek at her, the nervous swallows, the guttural clearings. She likes my reaction, not to Hamlet, but to her.

She keeps enough distance. We share it. We play with it like an extra pair of hands.

Hours pass. Hours I don’t notice. We aren’t around windows anymore. It may as well be morning. Hikari’s patience thins with daybreak. As we reach certain scenes, ones she says are pinnacle, she becomes less an actor and more a stage director.

“Sam, you’re doing it all wrong.” Hikari slaps her hands on her hips. “Stand up.”

“I am standing.”

“That’s not standing, that’s hunching.”

I look down at myself, puzzled.

“Hunching?”

“Hunching. Do you even have arms?”

“My arms are right here.” I extend them from my body as far as they’ll go, the book still propped open at the heels of my hands.

“Those aren’t arms,” Hikari says. “They’re appendages at best.”

“You’re starting to hurt my feelings.”