I Fell in Love with Hope(30)

“Yes.” I swallow, eyes flicking side to side, foraging for some courage. “I’m exploring you.”

She’s been tying her hair up more often nowadays. Whenever we stand or sit this close, little details like that become apparent. Her eyes are close to her nose. She’s colder when she’s upset. And if I say something out of character, she searches. She reads lines in me she’s already read as if she misunderstood them the first time. And if you give her a chance, she’s forgiving.

“Okay,” she nods. Then, she turns on her heel, hair swinging with her, striding away from the weary cafeteria. “But you owe me a night. So c’mon.”

—

“So why did you stand me up, Yorick?” she asks.

“I was scared.”

“Scared?”

“Neo says you won’t bite me, but I don’t believe him.”

“You should listen. Neo knows everything.”

Her room is full of plants, some wounded and others healing like mine. Her clothes are piled rather than folded, avalanching out of a suitcase in the far corner. Her bed is unmade, her medication thoughtlessly strewn about.

“You’re messy,” I say, smiling as I put the books down. It’s endearing. The comfort she has with the space. She’s adopted the room, given it a personality.

Hikari narrows her eyes at me, faking a bite, her teeth clicking together. We both laugh.

Once my arms are free, Hikari breaks into a run, out of her room, into the hall, a chorus of nurses yelling at her to slow down in the distance. She doesn’t even explain what we’re doing. She trusts I’ll follow, and I do.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

Hikari just chuckles, her steps unbreaking. She shrieks when we both almost run into a group of doctors, quickly ducking her head and taking another turn. Her laughter rings, keeping me close even when I’m several strides behind.

She only stops when we reach the gardens, panting, the cool night making steam of her breaths like the cafeteria makes of coffee. The stars are dull once more, but nonetheless, she looks up, taking them in like it’s the first time.

“How about now, Sam?” She caresses the dark shrubbery and sits down on a patch of grass. “Do you feel alive yet?”

“We stole a race,” I realize, wiping my mouth.

“For Sony.” Hikari holds her knees in the crooks of her elbows. She knows. That Sony isn’t doing well right now. She knows it pains me as much as it pains her.

“Can I ask you something?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“What is a life to you?”

“There is a medical definition,” I say. “Neo says there are too many philosophical ones.”

“I didn’t ask for a definition. I asked what it is to you.”

What if I told you that I am not meant to be alive? What if I told her? Do you think she’d understand?

Hikari’s earlier coldness resurfaces. “My parents think I’m throwing my life away,” she says. “They say I don’t want anything worthwhile, and when I bring up the fact that they’ve never asked what it is I want, they call me childish. My parents are logical. Their faith is expensive. It has to be earned. They believe scans, bloodwork, doctors, but whatever I’m feeling? Whatever I say?” As if her parents are sitting across from her, a barrier a table thick between them, she sighs. “It’s difficult to feel heard by people who have no faith in your words.”

“They don’t believe you’re suffering?” I ask.

“It’s not that.”

Hikari’s fingers caress the scar from the crook of her shoulder to her chest. There is another scar just adjacent, younger than its predecessor. She bares them to me as if bearing secrets.

“I was so happy as a kid,” she says. “They don’t understand how all of the sudden things changed. Although it wasn’t sudden really, it was more like the older I grew, the clearer my vision became. My imagination thinned like fog, and the world I saw was so gray in comparison.” The touch at the column of her throat falls to the bandages around her forearms. She trembles, but I think she trusts me enough to undo them. Beneath, little white scars form lines like a ladder up her arm.

“It started with loneliness,” she says. “I could eat and not taste a thing, cry and not feel sad, sleep and still feel tired. I didn’t like what I used to like or want what I used to want. I thinned until I felt like a blur. A little piece of the background no one would notice had gone missing. And even if I’d never felt emptier, every time I tried to get out of bed, I felt like I was sinking. I’d stare at my clock and watch it tick, wishing I could break it.” She closes her hand around the cuts. It looks like she wants to cry but doesn’t remember how. “Thank god you all hate time too, Sam. I’ve been wishing it dead for as long as I can remember.”

She’s still a teenager. Teenagers aren’t as malleable as children. They have a sense of self, aspiration, dreams. Sometimes, parents feel threatened by that autonomy. They cling to the idea of their child, the idea of who they are. Anything off-script feels like disobedience. So when that child would rather read and write than follow in his father’s footsteps, violence ensues. When that child is trapped in her own mind, her mother and father negate the pain as nothing but a symptom of age.