I Fell in Love with Hope(48)

But it’s a lie. It’s all a lie, and Hikari made me believe it could be true. With her one day and her constant game of pretend that she plays with the future as if it’s set in stone. She made them all think it could be true.

“Sam?”

I flinch. Hikari stands in the doorway, alone. My anger rises like smoke from the place she touched.

“Are you okay?” Her voice is edgeless. She’s worried about me. “I’m sorry I grabbed you like that.” She walks to me without caution as my jaw works on its hinges. “I just couldn’t let you fall–”

“Why did you say that to Sony?” I ask. My fists clench at my sides.

Hikari halts, our distance the same as the day we met.

“What?”

“You said, you’re going to make it. Why did you say that to her?”

Hikari shakes her head like she’s been hit.

“I don’t understand.”

“You’re acting like a motivational poster. Like those tapes, they remake every ten years telling sick kids to keep fighting as if any of it is in their control.”

“Because it is–”

“Sony’s body eats away at the very thing that breathes for it, and no one in their right mind will give her a pair of lungs she’s only going to destroy. She will die. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. Do you have any idea what it’s going to do to Neo and C if they start thinking she’s actually going to live?”

“You don’t know that she isn’t.”

“Yes, I do.” The more I speak, the more Hikari’s expression falls. “You make fun of me because I draw lines–”

“I never made fun of you–”

“You think I’m wrong!” I yell. I remember when she told Neo the whole world would read his stories, that C would be there with him, that Sony would get to run races again. I would look the other way like I did when I saw death pulling at their necks.

I can’t anymore. “You dangle futures that don’t exist in front of them like bait. You’re making their pain inevitable.”

“They’re already in pain,” she says, and the truth of that stings more than it should. “They deserve to have hope for each other.”

“Hope is useless.” My voice drops. The mere word crawls beneath my skin, makes me wince at the sound. “It’s nearsighted and blind to the fact that it always fails.”

Hope is the name that should be at the top of the Hit List. It’s worse than our enemies. Our enemies are thieves, but they come as advertised. Hope is ignorance, a liar, an accidental creature made of fear. And it failed my first love just as it failed me.

“You lost someone,” Hikari says, her voice traveling to realization.

When I face her to meet it, I don’t see her at all.

I see him. It’s only for a moment, but there he is, standing atop the stone, reaching for me, dark-haired and golden-eyed. It’s colder than it is now. The past is always colder. Suddenly, he’s crying, telling me that he’s sorry. He gets on his knees, his head against my stomach, begging me to forgive him, begging me to just hold on, to hope.

He falls apart into ashes. I wave him away like fog.

“I’m not going to pretend I can change the past,” I say. “Or the future.”

“Hoping for a future is not pretending.”

“It is. That’s all hope is. It’s a lie we tell ourselves so that we can break watches and pretend time is dead.”

“Is that why you gave me this?” Hikari fingers the glass, the arrow that doesn’t tick. She laughs at my audacity. It isn’t a laugh I once cherished. It’s dry and hurt and disappointed. “To mock me?”

“No.”

“‘I hear you.’” she says. “‘I’m always listening. And I’ll always believe you.’ You said that. Do you remember? Was it a lie?”

“No!” I shake my head, remembering the joy on her face. “No, I care about you. I just wanted to make you happy.”

“Why? Because you think I’m going to die?” she asks. She grips her wrist like Neo does. She tightens the loop with her thumb and forefinger as if she could squeeze the watch off her wrist. “Or because you love me?”

She looks the same as she did sitting on the stretcher when I pulled away from our kiss. The question weaves into the wound on her neck and the illness in her blood. Her voice turns faint, weaker with every breath.

“Do you love me?” She motions to the hospital below us. “Do you love any of them? Any of the people you claim to watch over?”

“I’m not supposed to love,” I say. “I’m not supposed to even exist.”

“Are you that afraid?” she asks, only now it’s a dare. A push. “Are you that afraid to lose again?”

“I already lost everything. I will always lose everything. No matter how many times I try to steal it back.”

Hikari cups her hands around her nose and chin in the form of a prayer. Horror works across her face. She looks down as if three graves sit between us. She looks at me as if I’m holding our friends’ hands as they lay down inside them.

“That’s why you spend so much time with them,” she says. “That’s why you do so much for them.”