Colorblind

by Siera Maley

I had a simple solution to this moral dilemma: to ignore it in hopes that it’d eventually go away.

It was no wonder Robbie was an Atheist; the idea that something intelligent enough to design thinking, feeling, living creatures would then assign them unchangeable expiration dates was horrifying.

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

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

Life would go on with or without Chloe Stephens, after all. It waited for no one. It never had.

“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.”

“She could be a serial killer. Or the bait for a serial killer.” “Then I will miss you dearly. Goodbye, Harper.”

a thin handmade bracelet encircled her wrist, repeatedly bearing, in order, the six colors of the rainbow.

I love gay people let's go!

But this was real life. And in real life, I was the love interest.

Chloe didn’t know anyone in San Francisco. She had no friends. And she didn’t deserve to die feeling alone in a new city.

“So… as it turns out, I sometimes do this thing where I flirt with a girl and then mistake discomfort due to lack of interest for discomfort due to nervous sexual tension, and then wind up trapping straight girls against walls and trying to make out with them. And then scaring the crap out of them and literally making them flee from me for several miles. On foot.” “Has this happened more than once?” I asked, dumbfounded.

I’ll be seventeen in August.”

oh fuck.

That meant that Chloe didn’t have twelve months to live. She didn’t even have six. She was going to be dead by the end of the summer.

If it happened with Chloe… when it happened with Chloe… I’d be ready.

“I have this theory,” Chloe began. “You have a lot of theories.” She ignored me and continued, “-that if I hit on you relentlessly enough, you’ll crack eventually. See, when guys do it, it’s creepy and gross, but I’m female and adorable and you actually like hanging out with me, so it’s okay.” “Is it?”

“I find you intriguing.” Then she dropped the act and added, “And once I got vibes that you were a cute girl who could actually be a lesbian, there was no going back.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” she said, offering me a small smile. “It’s okay to let people in sometimes.” “You promise?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t fair.” “I promise.”

Have you ever considered the fact that maybe the goal of life isn’t to get through it as painlessly as possible?”

“She had some problems with making friends. The kind she could bring home and have sleepovers with. She’s always been very blunt and I think a lot of time that doesn’t sit well with other kids your age.” “I think I like blunt sometimes,” I told her. “Blunt makes everything easier.”

It occurred to me, then, as I sat on my bed, that maybe Dad saw some of the same things in Deborah that I saw in Chloe.

“We should make sleeping side by side our thing,” she told me, her voice muffled by her sleeping bag. “Like, forever.” “I think they call that marriage,” I laughed, my voice a whisper. “I’m okay with that,”

all have our issues. I just want to be happy. Ignoring things makes me happy. Ignorance is bliss, right?”

“I thought you were more about not being unhappy.” “Is there a difference?” “Sure. If you want to be happy, it’s pretty simple: you do things that make you happy. If you don’t want to be unhappy, you’re cool with that safe, neutral, boring zone where nothing good or bad happens.” “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.”

“I think that if I knew, for a fact, that a decision I’d made had changed something… like, really changed it… for the better, I think I’d be okay with dying.”

Did you know that one of the biggest regrets dying people have is that they let other people dictate how they lived their lives?”

am I just a conquest?” “You’re a conquest. But you’re not just a conquest.”

you’re someone I’m interested in. But being a conquest is only a bad thing if the person chasing is only chasing just to chase, right? I’m chasing you, so you’re a conquest. But I’m not chasing you just to chase.”

“You can’t be afraid to lose everyone because then you’ll have no one, okay?” She reached out and squeezed my hand. “And if you have no one, then, like, you’ve lost everyone anyway.”

Some things were worth aching for.

How do you… be?”

“I’d marry you, if we were together for long enough,” I told her at last, long after she’d fallen silent again. “I want you to know that.”

sure?” “You were the one who said you never wanted to have any regrets,” I pointed out. “We don’t know what’ll happen tomorrow. I don’t want to wait.”

“I just wonder if those ninety-eight percent of teenage couples who’ll break up at some point know that they’re part of the ninety-eight percent. Like, do they sit around and go ‘eh, this is nice for now’, or do they actually have these embarrassing images of their future only to have it all destroyed in the end?”

I’d known it wouldn’t be okay from the moment I’d met Chloe.

The number rested there, clear as day, as though it had been there all along. 84.

I. don't like this ending

I had no way of knowing what or who decided how we lived, or how long we lived, or what the consequences of our actions and decisions were. I would almost certainly never know.

Bad things were inevitable. Death was inevitable. But maybe the reverse was true: that good things were equally inevitable. And maybe sometimes inevitability liked to take a back seat to second chances.