Chapter 13.
904 Words
When their boots finally hit the overgrown grass, the silence of the carnival felt deafening.
Harper hadn't even caught her breath when Ryan exploded. He didn't just step off the ladder; he fell off it, his face flushed and his eyes wild with a terror that had finally curdled into rage.
"That’s it!" Ryan roared, his voice echoing off the abandoned carousel. "I'm done! I can't do this!"
Harper turned, startled. "Ryan, I'm okay. I just slipped-"
"You almost died, Harper!" Ryan stepped toward her, his varsity jacket shaking. "I can't sit here and watch you kill yourself just to try and 'live.' This isn't living, it’s a suicide mission!" He whirled around, pointing a trembling finger at Kane. "And you! This is your life, right? Breaking laws, racing cars, climbing rusted junk? Just because this is your lifestyle doesn't mean you should drag her into it! You’re enabling her!"
Kane didn't move. He stood by the base of the wheel, his expression unreadable, though his eyes narrowed slightly.
"I’m sorry, Ryan," Harper said, her voice turning cold as she shook her head. "I never asked any of you to follow me. I didn't hold a gun to your head. If you don't want to watch me live, then don't. Go back to the picket fences and the football games."
"Harper!" Ryan’s voice broke, the anger vanishing as quickly as it had arrived, replaced by a raw, bleeding desperation. "I love you! I’ve loved you for years! Derek stepped in before I could ever get a chance, and I let him because I thought you were happy. But I can't watch this. Don't do this to yourself. Don't hurt yourself to feel alive. For me... please."
The air in the clearing seemed to vanish. Maxine stood frozen, her notebook forgotten. Kane stayed in the shadows of the machinery, a silent observer to a history he wasn't part of.
Harper sighed, a long, weary sound that felt like it carried the weight of her entire diagnosis. She rubbed a hand over her face, feeling the smear of grease and sweat.
"Ryan," she said softly, "I don't know what you want me to say." She looked at him- the boy who had been her friend for a decade, and felt a pang of genuine grief. "I have a month left to live. I can’t- and I won’t, say that I love you back. Not more than a friend. I don’t have room for a novel, Ryan. I barely have room for these chapters."
Ryan stared at her, the rejection hitting harder than the fall from the wheel ever could. He looked at Harper, then at the GTO, and finally at the dark road leading back to a town that suddenly felt very far away.
Without another word, he turned and started walking. He didn't head for the car. He headed for the gate, his shoulders hunched, disappearing into the darkness of the industrial road.
"Ryan!" Maxine called out, but he didn't turn back.
The silence that followed was thick and awkward, punctuated only by the distant, metallic groan of the Ferris wheel as the wind caught it. Harper stood in the center of the graveyard of rides, her heart still pounding, feeling the sudden, cold absence of the boy who had always been her safety net.
She looked at Maxine, then at Kane. No one spoke. The list was still in Maxine’s pocket, but for the first time, the bucket list felt very, very quiet.
*~*~*~*~*
The silence in the GTO was no longer a sanctuary; it was a tomb. With Ryan gone, the backseat felt cavernous, a hollow reminder of the bridge Harper had just burned. Maxine was curled into the corner of the leather upholstery, her glittery notebook clutched to her chest like a shield, her eyes fixed on the dark, blurred silhouette of the passing trees. She looked small- smaller than the girl who had just survived a sixty-foot drop from a rusted Ferris wheel should look.
Harper sat in the passenger seat, her spine rigid. She wasn't looking at the road. She was looking at her own reflection in the side mirror, watching the wind whip her hair into a chaotic mess. She felt a jagged, vibrating energy humming in her bones, the kind of restless electricity that comes when you’ve lost your safety net and realized you’re still falling.
"He’s not coming back, is he?" Maxine’s voice was a fragile thread, barely audible over the low rumble of the engine.
Harper didn't turn around. "Ryan chooses the sidewalk, Max. I choose the car. We were always going to hit a fork in the road. He just reached his first."
"But he loves you," Maxine whispered.
"And I’m dying," Harper snapped, the words sharp and cold. "Love is for people with a future. Love is for people who have time to argue over whose turn it is to do the dishes for fifty years. I don't have fifty years. I have a month. And I'm not spending a second of it feeling guilty for being a 'suicide mission.'"
She turned to Maxine, her blue eyes flashing with a desperate, manic light. "The silence is killing me, Max. My head is too loud. The list. What’s next?"
Maxine whispered lowly, "the drugs."
- Writer
