The Fates (Book I) - 2014 Watty Award Winner!

2.11 - Ishy

Dear Readers: Back at Cloe and Tom's favorite cafe on campus - the last scene on Commencement Day at Veriton! And second-to-last scene of Episode 2!!

So last time, Cloe was about to ask a question...

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Scene 11: Ishy

A.D. 2015

After the longest sigh, she finally asked.

“Tom…” Cloe whispered, clasping his hand even more closely, “…how are you?”

He blinked, not bothering to act as if he didn’t know exactly what she meant. He had tried, the first few times she’d asked about it with those three short words, in far too many previous conversations—but it would be no use pretending now.

He swallowed hard. “I’m all right,” he responded, his lower lip quivering into an attempted smile. “No bad news or anything.”

She bit down on her own lower lip, as if to keep it from mirroring that tragic tremor. She nodded slowly, somberly. “Okay.”

And those were all the words between them, on that note.

Tom did not like to talk about the details of his illness. He was dying; that was all. And so was everybody else. Maybe he was dying earlier and faster than most others, but whatever.

Sometimes, he tried to see it as a good thing. Like his life came with a clock. It could be kind of convenient, being able to tell time. Everyone was on death’s schedule, but most were not provided with a stopwatch counting down until their turn.

But then he would remember that the countdown didn’t work. For it was always changing, always playing tricks on him. And every doctor read the clock a little differently, so that Tom never knew what time it really was. How much more time he had until his turn.

Tears welled in Cloe’s eyes. This wasn’t right. When death wrote up its schedule, Ishmael Thomas Colbeck should have been the last name on the list. The whole earth would be darker, for the loss of such a life, of such a light.

Well—at least no bad news, right? So that was good news. He was all right. Today, for now, whatever happened next, he was all right.

She tried to make herself believe that that was enough, as they wrapped up their chat, made promises to keep in touch more often, pushed in their chairs with screechy scrapes against the pavement, hugged goodbye, left Pampelune behind, and went on with their lives.

Cloe climbed the Acorn House stairs to her dorm room and found her mother lounging on the bare twin mattress with a magazine.

“Ugh, look at this bitch,” Silvia griped, pointing at the glossy cover of the issue, on which one of her least favorite actresses was striking an audacious pose involving puckered lips. “She thinks she’s so cute.”

Cloe smiled in amused assent, then looked around and noticed that her moving bins had been left mostly untouched. “So did I do a fine job packing on my own, or were you just too tired today to bother rearranging things?”

Silvia tossed the magazine into a trash bag. “Little bit of both.”

They spent the next several minutes waiting for Cloe’s father to arrive for the move-out. Silvia asked how Tom was doing. Cloe summarized their catch-up, highlighting the fact that he had made no moves to sleep with her, despite the fact that he was single now. Insisting that the teddy bear gesture was not part of a hookup ploy, as her mother had surmised.