Love and Other Unknown Variables (23 page)

6.4

I
am skipping school to go see a girl. Charles Mortimer Hanson is voluntarily missing biochemistry. The planet is suffering a cataclysmic pole shift, and life as I know it is over.

The apocalypse is pretty amazing.

When I ring the doorbell, the hellhound breaks into a throaty wail, the sound severing my frayed nerves. There’s no movement, though.

I walk around to the back and open the gate, scanning the yard for a few good pebbles to toss. Maybe I’ll get lucky and hit her window this time. I’m about to launch my first missile when a burst of gray with white fangs squeezes out of the dog door. For a second, I stare and wonder how something so massive could fit through such a small space. But it can, and it does, and then it comes charging at me with hackles raised.

I’m still holding the pebble and for an insane moment I believe I can defeat the dog, David and Goliath style, but before I release it, I hear an even more frightening growl.

“Hit my dog and die, Hanson.”

I freeze. Luckily, so does the dog. At the sound of Charlotte’s voice, it turns 180 degrees and runs toward her, all waggling tail and wiggly butt. Charlotte puts a hand down, resting it on the dog’s head as it collapses on its back haunches beside her. It grins at me like,
Ha, ha, ha
.
Charlotte likes me best
.

I drop my pebbles. “It was going to eat me.”

Charlotte smiles. “Naw. Just maim you a little.”

“Oh, well, good.” I shift my weight side to side and drop my gaze to the pebbles on the ground. I’m afraid to move closer to Charlotte. With the dog at her feet and the memory of her dwarfed by all that hospital equipment, my fight-or-flight instinct is in overdrive.

“What are you doing here?” Charlotte asks.

I look up at her and know that flight is not an option. “We didn’t finish our date. You said there would be a kiss at the end of it.”

Charlotte’s face flushes. “You still want to be with me, even after all that drama?”

I step toward her. “Yes.”

She smiles and shoos the dog in the house, motioning for me to follow. “No time like the present.”

We walk through the kitchen, which I’ve only seen through the doggie door, and into the living room. The walls are painted various shades of green and golden yellow, and every spare space is covered with bookshelves and art. The place smells nice, too. If a garden and a bakery got married, this scent would be their love child.

Covering one whole wall is an enormous canvas with a picture of a girl leaning against a barn door. The barn is old, like condemned old, so there are huge gaps in the wood and you can see straight through it. The girl’s face is turned, looking through one of the holes, watching the sun slip behind the horizon.

I know her. I can’t help myself, but my hand is reaching to touch the girl in the painting.

“It’s Jo.”

My hand falters. “What?”

“My sister. When she was younger than I am now.”

“I thought it was you.”

Charlotte’s eyes widen. She looks at the canvas again. “No. It’s Jo. I’m the barn.”

I look closer. “In the barn? I can’t see you.”

Charlotte’s light laugh seeps through my skin. “Not
in
the barn. I am. The barn.”

I step away from the painting. One light summer storm would knock that barn down.

I sit on the couch consumed by my racing pulse and a deep heat radiating from my chest. Charlotte curls up next to me, pulling an afghan over her legs. Her head rests on my shoulder, glossy black curls scenting the air I’m breathing.

“Can we—”

“Make out?” Charlotte attempts to finish my sentence, looking up at me with a crooked smile.

“Uh, I was going to say talk.”

Charlotte juts out her bottom lip. “Fine. I suppose you deserve some explanation.” She sits up and turns to face me on the couch. “What do you want to know?”

Now that she’s facing me and those blue eyes are fixed on me, the only thing I want to know is what it’d feel like to kiss her neck from her collarbone up to the soft space behind her ear.

“Seriously, I’m an open book, Charlie. Ask away.” She thinks I’m stalling because I’m afraid to ask the hard questions. So wrong.

“You are not an open book, unless that book is a mystery.”

She juts her chin out at me, growling in the back of her throat. I can’t take it anymore. I have to be closer. I lean in, drawing my lips up her neck, devouring the smell of vanilla. By the time I reach her ear, her growl has turned into a soft moan and all my insides go nuts. I’m cupping her head in one hand, so she can open her neck more to me, and this time, as I travel downward, I flick my tongue along the hollow above her collarbone.

Charlotte’s hands are in my hair, pulling my face to hers. Her lips crash into mine like a meteorite hitting Earth’s atmosphere. Fire and heat explode as we fall together toward an uncertain ground. It’s a long, beautiful fall.

Hearts thudding from impact, we finally pull apart, sharing the same breath. I want to live in this moment. I try not to see a spatial graph of the exact angle between our touching foreheads. I try to ignore the urge to count the exact seconds it would take to travel the distance from my personal space to hers. I try not to name the impressive variety of microorganisms living in the human mouth that we’ve just shared. I try to ignore the cool logic inside me that burns to ask her one question.

I must not try hard enough.

Charlotte’s lips quirk to one side. “Now we talk?”

When I nod with our foreheads still touching, her face moves with mine. She leans away, wrapping her fingers through the tassels at the edge of the afghan in her lap. “You sure you want to talk?” She winks at me when she says talk.

“No.”

Charlotte gives me a small smile and rests her head back on my shoulder. “There’s not much to say. I have cancer.”

“Are you fighting it? Can you win?”

Charlotte’s shoulders tense and slide upward. “When I was first diagnosed, there was never a question in my mind I’d beat it. Like it was a cold and I could take my medicine, lay around for a few days watching cartoons while everyone else went to school, and then, ta-dah! I’m cured.”

“But now?”

“The prognosis is bad, Charlie. Inoperable and metastasizing and bad. It’s going to keep coming back. This cancer is going to kill me either now or next year.”

“A year is a long time.”

“Is it?”

“Twelve months, fifty-two weeks, three hundred sixty-five days, eight thousand seven hundred sixty hours—”

“Cute.”

“I’m just getting started. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, thirty-one million five hundred fifty-six thousand nine hundred twenty-six seconds…”

Charlotte is smiling up at me with a crooked grin. “That’s what I love about you. Always so literal.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. I know this is hard to understand. It’s hard to explain. It’s not like I want to leave anyone behind.” She looks over at the painting of her broken body with the sun setting through her skin. “But, if I have to die, I’d like to do it with some hair on my head. Is that so horrible?”

“But you’ll be dead.”

“Yep.”

“It will bother you? Not having hair when you’re dead?”

“Dunno. But it bothers me now, when I’m alive. Shouldn’t that count for something?”

My heart does this jolting, squelching, shredding thing, and on the other side of the pain is a clear truth. “Yes. It counts,” I say and brush one of the curls away from her forehead. She catches my hand and gives it a squeeze.

“But why not just try the clinical trial?”

Charlotte’s body, warm and soft against me transforms into a glacier. She sits up, her face turning white, then red. The delicate lines of her jaw harden. “What did Jo tell you? It’s a miracle cure I’m refusing willy-nilly?”

“Willy-what? No.”

“Because it’s not. It’s horrible. I’ve done them before. Hell, one even worked for a while, which was awesome. But this one has an extremely low success rate.”

“But it’s a chance?”

“To be a guinea pig. I’m not a person the clinicians are trying to cure. I’m a vessel that contains what they need, cancer cells they can experiment with. I’ll be injected with poisons while they chart my reactions, looking for the exact dosage at which my entire body shuts down. As an added bonus, I’ll be one of the first humans ever to be injected with a man-made virus aimed at infecting and killing cancer cells.”

“That’s amazing.” I didn’t mean to speak, to say it out loud. Charlotte’s face becomes foreign, sculpted by anger and betrayal.

“Amazing for a few of the animals it didn’t kill.” She splutters out like a snuffed flame, her anger slipping away in wisps of smoke.

“How many survived?”

Charlotte tugs on a loose string in the afghan, her eyes as sharp as scalpels dissecting me. “Sixty percent.”

“That’s more than half.”

She scoffs. “Wow, you should go to, like, a math school or something.” The sarcasm in her voice is nothing compared to the disgust. She yanks on the string, wrapping it around two fingers now. “Forty percent of those animals died, Charlie.”

“But without it, your chance of dying is one hundred percent.”

“Same as everyone else.”

“Yeah, but Charlotte.” I can feel my desperation clawing its way up from my gut. “Without the clinical trial, you’ll die within a year.”

“Without it, I get to keep my memories.”

A jolt of adrenaline rushes out from my core, racing to my extremities and back again in less than a heartbeat. All of my senses are hyperaware. I can hear the click of the icemaker in the kitchen as it turns on. Charlotte’s perfume is warm like sugar cookies. And I can see the trembling of her curls as she fights to keep her body still, to keep her shoulders from heaving under the weight of heavy sobs.

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course you didn’t,” she snaps. “Jo didn’t tell you that part.”

She’s so angry, I know the probability of convincing her is low, but I have to keep trying. You rarely win. “But wouldn’t it be worth it—to be alive—if it worked. And think of the breakthrough in medicine that would be. A virus that attacks cancer would be monumental.”

Charlotte drags herself off the couch and looks down at me with her shoulders pinned back. “I am not a fucking science experiment.” Her voice cracks on the last word. “Life is not an experiment.” She runs from the room, wiping the tears from her face as they fall.

Subject:
Charlotte Finch,

Method:
Participate in super hot make out session. Follow up by suggesting girlfriend subject herself to scientific experimentation for the greater good,

Result:
What do you think happened? Perhaps life should not be approached as a scientific endeavor, dumbass.

6.5

I
pace the floor in front of the couch, replaying our conversation, hearing all the ways I screwed up. She was too angry to be rational, too emotional to be reasonable, too Charlotte—

Our brains rely on certain chemicals and proteins to manifest connections between different areas and tissues where memories are held. If the meds from the trial destroy those connections, the memories get either erased or stranded with no recall. Without her memories, Charlotte wouldn’t know me. What if I can’t get her to like me a second time? I’m still not sure how I did it this time.

Without her memories, Charlotte wouldn’t even know her own self, and if there is anything in this universe I can prove to be true, it’s that Charlotte Elizabeth Finch knows exactly who she is and what she wants. No one should be able to take that away.

I realize with horror that, had I won that argument, we both would have lost in the end.

The house is silent, and while I know Charlotte went to her room upstairs, I can’t hear her moving around. I can’t hear her crying.

My fingers ache now that my adrenaline has crashed, and as I climb the steps, my legs feel like I’ve just run a race. Everything about me feels worn down. There’s only one door closed upstairs. I lean against it.

“Charlotte? Please, let me in.”

At first there is no response, but then I hear her voice. “What’s stopping you?”

I try the doorknob and find it unlocked. The door doesn’t swing in like a bedroom door should. It opens out. Because it’s a freaking linen closet—a very well-organized linen closet, with labels and everything.

“Charlotte?”

“Down here.”

Her voice hadn’t come from behind the door at all. It’d come from behind me. I’d walked right past her room, so fixated on the closed door I incorrectly deduced was hers.

The linen closet was not Charlotte’s doing. Her room is messier than mine. There isn’t an inch of wall space to be seen through the sketches, posters, canvases, and overflowing bookcases covering them. And the floor is littered with more papers, pencils, open pots of paints, and clothes—lots and lots of clothes. It’s like all the chaos of the universe has come here to roost.

“Why is your door open?” I ask, stepping inside.

“Because I
wanted
you to find me.”

We watch each other from across the room.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you a question about that book you love so much.” I shift my weight, taking a step forward.

Charlotte’s eyes are searching mine. “What’s the question?”

“Do you think Atticus blamed himself for Tom?”

Charlotte’s intake of breath is sharp, and it feels like a dagger in my chest.

I fight to keep my voice strong. “For not being able to save the mockingbird? Could he ever forgive himself?”

Charlotte is nodding, her dark curls bobbing around her chin. She stretches out one hand, and I cross the room and sit before she can nod again. I clasp her hand, but it isn’t enough, so I pull her toward me, on top of me, curled on my lap with her head on my chest, and my arms around her.

From buried in the folds of my shirt, Charlotte says, “Things should be forgiven.” Her hand reaches up and touches my cheek, coaxing my face toward hers. “Just don’t forget.”

“Never.”

Charlotte fights to keep from crumbling. She draws her thumb back and forth over my cheekbone three times, before pulling my lips to hers.

---

W
e fell asleep, me stretched out on her bed with Charlotte curled into a ball at my side, her head resting on my shoulder. That’s how Ms. Finch finds us.

She wakes me with a hand on my free arm, shaking it gently. When I startle awake, she puts her finger to her lips to shush me. “Don’t wake Charley. She needs her sleep.” Her eyes soften as she looks over at her sister. They are hard stones when she focuses on me. “Don’t wake her, but definitely get the hell out of her bed.”

I move slowly, extricating my arm from under Charlotte’s head, pausing to brush back the curls that have fallen over her face. Ms. Finch pulls a blanket over her and then shoos me out the door.

I follow Ms. Finch, but am confused when she doesn’t lead me straight to the front door. Instead, we end up in the kitchen, where she opens the refrigerator and stares into it for a moment before closing it again.

I’m afraid to speak first, but decide my fear of hanging out in the kitchen where there are sharp knives is greater. I mean, she did just catch me in her little sister’s bed.

“I tried talking to her about the trial,” I say.

She looks at me over her shoulder, her hand still on the refrigerator door. She doesn’t ask how it went though. I imagine it’s pretty obvious from my expression.

“The thing is…” I pause and swallow a hard ball of emotion rolling in my mouth like a marble. “I can see her point, and even though I’d do anything to keep her around longer, I’d also do anything to make her happy right now.”

She nods, turning back to the pictures on the fridge. The silence fills in the spaces around us like fog. She opens the fridge door again, staring at its contents like something new will have materialized from the last time she looked. Wishful thinking—sometimes that’s all we have to hold onto.

“I guess I’ll be going,” I say, taking a step toward the front door.

“Be sure to bring your sister back with you for dinner tonight,” Ms. Finch calls after me. “I’m not comfortable letting Charlotte out of the house so soon after a seizure, but I know she’ll want to be with you both.” She shuts the fridge door once more. “We’ll have to order pizza though because there’s nothing here worth eating.”

My whole face pinches as I try to understand what’s happening.

Ms. Finch chuckles. “We’re going to be spending a lot of time together, Mr. Hanson, if you intend to keep seeing my sister.”

“Charlie.”

She blinks.

“You can call me Charlie.”

“No. That’s my sister’s name and it would be weird if I had to call her boyfriend by the same name, so I’m going to continue to call you Mr. Hanson.”

“How about Jack?”

Her brows tick up with surprise.

“It’s short for jackass.”

Ms. Finch laughs, and I think it’s the first time in a long time she’s done any laughing because I can tell her face is unsure how to curve the muscles and her eyes are filled with surprise, and then tears. She blinks them away.

“That’ll do.”