Archive of Our Own ^beta

Emily scanned the school courtyard as she and her friends stepped outside for lunch, searching for a black hoodie over white-blond hair. The weather was starting to warm up, the snow turning to little lone patches over vast brown fields, but she was fairly certain he would have worn that hoodie even in high summer, though she had never seen him in the summer. Maybe she would have. Maybe, as the years went on, they would have met at the park, or the library, and she would have seen him.

There! Next to Steven and his group of jock friends. They were smiling and laughing with him, and her heart twisted, remembering how that had made her so relieved before, because if he had other friends, it meant she didn’t have to be. She turned to the girls she had hung out with instead, waiting for a break in the conversation, and said,

“Hey guys, I’m going to eat lunch with someone else today.”

“Why?” Hannah demanded, eyes flickering with hurt.

“I just remembered that I promised we’d study together.” The lie slipped easily from Emily’s lips, and she hurried away before it could be questioned. She crept up to the edge of the gathering of boys, shifting her feet uncomfortably. She was in a few classes with Steven and thought he was cute, but also knew for a fact that he didn’t like her, because he had told her so after she got frustrated with him messing around during a group assignment and threw his paper airplane in the trash. Her friend in the black hoodie looked like he was having fun too, smiling as he jumped like a frog and made the others laugh, and her heart twisted. Were they just messing with him? She didn’t want to believe it. She hated to believe it, but if they were… She looked at Steven, biting her trembling lip hard. He’d hate himself if they were just messing with him, maybe as much as she hated herself. But this wasn’t about him, not today.

“Hi Chance,” she said, her voice sounding abnormally loud in her nervousness. “Can I eat lunch with you, today?” Come to think of it, she didn’t remember seeing him actually ever really eat anything for lunch. They mostly just talked when they wound up in the same lonely corner, chipping away at the ice over the sidewalk when everyone else had gone inside to get out of the cold. “I’ve been thinking about that robot you told me about, and it sounded really interesting.”

Chance hesitated, glancing back at the boys, then to her. Maybe she was only making it worse. Maybe he’d had a good day, and she was pulling him away from something he liked. “You don’t have to, but I just thought it would be cool to hear more about, and we haven’t really talked in a while, so… I mean, only if you want to.” Her face heated as if she were beside a fire, and she saw Steven’s small amused smile, though it was hard to tell if it meant ‘him, really?’ or ‘her, really?’ She twisted the handle of her lunch box, beginning to wish she hadn’t spoken at all and had left well enough alone. 

“You said my robot would be evil,” Chance grumbled, and her shoulders relaxed.

“I know, but I’ve thought about it more, and I think you could program it to be good,” she said.

Chance got up and faced her, and they started walking along the brick wall at the edge of the courtyard like they had done so many times before. “It’s not just the programing. It’s a learning robot, so you have to give it to good people to teach it, like I said,” he replied. 

“And who taught you? What are your parents like? Is that how you think of yourself, a robot doomed by who raised him? I don’t even know. I’ve never asked about you, about your home.” Emily forced a smile. “You’d definitely have to be careful about who it had contact with,” she said.

They spent the whole lunch hour pacing along that wall, just like old times, and talked about how to keep a self-learning robot from coming in contact with bad things and becoming evil. He told her about all the good it would do, talking with starry eyes about something perfect and incorruptible, something better than humans because the very best of humans had raised it, and it had learned everything it knew from them. She listened intently, heart twisting, for she considered herself to have been raised by the very best of humans, and yet… Maybe that’s why she had told him it wouldn’t work, the first time. But then, she hadn’t quite been so disgusted with herself, the first time. 

She listened to his talk of robots, and strange moral questions, and they didn’t talk about her stories. She didn’t even try to look for an opening to change the topic like she always would have before, wishing she could memorize every word he said, every line of his face, every look in his glossy blue eyes. 

Then the bell rang, buzzing loud like a death knell, and he turned to run, joining the charge of students up the hill to get to class. Emily ran after him, panting, “Hey! Can we hang out some more after school?”

“I can’t. I take the bus,” he told her.

“Oh.” They entered the doors in the press of students, and he started to melt away toward the door of his math class. Panic seized her chest. No, no this couldn’t be the last time! It couldn’t! She seized his sleeve before the crowd dissolved him entirely and pulled him into a hug. He immediately went stiff, then squirmed. 

“Sorry,” she mumbled, pulling back. “I forgot you might not like… I just…” She scuffed the floor with the toe of her purple-striped tennis shoe. She was completely mucking this up. The halls were growing empty as passing period drew to a close, and he inched toward his math class. 

“I love you!” She called after him.

He froze, and she darted away, slipping into her English class just as the final bell rang. Her lunch box was still in her hand, all her English books still in her locker, and she slumped at her desk, dropping her head onto it with a soft but mildly painful thud . The lack of supplies for her class didn’t bother her nearly so much as it would have any other day, since the more mortifying ordeal was that she’d forgotten that he didn’t really like to be touched and then blurted out those words like he wouldn’t wildly misunderstand them. She groaned.

“Emily? Are you okay?” Mrs. McCormick asked.

Emily jerked her head up. “Yup. Fine. Sorry.”

She sat up and pretended to pay attention, thinking all the time about how she was going to get to the bus before he did. Where did the buses even pick people up? It was in front of the school, right? She’d seen them out front before. But then, she’d also seen them on the other side, at the back entrance where all the seventh graders were, but his bus would probably be at the front, wouldn’t it?

The rest of her classes passed in a blur of nervous contemplation and preparation, and as soon as the last bell rang, she went charging out with the surge of students to the front of the school, scanning the crowd for a black hoodie. She spotted him just as he was getting on the bus and tried to push through the other students, but by the time she got there, the doors were closed. 

“Bye!” She shouted, waving after the bus as it pulled out, hoping he could see her through the windows. “Goodbye, Chance!” 

She watched the bus go all the way to the end of the street, stop at a stop light, then keep going, turning into a dot, then a speck in the distance that she couldn’t see. A woman dressed in white with silvery, shimmering hair and eyes dark as midnight appeared beside her.

“Could I really not have changed it?” Emily asked in a small voice, as the sound and sight of the other students blurred into the background.

“No,” the woman replied gently. “I have some little power over time, but the power over life and death is greater than what has been given me, and so I cannot give it to you.”

Emily’s lip trembled, then she buried her face in her hands as she began to cry. “It’s not like he died of some disease,” she wailed. “Surely I could have stopped him.”

“You couldn’t have. Not then, and not now.”

Emily just shook her head, scrubbing the tears from her face with the heels of her hands. 

“One more day,” the silver woman whispered, “one more day to love him. That is all I could give you.”

“And that didn’t change it? Feeling more loved didn’t make him want to live?”

“I warned you it would not, little one.”

Emily fell to her knees, her backpack suddenly altogether too heavy, and she wished her daddy was here to catch her, just like he had been on the day she heard the news. The silver woman knelt beside her and held her, the touch hot as fire, burning like fire.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Then Emily was back in her room, in the dark, with the silver light of the moon and a single falling star streaming through the window onto her pillow, still damp with her tears.