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saw Robbie’s eyes glance to my dad’s forehead when they first greeted each other and was already expecting a comment on it once we were alone, especially given that we’d never explicitly discussed my dad’s number before.
    As we sat outside on the front porch and he smoked a cigarette, he told me, “You’re lucky.”
    “In the grand scheme of things, probably not,” I pointed out. “Neither of us is.”
    “That’s true. But your dad will be around for a long time. And he seems like a cool guy.”
    “Yeah.”
    We sat in silence for a moment, and I coughed as the cigarette smoke invaded my lungs. Robbie apologized and scooted away from me. I could tell he was deep in thought, but didn’t know what was on his mind until he spoke again.
    “So what’re you doing with this girl, Harper?”
    I leaned forward and put my chin in my hands, sighing. “I don’t know.” I hesitated, and then added, “I think she might be interested in me.”
    “So you’re using me as a buffer. I guessed as much. Why don’t you just tell her you’re not interested?”
    “Because.” I shook my head. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.” I paused, and then corrected, “No, I’m not. But only…”
    “Because she’s going to die soon?” I squeezed my eyes shut, and my heart dropped as he turned to look at me. Hearing it said aloud made it so much more real than it seemed in my head. It ripped me right out of my own little world, where Chloe and I were on track to become best friends with a mutual crush, and dropped me right back into a reality that had declared her dead in who-knew-how-many months.
    I bit my lip and nodded, but I still couldn’t help but doubt that reality. Chloe was so alive now. She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t depressed. She was a perfectly functioning human being who seemed to really enjoy living. It seemed so unlikely that she’d have less than twelve months left. “What if her number’s wrong, Robbie?” I asked him, even though I knew what his answer would be before he responded.
    “The numbers are never wrong.”
    “I know. But… maybe hers could be. Maybe I could change it this time.”
    “That’s not how fate works, Harper. If she were to die at sixteen and had never met you, then that was always going to be the way her life went. But since she met you and her number’s sixteen, she was always going to meet you, and meeting you – as well as anything you do to her or with her – won’t stop her from dying at sixteen. You can’t make a decision that’s already been made.”
    “For someone who claims to be an Atheist, you sure do sound religious when you talk about this stuff, you know,” I told him.
    “I don’t base it on some religious predetermination by a God. I base it on my own personal time theory. This is the present for us, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a present in the future. And in that future present, this is the past. The past can’t change, so everything’s already set in stone. Fate knows the future, so Fate knows its past, which is our present.”
    “That makes no sense, you pretentious idiot,” I groaned out. He put out his cigarette and shrugged his shoulders.
    “It’s just a theory. But we haven’t seen a number change, so I’m automatically more right than you are.”
    “Well, I hope that makes you feel better,” I bit out.             
    “Not at all. It makes me feel like shit, actually.” He got to his feet. “Let’s go meet your friend, okay?”
    “Okay,” I murmured, but I was dreading it now. When Robbie saw Chloe, her number would no longer be a message for my eyes only. It’d be a lot like how coming out had been. Sharing it with other people; saying it aloud… that made it exist in a world outside of my mind. That made it real.
    We said goodbye to my dad before we left, and he seemed particularly interested in how long we’d be gone, which was unusual. But I was too worried about Robbie meeting Chloe to dwell on it.