“Oliver!” Zoë shouts, breathless and beaming.
The music pounds in Oliver’s ears. The bass thumps in his chest. He wants to get lost in the music, wants to forget about his future, about Theo, wants to be in this moment before it slips away forever. He drains the last of his beer and slides out of the booth.
The room tips. The colorful lights flashing across the dance floor blur. Oliver catches himself on the edge of the table. The empty shot glasses clatter against one another.
“You all right, man?” Luke asks. Where has he come from?
Oliver can’t answer. The room spins around him, falls silent. Worry flashes across Luke’s face. It’s the last thing Oliver sees.
May 24, 2202Boston, Massachusetts
Oliver wakes in a bed that is not his. His head throbs in rhythm with his heart. He opens his eyes and a too-white, too-bright light stabs through his skull. He groans and throws his arm over his face. It tugs on his IV line.
He remembers where he is now.
“Oli?”
Shit.
Dread settles like a stone in the pit of his stomach. He turns toward the voice. His brother straightens in the fake leather chair that is some color between gray and brown, pulled close to his hospital bed. His eyes are bloodshot, his dark hair disheveled, his face etched with worry.
“What are you doing here?” Oliver pushes himself up to sit in the bed. It shifts beneath him, and he squeezes his eyes shut against the tipping world. When he opens them, the furrow between Theo’s brows has grown deeper.
“Luke called me from the bar.”
Oliver cringes. He must have scared the shit out of his friend for him to call Theo.
“What happened?” Theo asks.
The night is a blur. The last thing Oliver remembers is Luke reaching out to steady him. “I guess I was drunk. Fell and hit my head.”
He doesn’t remember drinking that much. Maybe he hadn’t eaten enough. Or maybe he was exhausted from graduation. He gave the doctors the same excuses when he came to. They still ran every test they could think of on him. He thought Theo had something to do with that, but everyone assured him it was routine procedure. Now, he’s not so sure.
“Have you been sick?” Theo asks, part concern, part accusation, torn between being a doctor or a brother or a parent. Typical.
“No,” Oliver says. He has spent the last few months dragging himself from his apartment to class to the library, then back to his apartment for a few hours of sleep before doing it all over again. Of course he was exhausted. And he got wicked headaches sometimes, but that wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence for a grad student running on too little sleep and too much caffeine. “Last night was an accident.”
Theo doesn’t look convinced, but he doesn’t get a chance to interrogate Oliver further. A doctor enters the room. He’s a portly, balding man with wire-framed glasses perched on the end of his nose. Oliver hasn’t bothered to remember his name.
“Good morning, Mr. Rhodes,” he says. “How are you feeling today?”
Tired. Dizzy. Aching. “Fine.”
Theo glares at Oliver. “He’s not fine. He’s still dizzy and his head is killing him.”
The doctor isn’t surprised by Theo’s assessment. “You are sick, Mr. Rhodes. Very sick. Denying that you are won’t change it.”
“What?” He can’t have heard right. He is just tired. Hasn’t been eating or sleeping right for months, working too long and too hard on finishing his thesis. It’s like he told Theo. It was an accident.
The doctor keeps talking. He doesn’t notice Oliver is drowning, grasping at his words, trying to stay afloat. But there is nothing to hold on to. Not when words liketerminalandinoperableare already sinking him.
He doesn’t know the doctor’s name, doesn’t care, as the man shows him charts and numbers and scans that all say the same thing. There is nothing he can do to stop it, nothing he can do to fix it. Maybe he should pay more attention, at least try to focus on what the doctor is explaining to him, but what is the point?
He’s dying.
“I am sorry, Mr. Rhodes.”
Oliver nods as if he has heard all of it, processed any of it. “How long do I have?” He doesn’t recognize the calm voice that is speaking, even though it’s his own.
