terminally ill: a short story

Alice had always had a different complexion than I had, though I never got the chance to admire

it up close. She always had dozens of people surrounding her, as if she was some kind of

person-magnet. Her jet-black hair and unnaturally pale skin made her feel more like a vampire

than a human, though I barely remember her appearance after so many years. We had gone to

the same school for the majority of our short lives, ever since she transferred to mine back in

second grade.

I take a step back after caressing the stone etched with text in front of me. The flowers to my

side have wilted long since… weird, I thought flowers never did wilt during the cold.

My world had always been this monotonous field of grey, no matter how much I searched for

that elusive meaning, that exalted feeling of happiness, I couldn't find it. That was until sixth

grade. The athletes on television had talked about the sparks of supremacy they felt during the

most intense races, though I never had the physique for such activities. “Perhaps academia

could make me feel something,” was what I thought… How gloriously wrong I was.

I never was of the gifted type, though spiteful was I. My studying motivation was of the most

depravedly essence befitting my dismal world. All I wanted was to escape the gray, and so, that

was what I tried to. If, perhaps, my grades could be maintained at the #1 ranking in the school

every semester until i could finally graduate, then university could display this elusive meaning

for me. Sixth grade had rolled around, the year the rankings finally opened. The entirety of the

class had buzzed with a fervor that bordered on fervorous worship when the rankings were first

posted. A sheet of white paper, thin as skin and twice as fragile, pinned to the corkboard outside

the administrative office. Names stacked one atop another, numbers inked beside them like

divine verdicts.

I already knew. Second. My name sat directly beneath hers. Alice’s… that accursed name sat

where mine should have been. She was absent the most, and I could barely go a day without

hearing some dumb speculations how Alice was secretly the heiress of some large

conglomerate.

It was always fucking Alice. That girl with the porcelain pallor and night-black hair. The one

whose laughter did not seem artificially tailored to fit into the social jungle known as human

existence… It was then, then that I understood she was the one who understood the spark that

eluded me. Even her name looked elegant printed in standard font.

Rank 1. Average: 100.0.

I told myself it didn’t matter, that second was impressive. That second was respectable, though I

very well knew peace would elude me until I could savour my schadenfreude. Second place

was the same dreary gray as the surrounding environment was, destined to be shorn from

Alice’s grace forevermore. From that day forward, she became the horizon that concealed my

light... No—she was my sun, I just didn’t want to admit it. Not because I envied her beauty or

her crowd of orbiting admirers. But because for the first time in my life, I felt something close to

heat. Spite.

I studied until my eyes burned and my wrists ached. I memorized textbooks until the point where

my name became this foreign concept. Each test was a desperate struggle to embrace my sun.

People called Icarus a fool for embracing his curtain call, a testament to how complacent

humanity has become in their comforts. Only those happy of living in the shadow of their gods

would be so ignorant as to condemn a free soul.

So I did what anyone in my position would do. I burned, burned the constraints of will and

motivation and exhaustion away until I became a mere machine driven by commands instilled

into my soul through the cuts on my limbs.

Seventh grade passed in a blur of graphite smudges and red correction marks. Every exam

returned to me with immaculate scores… 99s, the occasional 100, neat circles drawn in a

teacher’s satisfied hand. And yet, when the rankings were posted, there it was again.

Rank 1: Alice

Rank 2: Me

Sometimes she wasn’t even there to witness it. Her absences continued, equally sporadic and

unexplained. The rumors fermented about hospital visits, secret training programs, elite tutors

flown in from abroad. None of it mattered, the only thing that did was that whenever her name

appeared, it eclipsed mine.

In my solitary despair, I began to notice things about her that I hadn’t before.

She’d return after a week gone and slip into her seat without her signature bubbly greeting of

her fellow classmates. The way she never checked the accursed ranking sheet. While the rest

of us crowded the corkboard like pilgrims at a shrine, she would simply gather her bag and

leave. It infuriated me. No… words could not describe what her indifference caused me. That

soulless witch wasn’t even happy about her placements. I had only assumed that it was merely

the way of geniuses, that the world bows to their will.

Still… did she not care? Was first place so natural to her that it required no acknowledgment?

Or was I the only one pathetic enough to worship a number?

By eighth grade, my world had narrowed to margins and deadlines. The frigid expanse of the

snowy winter and the blistering heat of summer had faded into irrelevancy. I stopped attending

birthday parties. I stopped watching television. I stopped looking at anything that did not

contribute to the singular objective of surpassing Alice. Teachers began to use my name as an

example. “If you applied yourself like—” they would begin.

But no matter how hard the moon tries to shine, she cannot bypass the fact that her light stems

from the Sun. And like the moon, I could never outshine Alice’s radiance. Midterms came and

went in a breeze with little change.

Rank 1: Alice

Rank 2: Me

By the time graduation loomed over us like an executioner’s shadow, I had forgotten what it

meant to want anything that wasn’t hers. Heat from the blistering flames of the living world only

meant something if Alice was suffering in the frigid cold of my dreary abyss.

Ninth grade was quieter and Alice’s absences grew longer. Whispers thickened into something

less glamorous than conspiracy as I finally learned the truth behind her fucking absence. It was

her hospital visits. The word crawled through my body like a parasite draining its host of life. The

sun I had strived to extinguish had burned too bright by itself… I should have been happy,

fucking elated if anything, but when I saw her dreary eyes, I knew I would never forget the sickly

girl they belonged to.

The first time I saw her after a month-long disappearance, I almost didn’t recognize her. She

was thinner, her former pale radiance replaced by the same dismal energy that had permeated

my gray world. She reached for her chair slowly, her shaking hands making it clear that she was

truly in no condition to be here.

For the first time, Alice stopped in front of the leaderboard, her blue… or were they gray… I

cannot remember after so many years, opened in a sickly amazement.

Rank 1: Alice — 100.0

Rank 2: Me — 100.0

A tie. It was a fucking tie. She let out a soft breath, but it sounded more like a laugh than

anything.

“So,” she murmured with her hoarse voice, “you finally caught up.”

The words struck harder than any ranking ever had, after my torturous nights of monotonous

reading, all I got was a “caught up”.

“It’s a tie,” I replied. “Alphabetical order saved you.”

My chest tightened to the lame excuse I had replied with, my goal had never been perfection, it

had been to drag Alice down into my hell, to make her suffer alongside me. That night I studied

harder. I don’t remember sleeping much that year. I remember the sting of antiseptic on my

skin. I remember hiding long sleeves beneath uniforms and I remember my parents horrified

faces as they saw the bloodstained razors in my room. It didn’t matter though, for suffering

meant that the sun had graced me with her blistering light.

Final exams arrived like judgment day. I wrote until my hand cramped. I checked every answer

three times, then three more. I felt nothing while doing it, no dread, no excitement—only the

same mechanical precision that had haunted every waking moment of the past three years. If I

had possessed a soul, I suspect it would have been sold to the devil long ago.

Results were posted on a morning that smelled like rain. A crowd had already formed. I didn’t

push through. I didn’t need to see to know what had happened.

For the first time in years, I knew something with certainty.

Rank 1: Me — 100.0

Rank 2: Alice — 96.7

Alice hadn’t even attended the finals exam… that soulless witch had denied me my very last

sliver of hope to escape meaninglessness. I found out three days later that Alice had died the

day of the results being posted. Laughter reverberated through my hollow apartment, her death

had been the coup de grace to my miserable existence… had it not been for that girl.

She had knocked on my door and handed me a diary… Alice’s diary. The girl introduced herself

as Gracie, Alice’s little sister.

The girl couldn’t have been older than ten, a miracle she could walk alone in the frigid summer

cold. She stood stiffly on our doorstep, both hands clutching the diary as if it were the most

precious thing in the world. Unlike Alice, her hair was a soft brown, tied into uneven braids. Her

eyes, though— I could not tell.

“You’re… the second place girl right?” she asked quietly.

The words struck like a hammer into my nonexistent soul. “I’m first now,” I replied before I could

stop myself. She didn’t react to the correction, or maybe she did. Honestly, nothing mattered

more than that fucking diary. “My sister wanted you to have this.”

She extended the diary toward me.

“Why me?” I asked.

Gracie swallowed. “She said you’d understand.”

Understand what? Understand how it felt to be at the top? I laughed, barely containing myself

from saying things that I knew I would regret to Gracie.

“She wrote in it every day at the hospital,” Gracie added. “When she couldn’t move her hands,

she’d have mom write it for her.”

My fingers tightened involuntarily around the cover.

“She said you were the only one who would read it properly.”

“Properly?” My voice felt brittle, as if someone had shattered me into a million pieces.

“She didn’t care about school,” I muttered. “She was a genius in a different realm than me.”

“You’re wrong,” Gracie frowned faintly. “She cared about school… No, about you more than

anything.”

I shook my head. “She never even looked at the rankings.”

For the first time, something flickered in Gracie’s expression, an emotion that Alice surely knew

far better than me. It was fucking pity. “She looked,” she said gently. “She just waited until

everyone left.”

“She made Dad drive her to school at night once,” Gracie continued. “Just so she could see the

midterm rankings by herself. She couldn’t walk very well that week, she couldn’t do anything

very well actually.”

My throat tightened in despair, in the fact that I had lost to a terminally ill patient . “She said it

was what fueled her flame of ambition,” Gracie added, almost smiling. “That if she was going to

fade into the same nothingness that had claimed millions before her, then she wanted a legacy

that at least one person who could make her lose would remember… You were that person.”

The word lose had never been so meaningless to me as it was now. “She didn’t lose,” I said.

“She was dying and still beat me.”

Gracie shook her head. “She knew she would… Sister was smart and talented, much more so

than anyone I have ever met, but she did not have ambition. You were her ambition, you were

her reasons for her hospital bed being littered with mathematical symbols more akin to

hieroglyphs than academia to me.”

She paused for a moment, and then turned her eyes to me. Her beautiful hazel eyes, yes…

hazel they were. “She was the same as you…” Gracie barely managed to say in between her

sobs. I stepped forward and embraced her, the only thing I could manage to do at that moment.

“Sister had known from a very young age that she would die, but she never showed it. Mommy

and daddy tried their best with all kinds of gifts and ideas, but nothing ever managed to outshine

the look on sister’s face whilst she talked about you.

“She wanted to save you from the depths of despair before she died, to free someone from

meaninglessness before it consumed another,” Gracie continued. “She couldn’t sit up long

enough anymore, let alone study for longer periods of time, yet she persevered.”

My heartbeat quickened. Gracie looked up at me. “She sounded proud.. Proud of you.”

Proud of me? She must have thought of the wrong person. “That doesn’t make sense,” I

whispered.

Gracie shifted on her feet. “She said you were the only one who understood what it meant to

want something that badly. She took on the selfish role of becoming your light before her own

extinguished.”

“She told me,” Gracie said carefully, “that you looked lonelier than she did.”

Something inside my chest splintered causing rivulets of tears to flood down my cheeks. “She

wasn’t supposed to die that day,” Gracie blurted suddenly, as if the sentence had been waiting

to escape. “The doctors said she had more time.”

I gripped the diary harder. “She asked what day the results would be posted,” Gracie barely

managed to say through the veil of tears. “When Mom told her, she laughed.”

“She didn’t skip the finals to hurt you,” Gracie said firmly, as if defending her sister one last time.

“But she couldn’t hold the pen anymore, let alone write an exam.”

“She made me promise to give you the diary if…” Gracie’s voice wavered for the first time. “…if

she couldn’t come back to school.”

I looked down at the navy cover. “She wrote something at the end for you,” Gracie whispered.

“She said you’d probably be angry.”

Angry… What a stupid thought. That selfish witch was worrying about me days away from her

own death. Of course I was angry. I had won, yet it felt like theft. I did not deserve to stand in

Alice’s light. Gracie stepped back from the doorway.

“You don’t have to forgive her,” she said quietly. “She just didn’t want you to think she stopped

trying.”

It took her dying for me to realize something unbearable. She wasn’t obscuring my light, she

was my light. And while I carved pieces of myself away chasing her rightful spot, she had been

racing time itself. I try to recall her laughter, the one I convinced myself had been directed at my

failures, but I do not remember it.

What is a ranking for someone counting days and hours they have left to live?

The wind shifts and the sky remains the same dull gray it has always been.

For years, I believed meaning lived at the top of a list.

Now I stand before Alice’s name carved in stone and understand the cruel arithmetic of it all:

I won. She’s gone. And the world is still gray. That selfish bitch.