#thecelestialscribe

He was an alien. Not the kind that comes down in a UFO, with slimy hands or eyes the size of footballs or anything, but an alien, nevertheless. He was really quiet and secluded, you know? He kept to himself, he didn’t say much. He kept his earbuds around his neck, even if he wasn’t listening to them -- which was only about 10% of the time. His hair was just long enough so that it hung down over his eyebrows, dark brown, and naturally straight. He walked like a ghost through the halls; head down, shoulders slumped, music blasting.

I could never understand why he was so timid and shy. He was freaking beautiful. Girls always paid attention to him, though he showed not one bit of interest in return. He should’ve had the ego of Brad Pitt. What need was there for staying so isolated? And God, his eyes were so blue; I’d never seen anything like them before. The color his irises held was a one-of-a-kind, deep blue, like the ocean, surrounded by a lighter circle that was nearly gray.

You might ask me now how I knew what color his eyes were if he kept his head down so much, and if his hair was as long as it was; or maybe how I knew he had a beauty mark just under his sideburn on the right side. How would I know, right? I mean, it probably sounds like I’m some stalker or something. The truth of the matter, though?

I couldn’t help but keep him in my sights. There was something about him that was just so... compelling. It was almost like there was a magnetic field around him, drawing my eyes to his own. He’d look up at me for awhile, then he’d avert his gaze after a moment or two, opting to discreetly bob his head to whatever song he was listening to. We’d go through this day after day after day, establishing eye contact, then breaking it, every day, third period, then eighth period, then on occasion when he showed up at the public library.

So yes, when he was absent from school for a few days, I noticed. And you’d better believe I was worried about him. When he came back on a Thursday after being absent from the Wednesday prior, I was so relieved, I let out a heavy sigh (that didn’t go unnoticed by him). He met my gaze, just like he always did, but something was different. Something was wrong in his eyes. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but damn it, I wanted to. Sure, they were still blue, and they were just as beautiful, but there was something dark lingering just behind them.

I hated it.

I won’t lie, it kept me up that night, lying wide awake in my bed, listening to the swaying of branches as a breeze rolled by. Questions flooded my mind, and I couldn’t seem to make them go away. Was there something more to this boy? Something much more condescending and just downright devastating that he was hiding? I wanted to know. No. I needed to know what had gone amiss.

That Friday, I distinctly remember opening up a book on Greek Mythology, ready to do some research for my term paper when he strolled in. As always, he kept his head bowed, chin nearly touching his chest. Wordlessly, he slinked into the room and sank down into a booth to the left of the beanbag chair I’d chosen to lounge in. I’d never forget that Friday. December 7th, 2012. It was particularly chilly, and I’d worn my favorite hoodie, along with my old, tattered jeans that shouldn’t have seen the light of day.

It also happened to be the day I heard his voice for the first time.

I bet it’s difficult to believe I’d never heard him speak up until that point. I’d seen him speak to teachers in a soft hush of a whisper, but I’d never heard his voice for myself. He didn’t speak to anybody, as there was nobody that interacted with him. He just hung his head low like he always did, and he kept to himself. Like I said, he was an alien.

Anyway, around half an hour in, somebody all but tore through the front doors of the library. I looked up from my research just in time to see a tall girl barreling past the front desk in a flurry of brunette curls and angry grunts and growls. My eyes followed her as she carried herself across the nonfiction section and she sat herself down across from him in the booth. The girl -- whose name I’d later learn is Audrey -- she’s his sister, and she looks just like him. They have the same cheekbones and a similar, slightly crooked jawline. Their eyes, though, are a little different. Hers are more green than his are. Well, more gray than green, but that’s beside the point.

“Shiloh,” she’d whispered loudly. As if barging into the library wasn’t enough, she didn’t seem to care that she was causing even more of a disturbance, much to my amazement, I might add. Her brother took out his earbuds though, which obviously signified that he meant business. “What are you doing here?!” Audrey hissed at him. The words escaped narrowly through her teeth, and I could’ve sworn I saw a forked tongue dart out to wet her lips.

That’s when Shiloh spoke. His voice was deep; much deeper than I’d expected it to be. It was quiet (not surprising), but rugged-sounding, kind of like sandpaper. “Working,” he snapped in a husky grumble, picking up his head to look at his sister. I watched his mouth as he spoke, subconsciously taking note of how his tongue moved over his teeth beneath the cover of his upper lip. He glared at her when he forced out a quick, bitter: “What do you want?”

Then Audrey, as if on cue, glanced over at me, giving me the dirtiest look I've ever received in my life. She pulled her brother closer by the front of his shirt, whispered something in his ear, and didn’t take her eyes off me the whole time. She was quite intimidating to say the least. However, her clear efforts to instill fear in me weren’t enough to keep me from watching either her or Shiloh. I was holding my ground for one of the first times in my life, sitting there in that stupid red beanbag chair, without saying a damn thing. My gaze was just as intense as hers was, and my face was hard as stone. Well, at least I tried to look as terrifying as she did, although I’m not really sure I accomplished what I attempted to.

It didn’t matter though. Shiloh’s eyes widened at whatever Audrey told him, and he, in response, promptly closed his books and quickly shuffled out of the library. His sister followed behind him on his heels, like a guard dog with eyes of steel. That was all I saw of Shiloh until Tuesday -- and things only seemed to be getting worse.

He didn’t show up to third period, so I was under the impression that he wasn’t coming to school at all that day. When he arrived on time to Chemistry though, where it would’ve been a pleasant surprise, there was only a hollow feeling in my chest when I looked at him. He stared down at his blank sheet of paper, head absently nodding to the beat of the music in his ears. To my surprise, it scared me. There was something terribly, horribly wrong with Shiloh. He didn’t look at me at all that day, not even once; just kept his head lowered and avoided my gaze.

He didn’t look at me for the rest of the week.

Or the week after that.

Or the week after that.

January 16th, he began missing school again. At this point, with Audrey still attending all of her classes, glaring at me in the hallways, I was becoming increasingly concerned for his well-being. I had so many questions, and no answers to them. There was no solution I was seeing, I wasn’t having any epiphanies; it was frustrating. Looking back on it now, I realize there really couldn’t have been a solution for me to discover if there was no problem I could identify to begin with.

It shouldn’t have been eating away at me so much, but I couldn’t help it. He’d been a part of my life for a few months, and without him there, a part of my daily routine, it was throwing me out of whack. There was some... huge gaping hole where he usually was. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out why that was. He was just some boy that I’d never spoken a word to; therefore, he shouldn’t have mattered as much as he did. The concept was truly puzzling to me.

January 26th rolled around before I knew it. It’d been ten days since I’d seen Shiloh, and quite a long time since I’d gotten a glimpse at his eyes. My brother had a basketball game that weekend, and my parents were repainting the basement. My sister and her boyfriend had midterms to study for too, and on top of all that, I had a research paper to place the finishing touches on. Basically, the whole family was pretty busy, so when we heard a knock at the front door, it not only surprised us, but it also earned a collective under-your-breath groan from every mouth in the house. After a minute or two though, I forgot about it, getting back to my soon-to-be A+ paper.

I forgot about it, that is, until there was a knock on my door.

Who else would it be but Audrey, looking so unlike herself, it scared the hell out of me. She stood at my door, head bowed like Shiloh’s as her fingers toyed at the hem of her shirt. She didn’t say anything, just stood there. I felt my eyebrows shoot up all on their own in surprise as I fought the urge to slam the door in her face. I mean, come on, QueenBitch Audrey shows up at my house, looking somber and I’m supposed to just take her in, sit her down on my bed, and ask her what was eating away at her? Hell no.

“What do you want?” I bit out, leaning into my doorframe, arms folded over my chest.

She lifted her head up to look at me, the same look in her eyes that her brother’s often held. What she said next, I’ll never forget. I remember -- and I will always remember -- every single word she said, in the exact tone of voice she said it.

“He’s dying,” she told me. Fresh tears filled her eyes. “Shiloh. He’s dying.”

“What?” I was acting on impulse, not even giving a second thought to what I was saying. “What... What do you mean he’s dying?”

Audrey, with the stature of a lost puppy, stepped into my room and closed the door behind her. She leaned back into it, and ran a disgruntled hand over her face. I couldn’t remember a time in my life where I’d been so taken so off-guard. Dying? Shiloh? How could that even happen? Sure, he hadn’t been in school for awhile, but I didn’t think he was dying.

The most terrifying part though, wasn’t even that he was most likely lying on his deathbed as I stood in my room, speaking to his sister. It was that I could care so much for somebody I hadn’t spoken to even one time in my short, painfully useless existence. What did it matter to me if he was dying? He was just some kid that looked over at me on occasion. I didn’t know anything about him, and he didn’t know anything about me.

If I’d had any control over my emotions at that moment, I would’ve brushed it off and walked Audrey out of my house the way she’d entered. I had to focus on my term paper that was due Monday. Except, this wasn’t something I could brush off as nothing. This was a big deal; huge, gigantic, even -- and I still couldn’t figure out why.

Audrey took it upon herself to seat herself at my desk, where my laptop still sat, Word Document open. She looked me dead in the eye once she’d sat down, and she drew in a long, slow breath that seemed to drag on for much too long.

“They found his cancer three years ago.” She drew in another breath. “By the time they caught it, it had already spread from his shoulder to his forearm.”

It felt like somebody had come running at me full-force, and hit me square in the chest with a battering ram. I couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. That, however, didn’t keep Audrey from going on. She explained the skin cancer had attacked Shiloh out of the blue a few years back, and how it had taken the whole family by surprise. Audrey and Shiloh didn’t have the most functional family, anyway, but nevertheless it came as quite a shock. The two of them and their father shared a small cottage up the road a few miles that doubled as a clinic. He worked full-time as a veterinarian, and even then, it was still hard for him to pay the bills. The expenses for Shiloh’s cancer treatments were way over his budget to say the least. As a result, Audrey, for her brother, gave up every last bit of money in her bank account that she’d been saving up for college: over ten thousand bucks worth. Unfortunately though, even then, when there wasn't a penny to her name, it wasn’t enough.

An anonymous donor stepped in at that point, which, to Audrey, Shiloh, and her father, seemed like a heaven-sent blessing. Shiloh got the treatment he needed, and at long-last, his cancer went into remission.

When he finally recovered and he was healthy enough, Shiloh returned to public school, at the end of eighth grade, a completely alienated stranger. By that point, the cancer had weakened him not only physically, but emotionally and spiritually. He was quieter from then on. He kept to himself, absolutely horrified at the thought of dying and hurting anybody that cared about him. He didn’t want to do harm to anybody else, and so he secluded himself, Audrey told me.

“It came back,” Audrey continued. Her voice was strangled with emotion. Even talking about it now, I can feel a lump forming in my throat. She was so heartbroken, it killed me. Shiloh was in serious condition, I knew. There was a very good chance he wouldn’t be making it out alive, that was plain to see in the expression on her face. “They don’t know how long it’ll take for it to go back into remission or if... if he’ll make it out this time. He’s so weak, and I... I just... I don’t know what to do.”

That’s when I finally moved forward and pulled Audrey into a hug. We sat on my carpeted floor, holding each other. I smoothed her hair as she sobbed into my shirt, and my own tears seeped all the way through her sweater to drench her shoulder. “He wants to see you,” she whispered some time later. Her voice was still shaking, as was the rest of her body. “He... He asked about you... For you...”

Needless to say, I was at the hospital in less than twenty minutes, face blotchy, throat scratchy. I abandoned my term paper, and hopped in Audrey’s car without a second thought. If that blue-eyed boy wanted me there, I’d be there. Period.

⋆⋆⋆

Shiloh’s room was... cozy. It wasn’t at all how I expected it to look. He was lying in what looked more like a twin size bed than a hospital bed. He was all snuggled up under a comforter with an old, vintage-looking flowered print on it, sleeping soundly, much to my relief. Under his arm was a teddy bear, tucked into his chest as he dreamed. I watched contentedly as the right corner of his mouth quirked ever so slightly upward and he made a tiny sound of contentment. It brought a smile to my lips. Despite the circumstances -- how pale he was, the lack of his effortlessly perfect brown locks of hair and the tubes hooked up to him -- Shiloh managed to look peaceful.

He looked happy.

I lowered myself slowly onto the bed next to him. Somehow, it felt right to be sitting so close to him, even if we’d never done anything but look at each other. The fact that he’d asked for me to visit him was enough. I pulled up the sleeves of my hoodie so that they covered my wrists and I smiled a little brighter as I moved to gently caress his face, running my chilled knuckles over his jawline.

“He gets so tired,” Audrey broke in softly. “The chemo drains him. He’s hardly even awake five hours of the day.”

I’d forgotten she was even there up until that point. With tears in my eyes, I looked up at Audrey, nodded once, and then I looked back down at Shiloh, gathering my hands in my lap. There were dark circles around his eyes that had formed since the last time I’d seen him, I observed. Not only that, but he’d clearly lost a lot of weight, and his cheekbones were far more pronounced. Something in my chest twisted as I tilted my head to the side, studying him. I let my head sit on my left hand, and I just watched him as he slept. I watched how his chest lifted and fell, how he shifted while he dreamed, and how his face screwed up before he woke up. An hour after I’d arrived at the hospital, Shiloh was rolling over and opening his eyes, blinking up at me, quite surprised. He clutched his bear closer to him subconsciously, as a small child does upon being roused from a deep slumber.

“Alexis?” He croaked, trying to sit up. “What… How did you… Um… Why ar--"

“Audrey came and got me,” I broke in, feeling my cheeks flush red. He’d said my name. It sounded so perfect passing through his lips, no matter how broken his voice was. Alexis. “She said you wanted me here, I... I hope it’s okay, I mean, I know we don’t talk, I, um...” I have a nervous tendency to babble, which is probably why I don’t have many friends, and I keep to myself -- much like Shiloh did. Maybe not to the extremes that he brought social seclusion to, but he had his reasons for that, and I had no real justification of my own.

“I didn’t think she’d actually... do it,” he admitted, looking up at me. He didn’t even toss a glance at Audrey, just kept his eyes on my face as he spoke. Then he looked down, swallowing audibly before proceeding to tell me he “didn’t know what he was thinking” and how it was “stupid of him to ask me to come”.

Rejection. Great.

“Oh,” I said, clenching my jaw and beginning to rise up off the mattress. “If you want me to leave, I’ll… I’ll go, don’t worry about it…” I started. Shiloh grabbed my arm before I could say anything more, his icy fingers wrapping around my wrist. My heart skipped a beat as his classic blue eyes locked on my own. They hadn’t changed one bit since the first time I’d seen them. Shiloh smiled meekly at me.

“... Stay?”

I felt the right corner of my mouth tug upward involuntarily. I sank back down onto the mattress.

“Stay,” I told him.

Three weeks later, he was my best friend. In that short amount of time, we’d gone from strangers to an inseparable pair that knew everything about each other. From our favorite colors, to how he hit a clown with a baseball bat at his fifth birthday party, we knew it all. Every day after school, I’d bring him the work he’d missed, and we’d do homework together. Of course, I’d fill him in on what happened at school that day too; or sometimes, when he was too tired to do homework or to even listen to me speak, we’d lie in bed together, just Shiloh, his bear and I. I’d throw on the TV and wait for him to conk out, running my fingers over his scalp like he’d told me his mother used to do.

When I look back at the time I spent with Shiloh while he was in the hospital, the memory that stands out the most clearly is a conversation we shared after I’d finished reading him Chapter 7 of The Hunger Games. He'd taken the book out of my hands and placed it on the mattress before snuggling up close to me and resting his head in my lap. Why this conversation, out of all the things we spoke about sticks in my head, I’ll never know.

“Do you know what your name means?” He’d asked me with wide eyes, blinking up at me against the hospital lights.

I replied with a bashful smile and a simple, “No.” Hell, I couldn’t even remember what I’d eaten for lunch that day.

Shiloh just leaned his head on my thigh and sighed, his trembling fingers toying with the frays of my jeans. “‘Defender of men,’” he told me. “Like Alexander the Great, student of Aristotle, who slept with Homer’s Iliad under his pillow.” And he scrunched his nose up, laughing brightly and beaming up at me, his light freckles peeking through his paled skin. “Alexis the Great.”

I laughed softly, wondering how I could ever be considered “great”, in any sense of the word. I went along with it though. If Shiloh thought I was great, damn it, I had to be. “Alexis the Great, huh?” I questioned lightly, spider-walking my fingers down his arm. “I don’t see myself building a gigantic empire, do you?”

He laughed too, though the sound was dry and his voice was hoarse, as was the usual.

⋆⋆⋆

Now, two years since that first day I spoke to Shiloh, I get a lot of questions -- not just from family and friends, either. There's stuff like: How do you deal with it? Isn’t it kind of terrifying to know the cancer could come back again? Then there are the hopeless romantics that ask stuff like: What's going on with you two? Have you kissed? Is he your boyfriend?

Well, let's start at the beginning.

How do I deal with the cancer? It’s not running through my system, that’s for sure. So, I don’t really know what people mean when they ask questions like that. I don’t have to go for chemotherapy treatments or radiation therapy; I don't have doctor's appointments every few weeks. Shiloh, on the other hand, is the biggest inspiration I could ever ask for. He owns his problems for all that they are, and he learns to conquer them -- whether that be cancer or getting to school on time. He doesn’t take a single moment for granted. He can’t afford to. Neither of us can, as a matter of fact. We spent the five months before we started talking just staring at each other. Those are five months we’re never getting back, as well as five months that we’ve long since made up.

As to the question pertaining to the “am I terrified” part? Of course I’m scared his cancer will come back. If it returned once, I'm smart enough to accept the possibility that it can happen again. Shiloh is always going to be weaker than those around him, and we all know he’ll never make a full recovery. It kills me that he’ll never be completely healthy again, but the cancer's gone for now, and as long as his heart’s still beating, you'd better believe I’ll be here.

So the burning question seems to be: Is he your boyfriend?

Yes. Shiloh’s my boyfriend, and I couldn’t be any happier. He’s my alien from outer space, just as I’m his Alexis the Great. And you bet I looked up what my name meant after that conversation. Shiloh was right, as he so often is. Alexis means “defender of men”. What Shiloh didn’t know is what his own name means.

So I looked that up. Shiloh means “his gift” or “he who was sent”. Huh.