AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PROLOGUE
KAT
I was gettingice cream and arguing with a random guy by the vending machine in the hospital when my mom passed away.
Sometimes, the most trivial things remind you of the saddest days in your life.
When I was eleven, Mom was diagnosed with cancer.
When I was eleven and eight months, she collapsed and went into the hospital, going in and out of ICU for the next several months.
By the time I was eleven years, eleven months and twenty days, I was spending every afternoon after school in the hospital, doing homework, and watching movies on my iPad in Mom’s room.
It had become a routine. In the rare moments Mom came to, I tried to spend every second around her. Talking constantly because she barely could. Stroking her weak hand because she had a hard time moving. Bringing up the happy moments of the past as if I could bring my old mom back, make her look like she used to, with twenty more pounds, without sunken eyes or chapped lips.
By then, Dad had come back from overseas once again. That day, he’d gone to run errands, and I’d just woken up from a nap in the armchair next to Mom’s bed.
It was an ordinary day, sunny outside but the hospital room was dim because they kept the blinds closed. I hated dimness. And hospitals.
A nurse came in. Nurses are constantly around the sick and the dying. I decided right then and there I’d never be one.
I was about to bury myself in my iPad when Mom stirred. Her eyes were unusually sparkly, gazing at me from the dark sockets, shades shifting on her sunken cheeks as she whispered, “Kit-Kat,” so quietly I thought I’d imagined it.
“Mom?” I came up to her bed.
Her finger twitched—she couldn’t lift her hand by then. Nor could she move, really.
I wrapped my hand around her finger, her skin unusually hot to the touch.
She smiled just a tiny bit. She couldn’t lift a finger but she smiled—that was my mom, finding strength in the worst times.
She whispered something.
“What was that?” I leaned in closer, hating the smell of meds and hospital sheets. The smell that didn’t belong to my mom. I just wanted her back.
“Take care of Dad,” she whispered, closing her eyes.
I laughed. “Silly.” Dad was a giant warrior. Only Mom could take care of him. That was Mom—Wonder Woman.
“Thirsty,” she said. And though she was supposed to have only water, I wanted to cheer her up. She always liked ice cream. At that moment, all I wanted was to get her an ice cream. So I went out to the vending machine room at the end of the floor.
I was unwrapping the vanilla cone when some rude guy with a bald head and thick glasses said, “You should be in school, like other kids.”
Did other kids have their moms in the hospital for three months?
I said something rude, my mouth already too snappy for my age. He reproached me. I bickered, wasting my time on him.
I remember the voice on the loudspeaker. “Nurse, room 312.” My head snapped in that direction because I knew. I just knew.
I remember the nurses hurrying into the room,Mom’sroom, as I ran toward it.
I remember the sound of the heart monitor so unusually monotonous and annoying that I wanted it to go away so it didn’t bother Mom.
“Mom?”
I remember the nurse hovering over her bed, another one running in and pushing me aside.
“Mom?”
