“I know, Mom.”
“Do you have any idea how much trouble you could be in? Real trouble? Not school trouble?”
He was quiet for a long moment.
“She said she was going to di.e and nobody would tell her,” he said again. Quietly. “What was I supposed to do? Wait?”
The light turned green.
I didn’t have an answer for him. I still don’t.
I grounded him for a month. No phone. No laptop. No video games. He didn’t argue either. He went straight to his room and closed the door, and an hour later, when I looked in, he was asleep on top of the covers in his school clothes, like he hadn’t slept in four months.
He probably hadn’t.
I sat on the edge of his desk and opened the little notebook again.
Page after page of words he didn’t understand in January and understood now. Cytokine. Lymphodepletion. Remission. Phone numbers. A list of twenty-three hospitals, with twenty-two of them crossed out.
