Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Fifty-four minutes.
I crossed my legs at the ankle and leaned back against the tree. This should have been easier. She’d been sick for so long. We’d spent months preparing for this day. Or at least my father had. I’d spent months pretending it wasn’t happening. And now that it had, I was hiding under a tree in the freshly mowed hayfield behind our neighborhood, wishing like hell that I had prepared too.
Fifty-five minutes.
The numbers kept changing. The seconds created minutes she would never experience. The minutes—
“All right, I gotta know what you’re staring at,” a boy said from somewhere nearby.
My head shot up but only an empty field stared back at me.
“Hello?” I called out.
“Is that one of those watches that has games on it and stuff? This kid Kevin at my old school had one. He played Tetris on it during math class. The game was stupid to begin with, but the screen was like an inch, so it made it even more stupid. He was a dumbass, so I guess it made sense.”
I leaned around the tree, trying to figure out where the voice was coming from. It was possible I was suffering from some kind of hallucination. I’d seen that happen in the movies when someone was experiencing an emotional trauma. But why had my mind conjured a boy’s voice instead of my mother’s? And why the hell was he talking about Tetris and some random kid named Kevin?
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Up here.”
Craning my head back, I found him perched—heels to butt—on a tree branch. His arms were over his head, clinging to a thin branch that looked like it was hoping for an excuse to snap, but his dark gaze was locked on me.
He flashed me a wide grin and extended a small red-and-green package toward me, forgetting—or ignoring—that he had to be at least fifteen feet in the air. “You want some gum?”
“What the…” I breathed as I took him in. I didn’t recognize him from school, but he looked like he was around my age, maybe a year or two older.
His jeans were faded, and his sneakers had seen better days. There wasn’t a name brand or logo in sight, though there weren’t many kids in our area, myself included, who could afford more than discount or secondhand clothes.
However, the real mystery at the moment wasn’t who he was, but rather how he had gotten up there.
The tree had been stripped of its branches halfway to the top to allow the tractors to pass beneath it. I knew bears that couldn’t have made that climb. Okay, well, I didn’t know them. We didn’t really have bears in Clovert, Georgia. But I’d seen videos of bears on TV.
I stood, brushing the dirt off my cutoff shorts. “What are you doing up there?”
He shook the gum at me one last time in a silent offer before shrugging. Precariously balancing, he released the branch above his head long enough to unwrap a piece and shove it into his mouth then tuck the pack inside his back pocket.
He smacked his lips as he answered, “Just hanging out.”
“In a tree?”
“I’m not sure if you’ve dragged your attention away from Tetris long enough to notice, but it’s hot as Hades today. I swear this was the only shade I could find.” His shaggy, brown hair, which curled at the tips, fell over his forehead. With a subtle twitch of his chin, he shifted it out of his eyes.
“Have you been up there this whole time?” I accused more than asked. I’d been sitting under that tree for… I looked at my watch.
Fifty-eight minutes.
Well, less the three minutes it took for me to sprint over there after the hospice nurse had announced that my mother “had passed.” The word passed implied that there was somewhere else she was going. When in reality, the cancer had finally devoured her from the inside out until her lungs filled with fluid and she’d drown lying in bed.
Fifty-nine minutes.
“It wasn’t like I was spying on you or anything,” he defended. “I was going to say something earlier, but then I got curious about what the heck you were doing.”
What was I doing? Hiding? Avoiding? Clinging to the theory that ignorance was bliss? Knowing she was dead was one thing. After I’d listened for days to her gasp and gurgle, it was honestly a relief. But seeing them wheel her out of our house on a stretcher much like the first time she’d collapsed after chemo had been more than I could take. This time, there was no hope left to cling to. When she left that day, she was never coming back.
I just had to wait. Soon, it would be over. Soon, her hospital bed in our living room would be empty for the first time in three months. Soon, she would be gone.