Chapter 2

When I got home, Elena was sitting on the couch, playing with her new phone. She waved me over to her happily when she saw me. "Nina, help me transfer my pictures to the new phone."

However, I ignored her and headed straight to the dinner table. Ten lottery tickets were already spread out on the table, and my mother pushed five tickets toward me. "Hurry up and scratch them. Your father and I need to take a nap later. Don't waste our time."

I did not take the tickets, which made my father frown. "What are you still standing there for?"

That was when I placed the lottery ticket I took from the cupboard onto the table. When the ticket floated gently down, my mother's expression changed. "Who said you could go through my cupboard?"

She did not ask why I had the lottery ticket or where I had gone. Her first reaction was to get mad at me for opening her cupboard, and that killed the last hope inside of me.

"That ticket is fake," I heard my voice trembling. "Every ticket you gave us was customized, isn't it?"

Elena stopped playing with her phone, and my father's face fell. "How can you be so indignant when you stole from your own home, Nina?"

"I'm asking if the lottery tickets are fake."

My mother slammed the table. "So what if they are?"

She admitted it so quickly that the speech I had prepared for them got stuck in my throat. My mother picked up the ticket from the table and looked at me coldly.

"This was a family game we designed, and both of you got real money at the end of the game. Nothing we did was a lie to you."

"Why does Elena get more than a hundred dollars every time while I only get a few dollars?

"It's because your situation is different from Elena's," my mother insisted matter-of-factly. "Elena is lively and needs to socialize with her classmates. That requires money. All you do is read and sleep. What would you need so much money for?"

I clenched my fists. "I need to eat too."

"Isn't a few dollars enough?"

"A meal at school costs at least two dollars. How am I supposed to last with a few dollars a week when I have five days of school per week?"

My mother interrupted me impatiently, "You can fill up with free water in school, and I believe that the leftover food in the canteen will definitely be discounted. Children living in poverty can't even enjoy a meal. Why are you acting so spoilt when you have money?"

My chest felt stuffy as I looked at her. She knew. She knew that several dollars a week was not enough to last me, and she knew that I could only survive on leftover food and water, but she did not care.

All my father did was slam five lottery tickets in front of me. "That's enough! We're not going to talk about this anymore. Scratch your lottery tickets and go back to school."

I looked at the five tickets that had been pre-arranged for me. I picked up the first one and won nothing. The second ticket was the same. The third and fourth tickets won a dollar and two dollars respectively, while the last one won nothing.

My mother glanced at my tickets. "Three dollars in total. Use the money wisely and don't waste it on unnecessary things."

As for my sister, she won a hundred dollars because her birthday was this week.