To my Romeo, I am dying
Not a seventeen-year-old sitting in a room getting handed a sentence like that during the first week of senior year.
My mother had already moved on to second opinions, specialists three states over. I let the words wash past me. None of that mattered yet. What mattered was Gray, probably still waiting on a text back about first period, with zero idea what he was about to lose.
I'd watched him carry his mom's casket when he was fifteen. Renata Locke, same disease, two years ago, and I remembered all of it from my bedroom window. The hospice van parked in the driveway. The way he just stopped smiling for the better part of a year. I knew, better than anyone else on the planet, exactly what thi