Chapter 3

Ever since Eunice's legs were paralyzed, Mom and Dad set aside one week every month to take her to a big hospital in the state capital.

I never once doubted it. This morning they said goodbye to me and left.

They'd left two hundred and twenty dollars on the table, my living expenses for the week.

The whole family's grocery money for a month was only five hundred.

Two hundred and twenty was what Mom earned washing dishes for three days in town.

I won't pretend it didn't move me, in that moment.

It happened to be the weekend, so I lay in bed pretending, and waited until they'd gotten far enough away.

Then I quietly followed behind them.

First the five-dollar bus to town, then a rattling city bus.

Only when I watched with my own eyes as my parents wheeled my sister into the hospital

did I finally feel like I could breathe again.

Thank God. There was no faking poverty at all. The notifications were probably just something my mind had invented.

And just as I let out that quiet breath of relief, a line appeared in front of my eyes.

“Look up, quick.”

I looked up on instinct, and saw Dad in a sharp suit, Mom dripping with jewels.

And my sister Eunice, paralyzed in bed for years, was wearing three-thousand-dollar red-soled heels, laughing and giggling with her arms linked through Mom's and Dad's.

In that moment, my whole world came crashing down.

By the time I came back to myself, my face was already wet with tears, and the twisting pain in my chest and stomach told me one thing.

This was real. I wasn't dreaming.

I stared, wide-eyed, as they climbed into a car carrying several gift bags.

I didn't recognize the emblem on it, but the notifications said it was “a two-million-dollar McLaren.”

The two hundred-some dollars they gave me this morning couldn't have bought a single small part of that car.

I watched like a fool as Eunice, paralyzed for years, worked the steering wheel with practiced ease.

If I shouted right now to everyone around me that these people were my family,

they'd drag me straight into a psychiatric ward on the spot.

Because I was in a school uniform washed until the threads were coming loose, gray and shabby from head to toe.

The car slowly disappeared from my sight, and I followed the notifications' guidance, step by step, all the way to a gated mansion district.

I looked up, and my eyes went red.