Fire With Fire by Jenny Han & Siobhan Vivian

Author:Jenny Han & Siobhan Vivian [Han, Jenny & Vivian, Siobhan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult, Contemporary, Romance, Paranormal & Supernatural, Fantasy, Crime & Mystery
Goodreads: 10662420
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2013-08-13T04:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

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KAT

I WATCH MY ALARM TICK down, and a minute before it’s supposed to go buzz, I turn it off. I close the photo albums I pulled out last night and set them on my floor. Then I pull the blankets back up over me. My head finds the still-warm dent in my pillow, and I lie there for a minute.

Since she passed away five years ago, I’ve made it a tradition to stay up the entire night before the anniversary of my mom’s death to think about her. I don’t sleep, not one minute. It’s like some depressing form of meditation, I guess, but it’s how I do. I think about her all through the night.

I can trace that whole last shitty year of her life back to the moment it started, to the day Mom had to drop me off at school early because she had to go off island for an appointment with some specialist doctor.

I think about the day she and Dad sat us down at the kitchen table to tell us. How it didn’t look good, but we still needed to have hope. Mom was calm and Dad cried so hard he couldn’t breathe, and Pat ran straight out the back door in his socks and didn’t come home for three whole days. I felt anything but hopeful.

I think about telling Rennie when we first got the diagnosis. I rode my bike over early, before she was even awake, and basically ambushed her. She sat in her bed, still half-asleep, while I knelt on her floor and cried and cried. There was a sick part of me that was happy to have such a sad story. By then she was already starting to pull away from me. She was completely obsessed with Lillia and creaming her pants over the fact that Lillia was moving to Jar Island full-time after next summer. It’s pathetic to admit, but I remember hoping that Rennie might pity me enough to be close with me again, at least while I went through this terrible shit, but my mom getting sick only made things weirder between us.

I think about how Mom was strong for so long, until she couldn’t be, and then over a single freaking week she evaporated. Cancer eats you from the inside out, and I watched her waste away to skin and bones, to a hollow body, in literally seven days. The last day, she only opened her eyes once, and I don’t know if she saw me standing there, at the foot of her bed. Dad called out her name and Pat said he loved her, but her eyes didn’t focus. It was like we all saw the door closing. I wanted to say something meaningful, but I couldn’t get it out before her eyes shut again. We brought a stereo into the room and played “Suite Judy Blue Eyes” on repeat.

It was almost a relief to see her go.

All those memories, plus the good stuff from before she got sick, typically take up most of the night.

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