Notis.
Notwill be.
Would be.
Like she’s already gone.
Panic spikes through my chest, sharp and sudden and vicious. My throat closes. Air won’t move.
It’s just a figure of speech,I tell myself, forcing my feet to keep walking even though my legs have gone numb.Probably autocorrect. People use future tense wrong all the time. It doesn’t mean anything.
Mom’s fine. The new treatment is working. Sixty-two percent remission rate.
Those are good odds.
Greatodds.
I start running constitutional arguments in my head, a trick I learned years ago to distract from the panic. Fourteenth Amendment. Equal protection clause. Precedent cases—Brown v. Board,Loving v. Virginia,Obergefell v. Hodges. Clean, ordered citations. Things that make sense. Things that follow logic instead of chaos.
Things I can control.
My pulse starts to slow. Marginally.
“Yo, Caleb! Ready to destroy Hamilton Prep today?”
Kevin appears beside me, all easy confidence and unearned swagger. He’s good at debate—third-best on the team after Sarah and me—but he treats it like a game instead of a battle for survival.
Must be nice.
“Yeah,” I manage. My voice sounds almost normal. “Bus leaves right after lunch. You ready?”
“Born ready, my man.” Kevin grins, slapping me on the shoulder with enough force to make me stumble slightly. “This is our year. State championship, here we come.”
State championship. Harvard acceptance. Perfect GPA. Debate team captain.
All the achievements lined up like dominoes, each one depending on the one before it. One wrong move and they all fall.
No pressure.
We’re still talking—Kevin rambling about his opening argument strategy, me nodding at appropriate intervals—when it happens.
Every phone in the hallway buzzes. Simultaneously. Like someone detonated a notification bomb.
The conversation dies instantly. Heads turn. Phones rise like a synchronized swarm.
And the hallway, which was normal teenage chaos thirty seconds ago, goes silent.
That particular kind of silence that means something terrible just happened.
I’m still reading a text from Harper—Mom finished treatment, everything went fine, sixty-two percent is going to be one hundred percent, I can feel it—when Kevin’s hand clamps around my forearm as the hall erupts again in a white noise of whispers.
“Oh shit, man.”
His voice has gone strange. Tight. Almost… apologetic?
“What—”
He shoves his phone in my face before I can finish the question.