Chapter 3

Ever since Nelson's legs gave out, Mom and Dad had set aside one week every month to take him to a big hospital in the city.

I never once doubted it. This morning they said goodbye and left, same as always.

On the table they left two hundred and twenty dollars, my allowance 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 people in town for three days.

In that moment my heart wasn't unmoved.

It happened to be the weekend. I pretended to stay in bed, and once they'd gone far enough,

I slipped out and followed behind them.

First a five-dollar bus ride into town, then a rattling city bus after that.

Not until I watched with my own eyes as my parents wheeled my brother into the hospital

did I finally feel like I could breathe again.

Thank God. There was no fake poverty at all. The comments had to be something I'd imagined.

Just as I was quietly letting out a breath, a line appeared before my eyes.

“Look up, quick.”

I lifted my head without thinking, and saw my father in a sharp suit, my mother dripping in jewelry.

And my brother Nelson, bedridden and paralyzed for years, wearing three-thousand-dollar sneakers, arm in arm with my parents, all of them laughing.

In that moment, everything I understood about the world came crashing down.

By the time I came back to myself, my face was already wet with tears, and the ache twisting through my heart and my stomach was telling me one thing.

This was real. I wasn't dreaming.

I stared, eyes wide, as they carried several gift bags and climbed into a car.

I didn't recognize the emblem, but the comments said it was “a McLaren, worth two million dollars.”

The two hundred and change they'd handed me this morning couldn't have bought a single small part of that car.

Like a fool, I stood there watching my brother, paralyzed for years, work the wheel like he'd done it a thousand times.

If I ran up to the people around me right now and shouted that they were my family,

they'd haul me off to a psych ward on the spot.

Because I was standing there in a school uniform washed until the seams unraveled, gray and shabby all over.

The car slowly disappeared from my sight, and I followed the comments' directions, step by step, until I reached a gated luxury neighborhood.

I looked up, and my eyes went red.