Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 87968 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87968 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
After a few weeks she got a devastating diagnosis—stage four lung cancer.
“But Auntie Amelia,” I whispered, when she broke the news to me. “You don’t even smoke, do you?”
“I did when I was younger, child.” She put a tissue to her mouth and coughed—a deep, harsh sound that was frightening to hear. “Guess I’m payin’ for it now. We always pay for the sins of our past—remember that.”
“But it’s not fair!” I said, beginning to cry. “What’s going to happen? Will you have to spend time in the hospital?” I still remembered my own long hospital stay and how much I had loathed it. “I can watch Becky if you need me to until you come back,” I told her.
She shook her graying head regretfully.
“No, child. I’m afraid not.”
“But why?” I protested. “I’m old enough and responsible enough. I’m close to fourteen now—I’m going into high school next year!”
“Because, Kira, I won’t be coming back,” she said gently. “I’m afraid stage four means terminal. You know what that means?”
Finally what she’d been trying to tell me dawned on me. I was an avid reader—it was the best way of escaping the real world. I knew what terminal meant.
“You…you’re going to die?” I whispered through numb lips. “Auntie Amelia, you can’t!”
“Don’t have a choice in the matter, child.” She coughed again and wheezed for breath. “Don’t…don’t want to leave you and…Daisy girl but I can’t help it. The Almighty’s calling me home.”
“No!” I hugged her tight, my tears wetting her blouse. “No, please don’t leave me! Everyone leaves me—please, Auntie Amelia, don’t you leave too!”
“I’m so sorry, child—I don’t want to leave. You know I’d stay if I could.” She stroked my wild, curly hair gently though my tight hug must have hurt her. “You’ve got to be brave,” she told me. “You’ll be going to another foster home—I’ll ask them to put you in a really good one. And you’ll have to go to regular high school like we talked about.”
I shuddered at the thought. I had been through a single year of middle school before Mamma and I were in the car wreck and I had hated it. I was too strange—too shy and different—for the other kids. They had teased me and picked on me mercilessly.
I had agreed with Auntie Amelia that I would give “regular high school” a try but if I didn’t like it, I could go back to home schooling. Now that option and the wise, kind caretaker who had offered it to me, was being taken away. I was being tossed out into a cruel, uncaring world without anyone to call my own.
“You got to be brave,” Auntie Amelia said again and I saw how much she wanted me to reassure her that I would be all right—that I could make it without her.
“I…I will be,” I promised, although the last thing I felt was “brave.” “I’ll be okay. But Auntie Amelia are you sure? Isn’t there some medicine the doctors can give you?”
“They’ve done their best, child,” she told me. “It’s gone too far for chemo to help. Nothing to do now but get ready to meet my maker.”
Despite all the doctors could do, Auntie Amelia died two weeks later. I attended her funeral with my caseworker—a harried, overworked woman by the name of Stacy Cartwright. She took me straight from the gravesite to my new home and my new foster parents—Nancy and Gary Spaulding.
The Spauldings were a prosperous couple—upright, church-going, middle class people with one child of their own—a daughter named Alexis. On paper, they were model foster parents. They owned their own business and had a big, gorgeous house that was practically a mini-mansion with six spare bedrooms way out in the country.
The place was isolated—you had to go off the main highway and down a long, rolling dirt road through rows of Georgia pines to get to it. It was pure white and built in the antebellum style, like an old plantation house. Out behind it was a big, dirty barn that must have once housed horses, since it was divided into stalls—three on one side and four more on the other.
One of these stalls was to be my new “room.”
I was soon to find out that Nancy and Gary were only model foster parents on paper. In practice, they were two of the cruelest, most evil people I would ever have the misfortune to meet and I would be with them for nearly three and a half years.
But I didn’t know that at first. All I knew was that I was staring at my new “bedroom” and it was nothing more than a dirty stall in a drafty barn. The sheets and single thin blanket on the foam padding didn’t look very clean, either. In one corner there was an old trunk with a rusty clasp and a broken lock. Old straw and dry leaves had accumulated in the other.