The thing about hospitals is that they smell like someone tried very hard to clean up something terrible and mostly succeeded.

Bleach. That sharp, eye-watering kind that catches the back of your throat. And underneath it, something metallic. Something that doesn't go away. I'd been in enough hospitals to know that smell lives in the walls. You could repaint the whole place, swap the linoleum, put up cheerful posters of sunflowers and children holding hands, and it would still be there. We tried, the smell would say. We really did.

The sliding doors parted for us and we walked in. Papa first, then Momma, then me. Like a little funeral procession that hadn't got the memo yet.

I grabbed a queue number from the dispenser near the entrance. Forty-seven. I looked at the screen above the counter. Currently serving: thirty-one.

Fantastic.

We found seats in the waiting room, which is to say we found the only three chairs that weren't occupied by someone who looked like they were actively considering their life choices. I sat between my parents, which felt very symbolic and also very suffocating. The chair was one of those plastic ones that's been slightly melted by decades of fluorescent lighting. It made a noise when I shifted my weight. A noise that, in the silence of the waiting area, sounded obscene.

I looked at the ceiling.

The ceiling looked back.

A baby was screaming somewhere to my left. Not crying. Screaming. That full-throated, existential kind that babies do when they've just discovered the horror of being alive and are very upset about it. Honestly, fair enough. I understood. The father was doing that desperate swaying thing, the baby on his shoulder, his eyes the particular blank of a man who has not slept in three days and is slowly forgetting what sleep was. People kept glancing at him. I didn't. I knew what it felt like to be stared at when you were already falling apart.

The intercom called out codes I didn't understand. Some code blue, some yellow. I didn't know what any of them meant and I actively chose not to Google it. There are things you don't want to know, and there are things you cannot unknow, and I had recently developed a very strong preference for the former.

The television in the corner was playing a news segment, volume low enough that I could only catch every fourth word. Something about the economy. Something about a flood somewhere. The usual parade of catastrophe that the world keeps staging, unbothered, regardless of what's happening in your specific waiting room at your specific seat with your specific queue number forty-seven.

I closed my eyes.

I listened to the room instead. The baby. The intercom. Momma and Papa talking in the kind of hushed tones that are specifically designed to sound casual, which means they weren't casual at all. Papa's voice had that quality it gets when he's scared. Very even, very deliberate, like he's reading off a teleprompter he's memorised. Momma kept saying hmm and yes and of course in a way that meant she wasn't listening to a word he said.

I drifted off.

Not properly. Just to that half-place where you're aware enough to know you're asleep, which means you aren't really. The kind of sleep that leaves you more tired than before. When I opened my eyes, my neck hurt and my mouth tasted stale and the number on the screen said forty-four.

I got up to get water from the dispenser. The little paper cups they give you are sized for a child or a particularly optimistic bird. I filled three. Drank them standing there, one after another. Then I stood for a moment by the window looking out at the grey afternoon, and I thought about nothing, which is a skill I've been trying to develop and am not very good at.

Forty-seven appeared on the screen. Room 4C.

Dr Wilson is the kind of doctor who makes you feel, the moment you walk in, that the situation is more serious than you'd hoped. It's not anything he does wrong. He's perfectly kind, perfectly professional, his office is perfectly inoffensive. It's just something in the way he holds his face. This careful neutrality, like a man who has learned to ration his expressions because he only has so many good ones left.

"Olivia," he said. "Mr and Mrs Sharma. Please, sit down."

We sat.

He confirmed my name, which felt odd. Like he needed to double check he was about to ruin the right person's life. I said yes, I was still Olivia, had been for seventeen years, no plans to change that. He didn't find this funny. Fair enough. I barely did either.

He opened my file. He turned his monitor slightly toward us. Three images appeared. Small, circular, pink and purple, like something you'd find on the inside of a seashell if seashells were terrifying.

"These are pictures of your blood," he said. "Taken over the last three weeks."

I looked at them. They looked back. I thought, distantly, that they were almost pretty. The colours, the way they bloomed across the slide. Then I thought that was probably not the right thing to be thinking.

"I've been monitoring the rate at which these cells are multiplying," he continued. "The granulocytes. The type of white blood cell we discussed in your last appointment."

"I'm sorry. She's been tested positive for Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. The best-case scenario is that she might live for another year."

The water stain on the ceiling tile above his head was shaped like somewhere. A country I couldn't name.

So that's that, then.

Behind me, Momma made a sound I'd never heard her make before. Not a word. Just a sound. And then Papa's hand was on my shoulder, pressing. Not hard. Just there, just there, and I could hear him breathing.

"Why wasn't it caught earlier?" Papa asked. His voice was even. Teleprompter voice. He was terrified.

"In many cases," Dr Wilson said, "the cancer doesn't present symptoms until it's significantly advanced. It can lead to misdiagnosis, or no diagnosis at all." A pause. "This was one of those cases."

My fourth visit. The first three I'd spent asking questions, being annoying about it, making Papa apologise on my behalf afterward. This time I just sat there looking at the water stain.

"She's so young," Momma said, and her voice was the kind of quiet that comes after something breaks, not during. "She still has so much. There's so much she hasn't—"

Dr Wilson's expression didn't change, but something behind it did. He shook his head, very slightly. "The cancer has progressed too far. We can try treatments, but at this stage—" He stopped. Started again. "I don't want to mislead you about what we can realistically achieve."

A tear hit my lap. I looked down at it like it belonged to someone else.

When did that happen.

"Don't let this defeat you," he said, directed at me. He meant it kindly. I could tell he meant it kindly. "You still have time. Miracles—"

Don't, I thought.

He didn't finish the sentence. Maybe he read something in my face. Or maybe he'd said it enough times to know how it landed.

He wrote out a prescription. Antibiotics, something to reduce infection risk, nothing exciting. He explained what to do. He told us to collect it at the counter. He said we could come back next week.

We left.

The drive home.

I don't remember most of it.

I remember watching the city go past the window. Shopfronts, bus stops, a woman walking a very small dog that was trying very hard to keep up with her. How strange it was that everything was just still going. The lights still changed colour. The pigeons still congregated outside the chicken shop. A man on the pavement was laughing at his phone, properly laughing, head back, the kind of laugh you do when something is genuinely funnier than expected.

I thought: someone should tell him.

And then: tell him what, exactly.

And then: nothing. There's nothing to tell anyone. This is just how it is.

Maybe it was a mistake. I'd seen enough medical dramas (my entire watchlist was basically hospitals doing things dramatically) to know that misdiagnoses happened. They happened all the time. It would make a great episode. Girl told she's dying. Turns out she's fine. Everyone hugs. Roll credits. That would be good. I would enjoy that.

I looked down at my hands.

You'd think they'd look different.

They didn't. They looked exactly like my hands always looked. A pen mark on the side of my index finger from earlier. A small scar on my left thumb from the time I tried to cut a mango without supervision, which Papa had specifically told me not to do, and which I'd done anyway, because I was fifteen and therefore believed in my own immortality.

Ha.

My room is mine in the way that rooms become yours when you've spent enough time crying in them. The walls are white, which I'd always meant to change and never did. Pale blue curtains. A desk by the window, currently occupied by the project on renewable energy that I absolutely was not going to think about right now. A wall of photos.

I sat on my bed and looked at the photos.

Everyone in them was laughing.

Of course they are.

Photo-Olivia was laughing too. Photo-Olivia was unbothered and full of plans and did not know she was going to have a doctor tell her the best-case scenario for her life was twelve months. Photo-Olivia was, frankly, smug about it. I hated her a bit. I wished I could warn her, except that would be a paradox, except also none of this would have mattered to Photo-Olivia because Photo-Olivia was convinced of her own indestructibility, and I know this because I was Photo-Olivia four weeks ago.

The tightness in my chest was enormous. The kind that lives just below your ribs, the kind that makes it difficult to take a full breath, the kind that feels almost like a hand reaching in and —

I wanted to tear the photos off the wall.

I didn't.

I sat there and I did not do anything and the tightness stayed exactly where it was, doing what it was doing, because that's the thing about feelings — they don't actually care whether you engage with them or not. They just sit there. Patient. Waiting. Like doctors.

Like doctors with queue numbers.

Ha.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until I saw shapes.

Papa knocked, then came in, which is the correct order but also, like, minimal notice, Papa.

He sat beside me on the bed. He didn't say anything for a moment. He just put his hand on my back, between my shoulder blades, the way he used to when I was small and had bad dreams.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

"How are you — I mean." He stopped. "That's a stupid question."

"Little bit," I agreed.

He laughed. Very briefly. The kind of laugh that's almost a sob wearing a costume.

"Come eat," he said. "I made stuffed potatoes."

I wanted to say: Papa, I do not care about stuffed potatoes right now, I am in the middle of a minor existential crisis, why is everyone's default response to catastrophe to offer me food? But I also knew that the stuffed potatoes were him saying I love you and I don't know what to do and please just let me give you something, and there are certain things you can't reject without breaking someone.

"Okay," I said. "Five minutes."

He gave me a sad smile and left.

Dinner was the performance of a family trying very hard to be normal. They served normalcy at the table like a dish, alongside the stuffed potatoes. Momma asked if I wanted to watch Vampire Diaries with her. Papa commented on the food he'd just cooked. They talked about work in the careful way of people who have identified a safe topic and are going to mine it until the walls cave in.

I ate about three bites.

"Can we just—" I put my fork down. Louder than I meant to. "Can we actually talk about what happened today? Are we just going to — not?"

They looked at each other.

Momma set down her cutlery. Deliberate. A woman preparing herself.

"What do you want to do?" she asked.

And I wanted to say: I want to not be dying, Momma, I want to rewind to Photo-Olivia, I want to go back to this morning before we went in there, I want the last four weeks of doctor's visits and blood tests and that awful waiting to have just — not happened — I wanted to say a hundred things and I opened my mouth and none of them came out.

"I don't know yet," I said.

"That's okay." She reached across the table and took my hand. "You don't have to know yet. When you know, you tell us."

I nodded. I looked back at my plate.

I forced down four more bites, excused myself, went upstairs.

My phone had seventeen unread messages. I lay on my bed and opened them without sitting up, holding the phone above my face like a very small ceiling.

teenage mutant ninja turtles 🐢🐢🐢🐢

lyla: did anyone do the maths hw bc im literally going to combust

lyla: pls someone

lyla: HELLO

enzo: ur spelling is a hate crime

enzo: also no

lucas: which one's the maths hw

lyla: q4 onwards

lucas: oh. did 6a not 6b

enzo: I got 109 on 6b

lucas: bro how

enzo: talent, lucas. raw unfiltered talent.

lyla: ENZO

lyla: HELP ME OR I WILL LITERALLY END YOU

enzo: fine fine. what did you get

lyla: 67

enzo: olivia you're being so quiet it's actually concerning

lyla: liv babes you okay??

lucas: she's probably asleep

enzo: at 8pm???

lucas: she does that

I put the phone face-down on my chest.

The ceiling was very white and very still.

Enzo, Lucas, Lyla. They were doing maths homework. They were arguing about question 6b. They were in the group chat with the emoji name we'd come up with in Year 10 after watching too much Netflix and they were worried because I hadn't replied and they thought I was asleep.

They didn't know.

They were going to have to know, at some point. I thought about telling them and felt something very close to nausea. Not because I didn't trust them. I trusted them completely. But because telling people made it real in a different way. Right now it was real in the way that dreams are real. Vivid, enormous, but somehow still contained. The moment I said it out loud to someone who loved me, it would be real in the way that the ground is real when you're falling.

I opened my laptop instead.

Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.

I typed it into the search bar. Deleted it. Typed it again. Stared at it. Hit enter before I could stop myself.

The results loaded. I read them the way you read the last page of a book before you've decided whether to finish it — quickly, slightly guilty, braced for what comes next. Medical sites, research papers, forums, personal essays. Stories of people who had it and survived. Stories of people who had it and didn't. Statistics that I refused to do the maths on.

I read until my eyes ached.

I read until the shapes stopped being words.

And somewhere in there — past midnight, laptop dimmed to nothing, the house completely quiet — I stopped being numb.

Somewhere past midnight the laptop screen went dark and I didn't reach to wake it.

I pressed my face into the pillow. The cotton was cool for about three seconds and then it wasn't. I breathed through my mouth because breathing through my nose had stopped working. My hands found the edge of the mattress and held it.

I don't want to die.

Not as a concept. Mine. Actually mine, in the dark, at seventeen, with an unfinished chemistry project on the desk.

I don't want to die.

I thought it clearly for the first time. Not as a concept. Not as the thing the doctor had said in his careful, measured voice. But as mine.

I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I'm seventeen years old and I have an unfinished chemistry project on my desk and I don't want to die.

After a while, the shaking stopped. Not because anything was better. Just because the body gets tired of holding that much at once.

I lay there. I looked at the wall.

And I thought: okay.

Not okay like it's fine. Not okay like I accept this. Just — okay like: this is the information. What are we going to do with it.

I pulled the laptop back toward me. Dimmed it further. Started looking for something else. Not survival statistics. Not clinical trials. Something different.

I started looking for a way out that wasn't the obvious one.

I told them at breakfast.

Not my friends. My parents. They were both there — Momma with her coffee and the newspaper folded back to the crossword, Papa at the stove, which meant it was a pancake morning, which meant he'd been up since seven trying to feel useful.

I sat down.

I said: "I want to get treatment overseas."

Papa turned around. The spatula hovered.

Momma put down her pen.

"I've been looking at options," I said. "There's a hospital in Singapore — the survival rates on certain treatment protocols are significantly better. The oncologists there have published actual research on AML cases like mine. And yes, I know it's far, and yes I know it's expensive, and yes, Momma, before you say it, I know Aunt Reneta lives there and you two haven't spoken properly in years and it will be complicated—"

"Olivia—" Papa started.

"—but I don't want to die having done nothing but wait. I don't want the last thing I do to be waiting." My voice stayed level. I was very proud of it for that. "I want to go somewhere new. I want to actually — I want to do something. Even if it doesn't work. At least I'll have done something."

Silence.

Papa looked at Momma.

Momma was looking at me with an expression I didn't have a word for. Not pity. Not sadness. Something older than both of those.

"Daniel," she said, not looking at him.

"Jean, this is—"

"After Liam." Her voice didn't waver. "After Liam, I am not going to stand in the way of anything she wants to do. I'm not." She looked at me. "Alright."

Papa opened his mouth. Closed it. He turned back to the stove for a moment — the spatula going through motions — and then set it down.

"Alright," he said. Quieter. "Alright."

I let out a breath.

It came from somewhere very deep.

Okay, I thought. Okay. We're going to try.

The pancakes burned slightly. Papa rescued them, swearing under his breath in Punjabi, which he only did when he was stressed and had forgotten I could understand him. Momma smiled, very faintly, into her coffee. I ate four bites more than I had last night.

It wasn't hope exactly. It was something smaller and more stubborn than hope. The decision to keep moving. The decision to be somewhere else.

The decision to go.

Thinking back now, maybe it was a blessing in disguise. Without it, I might have never met those friends I cherish so deeply. Without it, I might have never gone on those adventures. I would have been too afraid to even think about it.

Without it, I would have never met him.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. We're not there yet. First, I have to tell you about the waiting room.

Oh wait. I just did.