❦ WINNER OF THE RIVETING WRITING CONTEST ❦
OLIVER IS DYING
With only months left to live at just seventeen, Oliver spends his remaining days of endless tests and debilitating drugs in the St. Andrews paediatrics ward planning his impending funeral...
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I sit on my bed with my legs crossed, my laptop propped up against my right leg as I haunch over it.
My bedroom is dim. The door is closed. And I patiently await the call from my sister with information about a guy I barely know.
I can't help but shake a weird feeling in the pit of my stomach. It's like the feeling you get when you think about a terrible thing you've done and you can't stop thinking about it; a terrible thing you're trying to hide from people in fear of what they'd think, but you have a sick feeling that people already know.
I don't understand the feeling. I don't understand why I'm feeling it. I don't know this guy. I just want to know who Frankie will be around. That's all. Nothing more than that.
I jolt at the sound of the FaceTime ring tone from my phone next to me.
I answer it and a picture of Frankie in the dark appears.
"I better not get in trouble for this," she hisses.
"You? Get in trouble?" I say incredulously. "Please. My sister Francesca is as sly as a fox. It'll take more than a call to her brother at eleven o'clock at night to get her in trouble."
"A phone call after curfew in a hospital where the nurses check on patients every hour?" Frankie tries. "You owe me one, brother."
"All in due time, sister."
I position myself to be comfortable. "We better be quick then. You got what I asked for?"
Frankie's face disappears from my phone screen. I can hear rustling in the background. She reappears a minute later.
"Okay, so don't freak out, but I hit a snag in my stalking," she admits.
I cringe. "Oh, god, don't call this stalking." I straighten just as suddenly. "What kind of snag?"
"Well, I actually don't know Oliver's last name."
It's too late to stop the irritated groan that escapes out of my mouth.
I hit my bed's backboard with a loud thud. "Frankie, you're in a hospital where hospital records are literally hanging off the end of beds. How have you not figured out his last name?"
"Hey, that's not fair!" a familiar, defensive high-pitched squeal slips from her lips and she slaps a hand over them.
She lowers her voice to a hiss. "I've only been here a week, Nick, and you're asking me to go snooping around a place I don't know for dirt on someone I've just met?"
When put into words out loud, it doesn't sound good—stalking a guy I don't know because of a gut feeling.
No, just seeing if the guy who is hanging out with my little sister is a jerk.
Yeah, that's all. Really, that's it.
"But I've made up for not knowing his last name," Frankie says.
