Lyla pinches her eyes closed as the pain pulses through her veins like a flowing stream of fire. It feels like poison is being spread through her body. Tears escape form under her eyelids and glide down her cheeks.

She clenches her teeth as she grips the side of the bed, turning her knuckles white. She should be used to the pain by now. She should be used to the nausea, and what the person who looks back at her from the mirror looks like.

She feels the pain stop, and releases her death grip on the bed, unclenching her teeth. When she opens her eyes, she sees the edge of a white coat disappear through the door.

She sits up, and pulls herself out of bed, holding onto the IV pole, and scooting her way to the bathroom slowly. She looks in the mirror at her reflection, lifting her hand to touch the smooth, tight skin on her bald head.

In her mind she feels old, weak, and fragile. Everyone says there is hope of her getting better, the look in her mother’s eyes says different. It says she doesn’t have much longer.

She wrinkles her nose at the sterile smell of her hospital room. She hates that smell. She wipes the tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her hospital gown, glaring at the ugly fabric she has been forced to wear.

She goes back to her bed, pulling the covers up to her chin, and making herself comfortable in the quilt her mother brought her. As she starts to drift in and out of sleep, she thinks of all the things she is going to miss, the things she will never experience. Like her high school prom.

Her high school prom was that night. Her boyfriend was willing to take her, but she would be too embarrassed. She was bald, and weak, and would look pathetic in a prom dress. More tears escape and fall onto the quilt.

Why can’t she just be a normal teen and live life like everyone else got to? Why does she have to sit in a hospital bed while her friends went to dances and football games?

She wasn’t afraid of dying because of death itself, she was afraid of what she would miss. She was afraid she would be forgotten after she was gone.
??

Later that day her mother walked in the room holding a pink princess-like dress. Behind her mother stood her boyfriend, who had shaved his head to match his date to the prom.