Mum was asleep when I slipped into the room. The nurses told me to let her sleep. It was the meds, they said. Keeping her alive. I stared at her pale face, her thin but curved lips faint, her forehead traced with wrinkles the width of a hair strand. Mum wasn't that old – she would be forty-seven in July. The doctors said she might survive until then.

I sat by the window in the chair that creaked under my weight, letting my school bag drop to the ground beside me. The window let in overcast light from the brooding metallic clouds, and the whole room was gloomy with shadows. I watched my mother's chest rise and fall with breath, appreciating the life that still flowed through her, even if that life was painful and weak.

Mariam said I should cherish my mother. Easy for her to say, when she was just giving out advice like pamphlets. Speaking of, I reached for my bag and dug my hand through it until my fingers touched the smooth pages of the booklet Yaz handed me. I hauled it out, placing it on my lap and letting it stay there as I thought of Mariam. It seemed she wasn't alone; she had Yaz to help her with the stupid bet I made up. I had thought Mariam alone was bad, but when you put Yaz into the equation the two of them were an unstoppable force. And they were so intent on feeding me all their bullshit. The only reason I did the bet was because I was bored, and I wanted a challenge, a challenge that Mariam would definitely lose. She was so confident in her own success – I admired that confidence. I had confidence, sometimes a little too much, according to my Dad.

Just thinking about my Dad made me clench my fists. That bloody bastard was too caught up in his work to even stay with Mum in the hospital. He said he was working for all of us, so we'd have enough money for all the treatment, but what was the point of all that money he was making when he wasn't even spending time with his family, when he wasn't cherishing his wife, who might die by the end of this year?

I couldn't believe I used to look up to him. I used to aspire to be just like my dad, the businessman, the guy who exported and imported goods and flew all over the world, selling products. Most of the time it felt like he didn't even exist because of how long he would be away. But he always came back, and that was what Mum and I counted on.

I didn't have siblings because that's how busy Dad's always been. But 'busy' could also mean 'selfish' and selfish could turn to gone, forever. I was surprised he hadn't left us yet. Maybe he really did love my Mum, who knew? But he barely even visited her after the surgery. And I knew I might not see him until Mum could come home again, which, according to the doctors, would be by the end of this week.

Mum had always been religious. I was more like my dad, though. He was too busy to have religion. As a kid, I was dragged to church and forced to sing shit I didn't understand, and Mum would always tell me as she tucked me into bed that God loves me. Well, God, how do you love me now, huh?

The day Mum was diagnosed, we were having breakfast. I was going to go to school that day, because of that presentation in physics. I had worked hard on it. Well, sort of. I didn't know what it was, but I actually tried. I did my part, and I thought I did a pretty good job. Working with Mariam was...fun. Fun for me, anyway. She kept glaring at me, but to be honest, I loved when she got angry. It was hilarious. She was entertaining, even if she was a Muslim.

Anyway, that morning, at breakfast, Mum started coughing, like really hard. She didn't have a cold or anything, so I knew it couldn't be that. But her coughs sounded deep, and raspy, and I remembered her eyes which were wide and watery as she bent over the sink, coughing so hard I thought her lungs would spill out of her mouth. And that's when I saw the blood, sprayed on the silver sink. She ran the water, attempting to hide it, but I stood up before she could, placing a hand on her back. Her breaths were ragged, and she hunched over the sink, the water running and the sound of her muted sobs filling the kitchen air. Dad was at work, so he didn't find out until we were at the hospital. So it was up to me to take care of her. It was always up to me.

"Mum. Mum, look at me," I spun her around gently, gazing into her eyes that she gave me. Tears streaked her cheeks, and she looked so weak, so pale, so tired, I wondered how I could've missed it before. My mum had smoked on and off for the last twenty years. She would quit, and then start it up again when she got stressed, then quit when things were good, and the cycle would start all over again. The only problem was, when she was stressed, she smoked a lot. I remembered nights when she'd come to me to give me a kiss, and I could smell the tobacco on her breath. My mum worked at an office, and basically all her friends there smoked on breaks, so she was always tempted to socially.

"Damian," my mother had whispered my name, a name she had picked from a Saint. Ha, I was no saint. But to my mother, I was.

"Mum, what was that?" I could hear my anger bubbling beneath my words. I was angry, yes, because Mum had partly brought this on herself for all those nights she'd smoke ten in a row, but I was angry because she had also hid this from me, because no way was this the first time. First times did not happen like this.

"Damian, you're going to be late for school," Mum had said, as if it were any other day.

I shook my head, gritting my jaw. "No, Mum, I'm not going to school. Not when you're like this. How long has this been happening, huh? How long have you been lying to me?"

Mum's brows were knitted together with a familiar expression that had torn through my heart. Hurt. "I don't want you to worry about me, Damian."

I snorted. "Then what do you want me to do – pretend this never happened? Pretend I didn't just see you cough up blood like it was no big deal?" I had let out a mirthless laugh, and I knew I was hurting my mother even more with my attitude, but I was not taking bullshit. I had had enough of it to last me a lifetime. "Mum, we're going to the hospital, whether you like it or not."

"Damian, that's not –"

I grabbed her wrist, interrupting her. "No, Mum, don't argue with me. Let's go."

I stormed out of the kitchen, picking up Mum's car keys. She had her own car, but she said she was going to give it to me. It was a blue Subaru, not too bad, but I'd rather red. I was still on my learner's permit, which sucked, so Mum drove us to the hospital, coughing every few seconds. She had a tissue held to her mouth, and I could see the wet blood through its transparency, even if Mum was trying to hide it. It made me sick to think she was planning on not telling anyone.

We entered the ER, because this bloody well was an emergency. Healthy people didn't cough up blood. Healthy people didn't smoke.

Mum got a blood test. They also did other tests on her. I was in the waiting room, fidgeting and counting the minutes. I thought about Mariam, knowing she'd be mad at me for not showing up to the presentation. The fact that she would be angry at me made me pissed. For once, I wasn't skipping school for fun. For once, I wasn't to blame, but I would be blamed, and the thought of that made me want to punch a wall.

"Cancer," the doctor had said the word like he was Eddie McGuire on the Millionaire hot seat, announcing that the answer the contestant had chosen was incorrect. But this time, for me, my answer was correct. And I had never wanted to be more wrong in my life.

"It isn't curable," the doctor had continued. "But we can treat it."

"It hasn't spread yet, but if we don't start the chemo now, it will."

"There will be a surgery to remove the cancer after some chemo is done to target the cells. The chemo will weaken her, though."

"Can you fix her?" I had asked, feeling numb.

"We'll do our best," they said.

"How long?" I demanded. "How long does she have?"

"We can't say for sure," they replied. "But it depends on whether the chemo works or not."

"And if it doesn't?" My dad told me to always focus on the bad side. Because then you would know the truth before you tried blinding yourself with the good. The sooner I could accept all this shit that was happening, the better. But when the doctor told me that she had five months – five fucking months! – I didn't feel any better.

I just felt worse.

Dad swung by the hospital after I gave him a call. He had been in the middle of a meeting when I called. I left a message, and he called me back soon after with, "This better be important, son."

He had no idea. He had no fucking idea, and I had wished I could've seen his face when I told him the news. I remembered being sarcastic about it – I was beyond grief, beyond hope, beyond feeling anything. I wanted Dad to feel guilt, to feel bad, to feel remorse, but when I told him Mum had lung cancer he just said, "Damian, that's not funny."

Maybe my reputation was the reason why people wouldn't take me seriously. I only had myself to blame for that. My Dad didn't have time for jokes, and I was one big joke to him, always trying to get his attention. I was the boy who cried wolf, except now I was crying cancer.

"You know what else isn't funny? The fact that I just told you Mum has lung cancer and you don't think for a second that it could be true. Is that how much you care about your own fucking wife, Dad? Have you become that fucking selfish?"

There were nurses and doctors around me in the hallway, shooting me dirty looks while I was on the phone. But I was beyond caring, too. I was so angry, and those nurses had no right to look at me that way. But deep down I realized, maybe they did. To them I was just some raucous teenage boy with too much ego and not enough shame.

"Wait, you're not kidding?" I could just picture my Dad's expression. He would be in a black suit with a stripy red tie, a coffee cup in hand, probably outside his enterprise, his green eyes bugging out from the shock. His dark hair would have silver streaks and he'd have rolls of wrinkles on his forehead but his jaw, the same jaw I had, would be square and locked, his lips pressed into a line.

"How about you come see for yourself whether I'm kidding or not," I challenged.

"Damian, swear to God," my Dad wasn't religious, however he used it as a sort of testing tool to see if I was lying. Little did he know I would lie in God's face without a second thought. My parents didn't know about my atheism. In fact, I had no reason to tell them. It didn't make a difference anyway. God or no God, life was shit.

"Dad," I rolled my eyes, but when he repeated the words to me, his voice sterner this time, I decided it couldn't hurt to swear, since I was telling the truth anyway. "Fine, I swear to God she's in hospital."

"Fuck," my dad uttered, and I could hear him toss his coffee cup in a bin as his footsteps ran across linoleum floors. "Is it St. Vinnie's?"

"Yup. I already gave your contact details to the doctors, even if they're completely useless," I replied bitterly, leaning against the wall.

"Okay, I'm coming right over." He hung up, and I gotta say, I was surprised he still gave a damn. When he arrived I was in Mum's room. She was asleep, since they had given her some medication, and I was just sitting there, thinking about how fucked up my life was.

"Karen," Dad had whispered, going to her side. He looked wild-eyed and rumpled, his tie swung over his shoulder from running. I watched him grip her hands and Mums eyelids fluttered, and she murmured his name faintly. "Darren."

It was funny how their names rhymed. But then I remembered someone whose name rhymed with mine, someone who would probably be doing the presentation now without me, thinking I was some selfish prick. She would be right, anyway. I was selfish.

Now, I looked down at this book of Scientific Proof in their so called Holy Book. I flicked through its pages, and groaned at how much words there were. I preferred to avoid reading whenever I could.

My mum had a copy of the bible on her bedside table. She had forced me to bring it to her so she could read while in hospital. I hadn't read that thing in years, but every time I did, it didn't "touch" my heart in the way it touched my mum's. After being diagnosed, she kept repeating how she wanted to get closer to God while ill, and she didn't mind being sick because it was God's way of saying she was one of his strongest believers. Mariam had said the same fucking thing today at the lockers, which got me wondering if I was doing it wrong all these years. I was perfectly fine, but my Mum was suffering. My mum might have her flaws, but she never gave up hope or faith in God's mysterious plans. She even claimed that she saw Jesus in a dream one night while in hospital, but I told her it was probably just the meds.

I decided to turn to the first page of this booklet, because why the heck not? I was bored out of my mind, and I wasn't going home any time soon. Home was empty and dark. Dad was still at work. Mum was in hospital. Where else was I supposed to go?

The first page had some Arabic on it. Underneath, though, was an English translation, so I skimmed that. In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful. Ha. If he was so merciful, why wasn't he showing my mother mercy? Hadn't she suffered enough already?

A flicker of light flashed across the book, and I turned to the window. Sure enough, there was a rumble of thunder muffled by the soundproof windows, and the dark clouds rolled in the sky like a burden. How fitting. A thunderstorm to reflect my dark mood.

I looked at the index, reading through the different titles. There was a lot about space, such as the expansion of the universe, the structure of the sun, moon and stars, and stuff about the body, like pregnancy and human organs. They could've easily faked all of this, I thought. They could've stolen all this information from the scientists, but then I remembered that this book of theirs was made in the 7th century. Damn, that's like, fourteen centuries ago.

The title that interested me the most was the sun's hydrogen and helium content. I flipped to the page, smirking to myself. I was curious, because how could they know about hydrogen and helium when they were discovered in the 19th century?

The page showed an extract of Arabic, which I completely ignored and skipped straight to the English. I was skeptical about the legitimacy of this, so I skimmed the lines as rain fell against the window pane outside.

As one can see, all verses in Surat Ash-shams end in the letters He and Alif.

What? I looked up at the passage of arabic text, separated by circles, and the last letter before each circle was underlined in red. So what?

The letter H stands for hydrogen and He for helium. No other Surah in the Qur'an ends in the letters He in every verse from beginning to end except Surat Ash-shams, and 'Shams' in Arabic means sun.

They're making this up, I thought. This is stupid.

I flipped back to the contents, and chose a different title. Black Holes. Okay, cool, black holes. My life was one big black hole.

I read through it, surprised how informed the author was. Like, damn, even I didn't know this stuff. There were quotes from verses in the Quran, followed by explanations. The explanations were stretching it a bit; it sounded like they were looking into every little detail, desperate to prove something.

When the stars are extinguished. I remembered researching about that, how when stars die they collapse into themselves and turn into a dense black hole.

And I swear by the stars' positions – and that is a mighty oath if you only knew. Another quote from the Quran. There was something ominous about that quote, like He was preluding to something deeper – if you only knew.

I shook it off, turning back to the index. I wasn't going to give in that easily. I wasn't going to lose Yaz's stupid bet. I ended up reading more than I thought as the rain bashed against the window and the storm grumbled outside. To say I was bored would be a lie – this shit was actually interesting. Contrary to what I told Mr Newton, I chose to do physics because it was interesting, and I wanted to know how this universe worked. It was true I liked the physical aspect of things, you know, things I could see with my own eyes, but there were also those metaphysical things that were unseen to us. Things that were invisible, like gravity, and wind.

It is He Who shows you the lightning, striking fear and bringing hope; it is He Who heaps up the heavy clouds.

As I read the word lightning, the room was illuminated from outside, and I jumped in my seat, scared shitless. That was freaky.

I reread the line, stopping at "heavy clouds." Clouds weren't heavy...were they?

As if to answer my question, the next bit of text explained how a cumulonimbus cloud weighed 300,000 tons with water. Damn. That's pretty heavy. I glanced out the window to the brewing storm, wondering how the hell those 300,000 tons were floating up in the sky. This was why I had taken physics, to get answers. I had abandoned religion so I could live life with logic, but there was still a lot of illogical things out there, things that didn't make sense. If I thought too deep about it, my head would cave in like a black hole. I also did philosophy, and that shit was enough to make anyone go insane. I was flunking it bad, though. It was harder than I had thought, looking deeper into stuff. Being an atheist was harder than I had originally thought.

My mum began to stir a little, and I turned back to her, grabbing her hand that wasn't taped to a drip. The machine beeping was just another background noise, like the tap dripping or the smoke alarm clicking. I had gotten used to it, like I had gotten used to coming here straight after school.

Mum couldn't speak because of the oxygen mask over her mouth, but the nurses told me not to take it off her until she woke up. So I did just that, and the first word Mum croaked was, "Water."

I poured her half a cup and held it to her lips, helping her drink. She was on a liquid diet, since any solid foods could give her heart burn or something and get stuck in her oesophagus. She was too weak to eat anything. She had lost her appetite, and I hadn't noticed until that day I caught her coughing blood, three weeks ago, how thin she had gotten, how gaunt her face was. She was a ghost of herself, and she had almost disappeared within herself.

"Thank you," Mum shot me a weary smile as I set down the empty cup on the table, settling back in my chair. A flash of lightning lit up Mum's face, and she raised her eyebrows in surprise.

"Storm?" she was keeping her speech to a minimum, and I nodded.

"It's been raining for..." I glanced at my phone's screen, shocked to see that it was already five thirty. "An hour."

Mum closed her eyes, leaning back on her pillow. Her bed wasn't completely flat, so she was able to still face me while resting.