Chronophobia - Betty Cooper

Prologue

Ok, I know what you're thinking. It's your typical teenage cancer story. I guess you're right, I'm just a cliché. A boring girl with a boring cancer who will live a short and boring life and ultimately die a boring death. Do you think they'll make a movie about me?

My name is Betty Cooper. I was born and raised in New York, lived your average life with my two parents and my sister Polly, went to school, rode the subway. All pretty substandard. Until I was 14, when I was diagnosed with a form of pancreatic cancer. Basically, it's super hard to find early so by the time the doctors had found it, the cancer had already spread. Good news, the 5-year survival rate is 6%, meaning there was a 94% chance I would die.

Eventually, they gave up on me. They gave me 6 months or so to live, which was 2 months ago. So, if the maths is on my side, I have 4 months to live. 4. That's one thing there's never enough of-

Time.

My parents were distraught, obviously. What parent wouldn't be? But what made it worse was the their desire to keep me protected and 'comfortable' every minute of every day, like it would change the fact that I was dying. I wanted to spend my last few months travelling, seeing the world, but instead we're moving to some town called Riverdale to live a quiet life. Great.

Right now, I was climbing into a cab with my mom and dad and sister, driving to our new home. Riverdale wasn't bad, but I missed the city. Tomorrow, I would spend my first day at Riverdale High, where I would just be the new girl instead of the cancer girl. That may actually be nice. Yeah, I wasn't going to tell them that I was dying. The students would treat me like everyone else - some fragile little kid. I'd just be a girl who came to their school for a couple of months and then one day didn't. They'd assume I must have just moved away again. I wouldn't make close friends, because they'd worry about me, I wouldn't care about anyone, because it would hurt them too much.

Oh, how wrong I was.