What Happened At St. Ivey's (One Direction)

“Brooke! Brooke!” my sister chanted from her perch on the hospital bed.

“Kayla! Kayla!” I said, holding up a colorful plastic bag. “Look what the best sister in the whole wide world brought you!”

She squealed, the tubes and wires attached to her shaking, and grabbed the bag from me. It was filled to the brim with teen magazines, one of her favorite things. I swear, she was addicted to those things. Kayla flipped through them eagerly; she didn’t see much of the outside world anymore, but she tried to keep up as much as she could.

My twelve year old sister was currently rooming at St. Ivey’s Children’s Hospital, suffering from stage three leukemia. Her once thick brown hair was already starting to thin. As she read, I glanced around the small room. The walls were white, and a few pictures of Kayla and her friends hung haphazardly on the back of the door. An ancient TV was hanging in the corner, quietly playing some kids’ show. All in all, it was one of the least homey places to be.

I twirled a chuck of my strawberry blonde hair aroung my finger, watching my sister. Her brown eyes, the only feature we shared, were bright and shiny as she flipped through the glossy pages. Kayla held a magazine next to her face, mimicking the model on the cover. She sucked her cheeks in, and her eyes were squinted.

I laughed at her, but as my grin faded, I wondered again why she was here. What did Kayla do to deserve leukemia? To deserve a sterile hospital room, along with the radiation treatments?

She let out another squeal, breaking me away from my thoughts. I put my hands over my ears. “Try to control yourself, would you?” I said playfully. Kayla was slowly unfolding a poster from an issue of People. She looked up at me with pleading doe eyes, something she knew I couldn’t resist.

"Can we put them up? Pretty please, with sugar on top?” she begged.

I giggled. “Anything for you, Mouse.”

She groaned, “Are you ever going to stop calling me that?” I shook my head at her, smirking. Mouse was a nickname my dad had given her when she was much younger, and it’d stuck.

For the next hour, we tore out poster after poster, and taped them up. Pretty soon we had almost one whole wall covered.

“Brooklyn!” Kayla suddenly yelled.

“What?” I said frantically, rushing to her side. “Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

“I’m fine. But look! It’s One Direction!” My sister unfolded a huge poster. Five teenage boys grinned back at me. “I love them.”

I shrugged, digging through some pages. “Never heard of them.”

She gasped, acting offended. “Never heard of them? Oh, they’re just the biggest boy band on the face of the planet!” She looked at me as if I lived under a rock. “Plus, they’re super adorable.”

“Not ringing any bells.” But I did agree with the adorable part. Not that she needed to know that.

“You’re insecure, don’t know what for. You’re turning heads when you walk through the do-o-or,” she sang. My sister loved music. At home, she had always had something playing on the radio, singing along. She actually had a pretty good voice, I realized. One she probably won’t be able to use in a few months…. I pushed that thought away quickly.

“Actually, I’ve heard that song before, I think, at work. Nice voices,” I commented, and Kayla smirked in satisfaction. I worked at the ice cream shop downtown, Frozen Dreams. It wasn’t the most fun job, but, hey, at least I got free ice cream out of it.