As soon as the doctor entered the room, Alex immediately started attacking him with questions. He asked with a panicked look on his face, "What happened to my little brother? Is he alright? Where is he?" "Alex! Let him talk", his mother exclaimed. "It's quite alright." The doctor reassured his mother. Then he looked down at him with a sorrowful look in his eyes. He knelt down and put his hand softly on Alex's shoulder. Taking a deep breath to get ready to speak, he started, "My boy...," he paused as if he had something stuck in his throat, "your brother has an aggressive brain cancer. He doesn't have long before-" "How long?" Alex interrupted with a cracking voice trying to fight back the tears long enough to get a straight answer. Hearing the word cancer was like a knife stabbing him in the chest, making it hard for him to breath knowing that his best friend and his baby brother was going to be ripped away from him." "Two months," the doctor said grimmly. Those words kept repeating in his head, over and over like a broken record.
Two months was all he had with his brother. Two months was all he had to say goodbye. As soon as the doctor walked out of the room, Alex broke down, his knees got very weak and completely gave out, as he looked down at the floor he felt the burning tears streaming down his heated face.
Day after day Alex would notice each and every painful change that was happening to Lucas's body; his curly black hair falling out, his bones seeping through his, now fragile pale skin, dark circles under his now faded hazel eyes and red shot marks all over his small body. Alex couldn't stand to see his brother like this, he would always be thinking none stop how he would be alone. That made him scared, to know in a few weeks he would no longer have a little brother to make him smile, to make him laugh, to make him feel whole, to be his bestfriend. And the fact that he could do nothing about it, made him feel lost. The moment Lucas died, Alex had lost a part of himself that day. Alex remembered what Lucas said everyday before he died, "Never lose hope Alex, I'm sure I'll recover in no time and then we can play Cario Brothers together, and eat Scotty's Pizza to celebrate." But he didn't recover, he didn't come back home, and he didn't play games with Alex, he hated feeling so vulnerable and powerless to know he couldn't protect Lucas. Alex thought about how it was the worst way for someone that young to go. Lucas didn't deserve all that suffering, to wake up in the middle of the night wailing in pain, he didn't deserve to not experience growing up, to not experience what it was like to go to high school, or college, or to fall in love, get married, and have kids of his own...To grow old with his big brother, who was supposed to protect him but couldn't. To this day he still blames himself thinking he failed as a protector and as a big brother.