Florida Won Gun Day, So Nobody Believes the Only Kid Who Can Level Up novel · Chapter 28 of 32
Chapter 28: The Quiet
My mother has worked nights in the intensive care unit of a Tampa hospital for sixteen years.
She met Joelle early on Saturday morning, March 20, in the cafeteria, in her scrubs and her Crocs.
I had warned Joelle that she would be inspected, and she was.
Mami looked her up and down, from the braids to the boots, and she said, in English, "Do you eat?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Joelle.
"Abuela feeds her," I said.
"Then she eats," said my mother, and she hugged Joelle for a full five seconds, which she does not do for me.
She was forty-six, a small round woman with reading glasses on her head.
Her lanyard said she was a charge nurse.
She had been awake for twenty-six hours.
She ordered us breakfast and watched us eat it.
She asked Joelle about the water, the boats, the Port and the courtroom, and she cried a little at the part about Key Largo.
Then she looked at me.
"You were supposed to stay in the cooler," said Mami.
"I know."
"I watched that video forty times, mijo. I watched you go out for the old man."
"I know."
"I'm proud of you and I'm furious," she said. "I'm going to be both until I die."
It was the best part of my month.
Mid-morning the hum came up through the cafeteria floor.
It was a hum I knew in my teeth, but it was lower, and it did not stop.
The plates on the trays began to shiver, and the windows along the south wall fogged from the outside.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Florida Won Gun Day, So Nobody Believes the Only Kid Who Can Level Up are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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