The hospital coffee in my hand had gone cold an hour ago, but I kept holding it anyway, as if it were the only solid thing left in my life.Six months had passed since the word leukemia walked into our living room and refused to leave. My daughter, Carol, was seventeen. I was a single mom who had learned to smile through things no smile should ever have to cover, and by that spring, I could have taught a class in it. How to smile while a doctor talks about cell counts. How to smile while your child vomits into a pink plastic basin at three in the morning. How to smile in a hospital parking garage and then scream into your steering wheel before driving home to wash her favorite blanket so it would smell right.To understand what that night meant, you have to understand what prom meant. Not to me. To her.Carol used to cut dresses out of magazines and tape them to her bedroom mirror. She started in the fifth grade, long before any boy had ever made her blush, long before she even knew what high school looked like from the inside. Ball gowns, slinky things she’d never be allowed to wear, ridiculous feathered ones she taped up just to make herself laugh.

“Mom, promise you’ll do my hair that night,” she’d say, ten years old, mouth full of toothpaste, pointing at the mirror.“I promise, baby. I’ll do your hair for every prom you ever have.”Now her hair was gone, taken a fistful at a time by the chemo, and the magazine pictures were still taped to that mirror at home. Waiting. I couldn’t bring myself to take them down, and I couldn’t look at them either. I just kept her door closed and told myself it was about dust.That afternoon, I sat by her hospital bed and watched her doze. The latest round of chemo had hollowed Carol out in a way the earlier ones hadn’t. Her cheekbones looked sharper. Her hands looked smaller against the blanket, like the hands of a much younger child, and there is no preparing yourself for the sight of your teenager’s hands looking younger instead of older.On the rolling tray beside her sat a leather journal I’d bought her back in February, when the nurses said writing helped some kids. She’d taken to it more than I expected. She wrote in it every day now, sometimes for an hour at a stretch. And lately there were letters, too, folded carefully in thirds, addressed in her looping handwriting to names I recognized from her class. I assumed they were thank-you notes, or the kind of dramatic friendship letters teenage girls have been writing since the beginning of time.