For the next few days, Rishabh was paralysed by fear. He didn't know what to do with his life, now that his dream was shattered. He would see the emails alerting him of webinars for medics and work experience opportunities for medics, which made his heart ache even more fresh.
It had become slightly easier for him to take care of the responsibilities at his home, now that he didn't have the pressure of revising. He could spend more time serving his mother and helping his brother with his revision.
Slowly, he started to recover from his grief and make plans of what he could do now. He had to find a new career path, and he had to decide it quickly. Soon enough, he would have to send his UCAS applications. Now that he wasn't applying for medicine, he had a few extra months to boost his predicted grades up by doing well in his tests. Finance seemed like an obvious choice, seeing as it would allow him to earn good money, of which there was a dire need in his family. But he had no knowledge of business or economics. He had to find a crash course. He had to start getting ahead in the topics they were about to cover after the holidays. And he had to do it all proportionately while giving time to his responsibilities around the house. He was so tied up in all this planning that he didn't even realise when prom approached.
Alice and Rishabh had arranged to go to prom together months ago. Alice, with whom he hadn't talked to for so many days, each of which had seemed like a decade long to him.
Alice was on holiday with her cousins. When she had invited him, he made an excuse of not feeling like he would fit in with her extended family. He was too embarrassed to share the real reason with her. He simply couldn't afford a holiday like that. He had somehow managed to scrape the money, by getting a little from his mother, some from tutoring and some as a loan from his friends, in order to pay for the prom tickets just so he could be with the love of his life for one night.
Rishabh wore the tuxedo his grandparents had had specially made for him when his uncle got married last year. He made sure to remove every speck and iron every wrinkle. It made him look like a gentleman he didn't really feel like from the inside.
Now he just needed to pick up Alice so they could go to prom together. She had asked him to be there at 5 p.m. sharp. Rishabh left ten minutes earlier, just in case.