When my mother heard this, she angrily warned me not to shirk my responsibility for taking care of my sister. She insisted that my sister's condition was entirely my fault.
I endured this, knowing it was not the right time to tell my parents that my sister's paralysis was actually a ruse. As they themselves said, pretending to be ill for three or four days might be believable, but how could someone fake an illness for over ten years?
These ignorant people held on to this belief and even when things seemed odd, they never questioned it. They trusted only what they saw with their own eyes and heard with their ears. Since they didn't believe the doctors, I decided to let them see the truth about their supposedly paralyzed daughter for themselves.
One day, after my father had neatly arranged the farming tools in the toolbox as usual, I took the opportunity to sneak out a small hoe while he wasn't paying attention.
After finishing everything, I put on my backpack and set off for school on foot. My home was quite far from the school, requiring a walk of over an hour and the only vehicle at home was a tricycle. My father would never waste time driving his "bully" of a daughter to school.
Nevertheless, I was determined to go to school, hoping that education would enable me to leave this small mountain village and fly away from my original family, like a bird.
Without proper shoes, my feet were constantly covered in painful blisters from walking long distances.
Since discovering that my sister's paralysis was fake, many strange occurrences in the house had been explained. For instance, the mysterious disappearance of brown sugar made sense now. In the past, my parents thought it was being eaten by mice, but it turned out to be consumed by the family's "little greedy cat".
As expected, when I returned home, my parents were gathered with serious expressions in my sister's room. My sister was crying pitifully, covering her face.
I smirked to myself, thinking that the "discovery" had finally been made. It turned out that my father, after working in the fields, realized he had forgotten the small hoe and hurried back home to get it.