The Man Who Built a Purple Pool by David Krause

College-bound Tom Cochrane isn’t rich enough to place his kidney-cancer-stricken sister on America’s twelve organ donation waitlists, so he quits school and takes a job as a carpenter in Las Vegas, sending his weekly paychecks back home, hoping to make enough to add her name to each list. Unfortunately, Tom’s paychecks aren’t coming fast enough, and his sister is getting worse, so he turns to what he thought should be his last resort: gambling. He spends each night inside Vegas’s casinos, life-savings in hand, trying to calculate the probability of winning big, even just once, all in order to overcome a system in which income inequality has become a matter of life or death.