Slight Pressure

1. Hang in there Kitten

Written by alessandra

The waiting room at the campus walk-in clinic is absolute hell on earth. If you try to argue with Riley Sanders on this obvious fact, she will find the nearest syringe and pop an oxygen bubble into your bloodstream so fast you'll be dead before they call your ticket number.

Okay, no. She didn't mean that. At least the syringe part. Murderous rage like that runs in her family and most of it is just drastically hyperbolic. At least from her experience. The Sanders' have never actually killed anyone as far as she knows, by oxygen bubble or otherwise. Though, at this moment in her life, Riley figures there is a first time for everything.

Bouncing her legs up and down in her seat, she sees the number on the screen on the wall ding 72A and Riley's eye violently twitches for what seems like the 27th time already.

The entire waiting room, all 45 chairs that she actually counted one by one, were empty and the swinging doors, guardians of her medical sanctuary, remain closed tightly.

Maybe her legs should have remained closed tightly. Maybe then she could have avoided this whole expedition, trudging through the rain, half-drowned in her own regret and showing up here like a wrung-out rat pelt of a person to beg for mercy from the med gods. Maybe.

The ticket in her hand, 51B, is almost soggy with palm sweat from the stress she's been taking out on the flimsy piece of paper. The ticket system in this joint makes zero sense. It's flawed and fucked, like her own life. It's literally her ticket through those swinging doors where some righteous baby doctor fresh off their exams can take one look at her and fix everything with one little sentence.

No, Ms Sanders, you do not have chlamydia.

Of course there is also a 50/50 chance the esteemed baby doc will say she does, in fact, have the most common STI on campus and thus ruin her life for eternity. Or at least until the antibiotics wear out. All hope she holds for the former is oozing through her palms and into the useless trash that is her ticket.

The fact that all of this had everything to do with her dumb fuck ex boyfriend is basically a gunfire assault on her life choices. The same piece of shit who silently sat and watched her dip chocolate mini eggs into a jar of peanut butter from across the table before breaking up with her via text message the very next morning.

Riley isn't sure how anyone could come to terms with something like that as a human being. Rejection most foul. Heartless, even.

Was it the mini eggs? The peanut butter? A combination of both or the sheer volume of which she ate? How she starts by nibbling off the coloured shell with her teeth like a rabbit before sucking on the naked chocolate until it dissolves? It was post-Easter and the Costco bag was on sale!

These are the kind of people she needs to avoid from now on. The ones who come with no warning. The ones who woo and beguile you with charm and charisma so they can mould you into a target for their cruelty. The same kind of people that would keep a near-hysterical diseased-and-dumped victim waiting in an otherwise vacant waiting room.

The screen on the wall dings again and Riley shoots her head up to look at it.

75B.

Someone is going to die today.

Riley gets up and heads over to the counter. Enough of this shit. She leans over the reception desk and stares at the child behind it. Because it is literally a child sitting there, rosy cheeked and doe-eyed like Bambi and just as fucking useless.

"Excuse me?" She says pseudo-politely.

The Bambi child looks up from her highlighter doodle of a curlicues.