❝The truth is that I'm scared. I'm supposed to be preparing for finals and the ACT and SAT but I've been sucked into a mess of werewolves. Everything I've ever known is changing and leaving and everyone is dead or on the verge of leaving. I feel lik...
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Bleach and latex. They smell clean, sanitized, but also pretty repulsive; that is unless someone spends as much time in a hospital as Cam does. These cleaning products hospitals use and the strong smell of latex start to smell more like her home than her actual house.
Her clothes seem to reek of the sanitary scent. It's in her hair and almost embedded into her skin. Of course, she doesn't smell exactly like a hospital but from the amount of time she spends there, she can't help but think everyone around her can smell the bleach and latex with a mixture of dread seeping out of her pores. And it's not just the smell that's gotten to her.
Eating a McDonald's cheeseburger from the dollar menu has become the best-tasting thing on the planet after hours at the hospital with the only options for food being blander than bland cafeteria food and vending machines snacks. She's found recently that homework is a hassle to do in a bedside chair. Sure, the reading is simple but taking notes and having to keep track of loose paper worksheets teachers just insists will help improve students' memory intake of the subject and test scores.
Cam has already lost plenty of papers, turned in papers late because when her mom wakes up and happens to be lucid, she doesn't waste time in keeping up with her mom. School is school but this is her mom. And maybe that's the worst part about hospitals. It's that her mom is trapped here and Cam can leave but what if she does? Will the guilt eat her alive or will things just be as they are? Or is her thinking that things could just go on just be her getting used to hospitals? Is her hatred for them just because of her mom or is it because she feels she has to be in one or be eaten by guilt?
To Cam's misfortune, she's been coming to a hospital at the very least, 3 times every month over the last five years. It originally started with doctor visits and then it turned into her mom needing to be in a hospital for a little bit, usually a week a month and as time went on, hospital visits became more frequent and longer. Cam went from visiting the hospital 3 times a month to being at the hospital seven days a week over the past two weeks. Before that, when her mom had to be hospitalized, for good, she would normally go every other day but now it's getting worse and everyone knows exactly what that means. There could be a cure tomorrow but that wouldn't help her mom because that's just not how healthcare works.
Death, that's inevitable. It happens. It doesn't matter who you are or what you are. Everyone dies. But the worst part about that is that when someone dies, they leave people behind. They might only leave one person, but that one person has to live the rest of their life without them, wondering how they're supposed to just go on without them. They have to fight the urge to call them when something happens because they were always that person they told things to. When death happens, that call goes to voicemail and if they're lucky, they'll hear their recorded voice but after a while, they won't even have that because the phone will be disconnected. And to think, that's considered lucky.
And in spite of those horribly depressing thoughts that always seem to wander into Cam's mind while her mom sleeps and she's left to her thoughts, she finds her stomach growling. And the realization hits her that she hasn't eaten in hours and she definitely doesn't have any food and the cafeteria is closed. But she has a few dollars so she stretches, shaking her head, the braid going over her shoulder sitting in place and she starts her walk to the vending machine.
