Avery:
It was chaos from the moment I walked through the sliding doors.
A six-year-old with a busted eyebrow from a trampoline accident. A man doubled over from appendicitis. A girl my age, pale and clammy, hiding track marks under her sleeves and begging me not to call her parents. The kind of shift that ran on caffeine and adrenaline and forced me to forget, for hours at a time, that this was my last one.
I didn’t even realize it until Nora leaned her head around the corner, smirking with a frosting-covered spoon in hand. “You’re gonna let your goodbye cake go stale?”
I blinked, glancing at the time on the wall. Had it really been four hours already?
With a nod to the attending beside me, I peeled off my gloves and followed her to the breakroom. The second I stepped in, it hit me.
