“Thank you, Miss Caraby.” The slight little girl awkwardly wiggled her way out of the car, trying to put no weight on her right foot lest she get her cast dirty. Once properly stable on her crutches, she gave a low little wave and started hobbling with practiced motions toward the hospital doors. They slid open automatically for her and she made her way over to the receptionist’s desk, only to be waved on automatically. They knew that she knew where she was going; it wasn’t like this was the first time she’d been by to visit Doctor Schub.

One agonizingly-long elevator ride later (really, why was this hospital so huge? And why was the orthopedist on the second-to-last floor?), she was seated in one of those uncomfortably-stiff purple chairs that the hospital claimed were stuffed (or rather, they were covered in cloth, which was close enough to claiming that) but which she would swear before the highest court of law were actually made of the least-comfortable plastic known to mankind. More uncomfortable than whatever plastic they used to make those super-scratchy tags that always left bits in your shirt after you tried to cut them off. Yes, these chairs were that uncomfortable.

And since this particular orthopedic surgeon was the only one of his kind around here (the nameplate on his door claimed he was the “Head of Pediatric Orthopedic Surgery”, which was a fancy way of saying that he was the [i]only[/i] child-specialized setter-of-bones within the city limits), she was going to have to wait a long time in this uncomfortable chair. It didn’t make matters any better that her appointment wasn’t until 2 PM, and now it was… 8:57 AM.

This was going to be a very long wait. But such things happened when you had to bum rides from your friends’ parents, and they were all working-class. You ended up wherever you were going super early in the morning, or after everyone had gone home from their work day.

By 10:30, she was convinced that her butt was about to have irreconcilably taken on the stiff shape of the implement of torture upon which she was sitting. She hadn’t been able to feel her legs for like an hour, and she could feel her spine compacting from the sheer force of gravity pushing her down against this heartless, immovable cloth-wrapped plastic death machine. And when you were 5’0”, you didn’t particularly want to end up with your spine any more compacted than it already was; you needed every half-inch that you could get. It was time to take a walk around the floor, and so, with considerable effort (why did limbs feel so heavy when they were asleep?), she hoisted herself off of her shelf, startling the receptionist who quickly put away her phone; she’d probably forgotten that she was a living being instead of part of the décor, having last interacted with or seen her move one and a half hours ago when she’d asked “When is you appointment?”, gotten the correct answer, stared bug-eyed for a moment, and then helpfully (if hesitantly; apparently even she knew the pain that was those chairs) told her to sit down, Doctor Schub was running a bit late. Which was to say, let’s put it plainly, that Doctor Schub had not arrived at work on time. His first appointment was scheduled for 9 AM (and the owner of said wonderful time slot was fidgeting in pain in the reception area herself, her mother knitting obliviously next to her a scarf that seemed much too thin and far too long and [i]definitely far too ghastly[/i] for anyone to actually use it; they had arrived even before our red-haired protagonist had), and he was yet to be seen. He would be walking in the door in two minutes fifty-nine seconds, but that would leave him with a bunch of preparation and having-a-cup-of-coffee and flirting-with-the-nurse before he would get to anything, and this receptionist, being good at her job and having worked with this particular client for a long time, had already factored that into her estimates of when the good Doctor would be getting to his appointments; namely, that he would be getting to them “late”.

Now, it wasn’t unusual for this particular red-headed, sun-kissed young lady to find herself with unreasonable amounts of time left before her appointment with this specific doctor, and so she had, through the many, many times that she had been forced to find something else to do than sit upon things more uncomfortable than that one estranged Mormon cousin with the twelve (or was it twenty?) wives was at family reunions, forged a habit, which she now embarked upon. It was time to go visit every single person in this floor’s sick ward.