Karli || Open - Burn Back the Sun
There were only three things that gave Karli a solid reason to pick up her pack of cigarettes and go to a bar, of all places - 1. Stress. 2. when something's wrong, and 3. when she knows she's in deep shit.
Luckily for her however, it was not the latter.
Karli had been looking forward to her day off all weekend, having been overwhelmed at work with several more emergency room transmissions than normal and a sudden bout of surgeries her resident allowed her to scrub in on, and had been in the middle of reading one of her recently purchased and highly anticipated books when Owen had called. She hadn't hesitated in picking up the phone, having not talked to her brother in quite some time (mostly due to work, and the fact that he was just in the prime of his college career), and she was just about to tell him about the shard of glass the size of her finger that she extracted from someone's face last night when he had interrupted her with the news. She was certain that the very moment the words left his mouth the air left her lungs because this was exactly the type of thing that she did not want to hear. Their baby brother, Nick, had tested positive for Stage III Melanoma just like their father had and was to start treatment straight away at Bismarck's local hospital.
Of course, upon hearing the news, the doctor side of her took immediate effect, analyzing every nook and cranny of her brain. The survival rates, which treatment would be when, the side effects - everything - and the older sister in her found herself both angry and horrifically upset that cancer had managed to threaten to take another person that she cared about, and wondering just how much all of this would cost, because she knew damn well her mother wouldn't pay a dime. Owen had insisted she'd changed and was regularly attending a 12-Step Alcoholic Anonymous group but Karli cut him off and she herself insisted that Nick was transferred to Baltimore immediately for the best possible care, because she was sure she couldn't fit time into her schedule to fly all the way out to North Dakota for regular visits. He'd said he would discuss it with Nick and get back to her later.
And so while she waited, Karli grabbed her purse and her jacket and headed for the bar a couple blocks away. She'd rarely ever drank, especially with such a bad history with everything alcohol and the fact that she had to watch how much she actually drank because of the adderall dosage she was taking, but at the moment it seemed like a necessary trip to take. So two beers later and she found herself outside, the filter of a cigarette between her teeth, searching her belongings for her lighter - and, of course, having no such luck.
"Dammit," she swore, a muffled exhale of frustration upon the realization that she must have left her lighter on her work desk back at her apartment - where it usually lay idle, collecting dust. It wasn't routine to take it anywhere anymore, but she figured her head must have been elsewhere if she'd grabbed her pack of cigarettes and completely forgot all about it. Karli removed the cigarette from her lips and let it settle between her two fingers. She leaned her back against the brick wall of the bar and with an exasperated sigh she closed her eyes. There was several options available to fix her dilemma; she could have just gone back to her apartment several blocks away, or she could go to the convenient store a little ways down the street and spend a couple bucks on a new one that would just end up sitting next to the old the minute she got home. She resisted the urge to slide to the ground. Today was just not her day.
