3

“So how’s your trip?”

It was an unusual quiet Monday morning at Southwestern Teaching Hospital and Bette and her best friend and Co-nurse Lloyd were in the nurse’s station talking about how their weekends went by. Bette just finished giving meds to her patients and had a few spare moments to spend chatting.

 “Please I don’t want to talk about it” Bette said feeling quite tired after a long weekend

“Let me guess, judging from the way you look the romantic getaway that you’ve been dreaming of didn’t go exactly as what you’ve expected, am I correct?”

Bette slumped on the chair and sighed heavily, “Sometimes I don’t know if you have a third eye or what, how did you know?”

“Honey it’s written all over your face, so tell me, what happened?”

“He brought me to his parent’s house”

“He did what?!”

“I said Mark and I spent our second anniversary in his parents’ house in San Diego”

 “What about the Catalina Islands? I thought Mark will bring you there?”

“That’s what I’ve thought too, apparently not”

“Didn’t you tell me that you caught him checking out for a vacation spot on the internet last week? What happened to that?”

“It’s for his parents golden anniversary,” the brunette said sourly

“Let me get this straight, so Mark has a surprise gift for his parents’ golden anniversary which I believe is going to be next year…”

“Yeah” Bette agreed

“…but on your second year anniversary his surprise gift for you was bringing you to his parents’ house? How romantic” Lloyd said with a sarcastic tone.

Bette Porter came from Philadelphia while Lloyd Jeffries was a Chicago native. Bette met Lloyd on their first day of college and immediately hit it off and became best friends. They took the same course, the same subjects, had the same professors and both even had crushes with the same guys. They were so close that often some people would think they were lovers because they looked good together.

Bette was a product of interracial marriage, her father black and her mom, white. Everyone envied her skin color and found the 23-year-brunette gorgeous but she didn’t think of her that way. She thought she looked normal but not beautiful.