Chapter 2 ~ First Day

Chloe knew she was driving too fast… again… but she was late for the first day of her summer internship. Her Aunt Doris had insisted she needed to go to Houston to have the best learning opportunity and Shannon, her adoptive mother had agreed. For both of them, she wanted to make a good impression. “Not a good start,” she muttered.

The hospital’s right across from the campus,” her aunt had said, meaning across from Rice University. The directions had sounded easy enough but the problem she had reminded her about was that the Houston medical center had tons of hospitals. Even though Chloe had recovered from her accident there, MD Anderson Cancer Center was only one hospital among a maze of others.

“Go south on Montrose until you run into a circle around a big fountain. You can’t miss it. If you go too far, you’re in the zoo.”

Damn, she thought. There it is. The damn zoo. She doubled-back by making a semi-legal u-bee through a gap of approaching traffic, aimed for the fountain for the second time, and then accelerated around it.

Through breaks in the dense canopy of oak limbs, she caught glimpses of the university on the right and, as promised, a zillion medical buildings on the left. Crap, I’m so late I’ll be fired before I start.