Subway Cars & Lonely Hearts

twentytwo/call/

italics ~ elliot

bold ~ carter

friday may 11th 1:32 am est

elliot and grace had just ubered home from their very last college party. elliot went to her room, changed into her comfiest shorts and t-shirt, and went to the bathroom to take off her makeup. her head hit her pillow, but she couldn't get her eyes to shut or her slightly intoxicated mind to stop racing.

relax, she told herself, go to your happy place. 

she found herself pulling up a familiar contact on her phone. 

incoming call from "el"

"carter?" her voice broke.

"hey, i'm here el, what's wrong?"

"can you just talk to me, tell me a story or something"

"of course, ok, if  you think that'll help"

"mhmm" she shut her eyes.

"ok, so when i was nine, my brother asher, who was about thirteen i guess, had the idea to make my parents breakfast in bed for their anniversary. we woke up super early and went down to the kitchen, and my sister caitlyn was home from college so she went out and bought everything for us the night before. the three of us felt like such good children, doing this for our parents."

"so we're cooking all this food for them and decided to split up the meal so we'd finish it before our parents woke up. caitlyn was cooking eggs and bacon on the stove, asher was making toast, and i was supposed to be making smoothies. everything was going great, we were all laughing and joking around, my sister put on some music and we were dancing and singing around the kitchen."

"so what i didn't know was that my sister had made some facial concoction with like essential oils and raw eggs. so i ended up putting that in the smoothies instead of yogurt. i guess there was enough fruit in there that none of us could taste it, so we ended up serving it to my parents and also drinking some ourselves."

"everything was fine at first, my parents were so happy we made breakfast for them, but then at around noon things got...bad. we were all super nauseous and soon enough, all puking. we all thought it was food poisoning, but after none of the symptoms went away the next day we all went to the doctor."

"so turns out i accidentally infected my whole family with salmonella."

 elliot replied only with a half-asleep chuckle. 

"goodnight el, sweet dreams."