Warning: This work has been rated 16+.
"Cancer runs in the family,"
She'd chewed over the words all night on the flight back home to Virginia, squirming in her seat. Her mind hadn't been this exhausted since her childhood, and that long period of time that she'd lived with her auntie in England. All the foster kids running around... it'd been hard to keep up with her things, her school work, her friendships, her privacy. But this? This was a new level of 'tired'.
For the hundredth time that night, her hand slid up to her left breast, fingers pressing through the red coat and the black "tres cool" long-sleeve. Plush flesh bowed beneath her touch, then halted on a hard, knotted lump. There were three, but this one was the largest. For months she had thought it was just her over-consumption of caffeine. It'd been so busy, with all of the orders coming in for custom Portal 2 furniture and steampunk-styled computer frames; she hadn't thought to look it up or get it checked out. She was too busy for doctors, even with all of her problems.
Lifting her hand to press it against her temple, she sighed. The man sitting next to her, his face squished against the glass window grossly, snorted in his sleep. He'd woken up several times in the last four hours to grumble at her, disgusted at the way her hand continually drifted up to her left breast to press against the skin there. Though he didn't wake up this time, she didn't want to risk his ire, so she turned her back to him in the seat and tried to close her eyes. Sleep... just a few moments of sleep... and everything would be alright. Right? She'd wake up in a few hours and, like the fairy tales she'd enjoyed so much as a child, find herself in a perfect world where nothing bad had ever happened to her.
Her mother had never shipped her off to Maine for months at a time because she was too busy to take care of her own child. She'd never had to deal with an abusive uncle as a young girl, or stare at the white lacey bows and frilly blue and cream dresses she'd worn with vicious hatred. The uncle in Maine had never gotten cancer, wrote her into his will, and called her back to his filthy side to tell her he was sorry. That she should remember to check for cancer.
Eyes tearing open once more, she grit her teeth, agitated. Even though she wasn't allowed to use her phone on the plane, she wanted nothing more than to turn the device on, load up Google Hangouts, and text her long-distance girlfriend. Let her know about what might happen. Voice her concerns.
But, no. She didn't turn the phone on. She didn't text her girlfriend. She didn't weigh the poor girl down with another barrel-full of stress and negativity. Instead, blue-painted nails dug into the fabric of the fleece blanket she'd sat in her lap, her eyes burning with unshed tears as she puled the blanket up and over her head.
She cried, but no one bothered to ask why.
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125,005 Literary Works • 672,797 Reviews
Hey there! I'm here for a review on this.
So, this is quite a good start. You introduce the main conflict right away, which is always nice, and it allows us to get a sense of her character.
Little problems I see:
1. Did she really blow off the lumps for months? I just have a hard time believing that she wouldn't be worried about them, especially because cancer has really been made a big deal of these last few years, to the point where it feels like we're almost paranoid about it. I know for sure if that happened to me, I'd get them looked at straight away. Especially if my uncle had recently died of cancer.
2. The backstory is just a little bit info-dumpy here. We don't really need to know right now about how her mother shipped her off or how her uncle wasn't abusive. Because it's not relevent right now, it can feel like a cheap device to garner sympathy. And it does need to be important in the future. Too many main characters have abuse in their backstory, but it doesn't seem to affect them very much, which is simply not true when it comes to real life. I'm not saying you shouldn't include it, but do make sure you do your research.
3. Do planes actually not allow you to use a phone? I think that might just be for takeoff and landing. I think it depends on how long the flight is, though - if it's a longer one, they're more likely to let you use it. I went on a 13 hour flight recently, and they even had Wi-Fi you could pay to use.
Anyway, other than those little things, this is a very nice start. Good luck with this, and keep writing!
Hello, Meandbooks!
Thanks
So this is the second chapter; the book is going to go from a friend's view, to her view, to another view repeatedly to get the full-circle of everything that happened.
Unfortunately, yes -_- She blew off the lumps for AGES. I begged her to get them looked at, but she kept blowing me off. She had a few phobias and ideals that made her brush off things like that and avoid mammograms. I thought she was stupid, to be honest XD
I know it's infodumpy, but before she passed, I had her give me a complete interview. She just told me what she was thinking on the plane, and I used my notes to write the chapter after she'd passed. Her uncle did sexually, physically, and mentally abuse her, and she connected that abuse to quite a lot of current events in her life. I had her explain the emotions in-depth for me so I didn't screw up her story. Of course, she thought it would be a survival story. Now we know better...
On short flights, and on the particular one she was taking, no, they don't. And if they do, the minutes get more expensive. That and she had radioactivity phobias XD She was weirdly random like that.
Thanks for the review! I'll try and amend the info-dump, but it seems like sometimes you just can't avoid it in a story when the information is just... there. It's what happened, and although I rewrote this chapter a good handful of times, I can't get it any less... word-barfy.
Thanks again, though! I'll keep trying
Your grammar and spelling are clean. The only error I found was in the very first sentence. A period, not a comma, should complete that sentence. But i had to reread this piece several times before I caught that, so good job. There were a few spots where I felt your adjectives would have been a little clearer (with that they were describing), but that's a style thing, so if how it's written matches your style, keep it.
I liked your use of imagery and emotion. The feelings behind this piece were very clear. Overall, I enjoyed reading this.