It was her birthday.

karina didn't really like her birthday, though.

nobody had ever celebrated with her before, and she was certain she wouldn't be getting a celebration this year, either.

to make things worse, she was completely alone that day as well, as her favourite doctor, winter, had gone missing.

she was supposed to make her rounds to karina's room like... 34 minutes ago!

and winter was never late. Yeah, she may have slacked off and often cut her visit time short, but she was never late.

maybe she got held up with some other patient? Yeah, that could be it.

karina fiddled around with her hands, not having anything to do in the room,

unaware that winter was standing like 3 metres away from her, seperating them by a door labeled 411.

why was she panicking so bad?

it was just a birthday surprise. Plus, karina would probably be happy with even just a 'happy birthday'! So winter had no idea why she had to wipe the sweat off her palms on her hospital gown and why she had to do those deep breathing excersises she learnt from gym class like 4 years ago.

maybe it was the fact that it was karina's first birthday celebration, or maybe it was the fact that it was karina that had her panicking, but whatever it was, it had winter stressing BADLY.

like this stressed her out more than her university finals!

Taking a deep breath, winter decided the birthday celebration would already be lame enough, with her dollar tree party blowers, sloppily self-designed cake and last minute gift, so it didn't really matter how well she carried the surprise out.

'Happy bitrhday karina!' The cake had spelled out in blue frosting, and reading it over almost made winter's eyes pop out of her head.

Oh my god. How had she, winter kim, a med school student, ed up the word 'birthday'!

It wasn't even a hard word! Like b i r t h d a y?! That was so easy??

winter groaned.

well she had realised too late, and there was no way to fix it now.

did karina even know how to spell??

maybe she wouldn't even notice.

Whatever, winter decided she would just go for it now and wallow in self-embarrassment later.

Karina looked at winter in shock as she walked into the room with the cake, blowing into her cheap party blower. It was a miracle that thing even worked!

"happy birthday, karina! Uhm, i baked a cake and- it's a little ugly but that's okay. So i might have made a small mistake with the spelling and mispelled birthday, but like you can't really blame me because birthday had like what? 10 letters?? That's outrageous! And like-"

winter talked akwardly, half-trying to sound cheerful and the other half just trying n