“How much longer is she going to be?” asked an impatient Tina, leaning against the wall and tapping her foot.
Brie, more invested in the commotion behind the door she was squeezing her ear against, shrugged. She was happy to hear her mom’s embarrassed laughter escape her lungs, but wasn’t able to see what was going on to cause it.
“I have no idea. I can’t even tell what sort of tests Doctor Rodriguez is doing.”
Tina sighed. “Probably some adult tests then. Well, the longer she spends laughing, the more she can blame this morning on the doctor and not us. Come on, let’s go back to the lobby, I need to sit down.”
Brie thought about it for a moment, and acquiesced. She was always down for watching her mom laugh, but this time she couldn’t see anything, making it less entertaining. There’d be other opportunities later. As Hillary’s high-pitched guffaws continued to flow out behind them, they exited back down the hallway, missing a rather high pitched “OOOOH!!!” from their mom. Back in the lobby, the two sat down in the waiting chairs and pulled out their phones, intending to scroll the time away. The room was quiet, except for the low volume of the TV reading the news, and the occasional rustling of papers from the receptionist; aside from her, there was nobody else there. Two more minutes of silence passed, before an echo came down the hallway.
“YEEEEHAHAHAHA!!!”
“Sorry! I’ve never worked with a bellybutton like yours before!”
The two sisters awkwardly looked at each other and chuckled, while the receptionist looked back into the hallway, clearly rather confused.
“Was… was that your mother?”
“Yeah… laughter is the best medicine I guess.” Brie chuckled.
The receptionist, a young medical student, giggled at the response, before rubbing her temple in annoyance.
“Well, maybe I could use a bit of laughter, these headache pills aren’t doing anything.”
She didn’t mean it literally, and went back to her filing, but Brie and Tina looked at each other and got smirked. They still had an unknown amount of time to wait, and Hillary had told them before that they didn’t need to spend all their free time on their phones. With the woman too busy to keep an eye on them, the pair got up and quietly stepped around the side of the desk, crouching down to stay out of sight as they slipped around behind it. Dropping to their bellies, they army crawled towards the receptionist’s feet, Brie leading the way and getting to her right while Tina set up at the left. Their target had worn heels to work, which didn’t seem like appropriate footwear for the job, or for keeping them behind a desk all day. With swift flicks of the wrist, they knocked them off. The woman sitting above them didn’t stir; the sisters had plenty of experience discarding footwear without drawing any attention.
“Laughter is the best medicine, Doctor Tina. What dosage do you recommend?” asked a sarcastic younger redhead.
“We’ll start light, and increase if need be, Doctor Brie” responded the older redhead.
The two moved their hands palms-up, and began to slowly curl their fingers in and out, creating a scritching, brushing motion before they’d even touched the secretary’s feet. Gently, they lifted their hands, and connected their scraping fingertips with the bottom of the receptionist’s nylon-covered soles. The “dosage” was light, but the effect was immediate: the feet in front of them twitched and danced, while the receptionist laughed out loud up above them.
“Heeheeheeey… what are you stahahahap! Eeek!”
The feet tried to pull back, but the sisters used their free hands to clutch them around the ankles, pinning them in place. And with their bodies slumped against the bottom of the rolling chair, the receptionist wasn’t going to push herself back and free any time soon.
“You said it yourself, you wanted a prescription of laughter for your headache. Well, we’re filling it!”
“Let us know if the symptoms go away, or we can increase the dose!”
“Ohahaha, that’s not what I meantahaha! Wait, stahahahap, someone’s coming!!”
Wondering just who she might have been taking about, the sisters gave their target the benefit of the doubt, and stopped as they heard the de sound of flip flops on the tile floor of the lobby.
“Hello, I have an appointment for 9.30.”
Oh, it was just another civilian, no need to panic. Brie brought her index finger to the student’s nylons again, and lightly traced a circle around it, the lightest possible tickling she could muster. Tina followed her sister’s example, and the feet ever-so-slightly twitched in front of them as the receptionist tried to keep a straight face.
“Yehehehes I seehee you here. Excuse meehehe…”
“Is everything all right? It’s just an ultrasound…”
“Nohoho, it’s… oh dearhehehe…”
While the two sisters made the secretary’s job a lot harder, back in the exam room, Hillary was sitting on the table, adjusting her bra before she went to button her shirt back up. She was red in the face, but so was Maria from all the accidental tickling she had been causing.
“I just… try to be careful with everyone. And that means light touches, which in this case…”
“It’s all right” panted a recovering Hillary. “We’re just… abnormal like that. But is everything done now?”
“Well, there’s one last thing.” said Maria, eager for a last chance to prove her medical skills to her new patients. Your vaccinations can be updated.”
Hillary’s eyes widened and her pupils shrunk as the thought of this clumsy-as-a-clown doctor poking her with a needle didn’t play out well in her mind. Maria caught her apprehension, but true to her naive nature, completely missed the cause of it and laughed.
“Oh, afraid of needles? Don’t worry. See, I have a foolproof method for helping deliver shots and such without it being painful.”
Doctor Rodriguez knelt down to a cabinet drawer and unlocked it with a ring of keys. She set the keys down on the counter and dug out a medium-sized metal canister with a pressure gauge on the side: condensed gas? Hillary shuddered when she saw the safety label: Nitrous Oxide.
“So this is Nitrous Oxide. Some people call it laughing gas!” Maria said, holding up the canister. “It loosens up the body’s senses and can aid with relaxation. So by administering a tiny amount before an injection, I can help WHOOP!”
The edge of her lab coat had caught in the cabinet, and as she stepped forward she dripped and dropped the container straight to the ground. It landed nozzle-side down, and with an audible clank, knocked loose the cover and bent the end. A small hissing sound began to escape.
“Oh.” Maria stared, surprised, at her mess and taking a few seconds to register what was happening.
“Um.” Even Hillary was a bit too shocked to react right away.
“Here, I’m sure it’s fine, but let’s just get outside and…”
Maria turned around quickly; too quickly, as her arm swiped her keys off the counter to the floor. In her haste to retrieve them, she ended up stepping forward and kicking them underneath the door. She nervously gulped, and as the Latina’s eyes widened further, she jiggled the handle fruitlessly. They were locked inside.
“Oh dear. Well… um…”
The gas continued to hiss, and Hillary already felt the hairs on her body beginning to stand up on end. In spite of all the morning’s mishaps, she still felt relaxed and eased about what was going on… suspiciously relaxed.
“Was this already diluted? Or is it fulleehee concentrated? Oh no…”
“Well it’s only coming out slowleehee… so we still have time before wehehe inhale too muchhahaha…”
The doctor’s red lips parted into a smile, one motivated by her need to be friendly AND a loopy feeling that was starting to take over. She knew that the leaking gas wasn’t good, but couldn’t help but find the whole situation feeling funny.
“Well… at leheheast you might be used to ihihihit! I’m feeling rather… ticklly! Heeheehee!”
The nitrous oxide was making both women more sensitive, and clouding their judgement. Maria looked at Hillary, whose lower shirt buttons were still undone, and felt the urge to reach out and do some more “tests” on that tummy. Likewise, Hillary was suddenly beginning to wonder what Maria looked like under her lab coat, and if she should take revenge for all the tickling she’d been through so far that morning.
“Look who’s laughahahahahing now! Eehhee oh dear”
Maria knew it was only going to get worse, and made a move to press a button on her desk, thinking it was the intercom. Likewise, Hillary reached up to get into a shelf, grabbing what she thought was a box of disposable masks that might make everything just slightly easier. But both being as giggly and clumsy as they were just made it worse. Hillary grabbed and dropped an open box of cotton balls instead, while the button Maria pressed was actually the switch to the large fan sitting on the counter.
The gust of wind blasted the soft and fuzzy cotton all around the room, to immediate effect. Both Maria and Hillary sputtered uncontrollably as the cotton whizzed its way past their necks and cheeks, and had to put their hands to their mouths in a desperate attempt to keep the floodgates closed. But when some of the cotton flew up and into the exposed triangle created by Hillary’s undone buttons, is when she lost it and fell to her knees, going back into proper laughter. The sight of this was contagious, and Maria also broke into a laughing fit at Hillary’s predicament. One lone cotton ball managing to fly up her sleeve and into her bare armpit made things even worse, and she panicked while trying to flail her arm and dislodge it, not being rather successful.
It was a bizarre situation to be in, but the nitrous oxide kept pumping out. Both women felt rather incredulous, but also loopy and somewhat elated, as if something at the back of their heads was tempting them to just give in and join the laughs without any more resistance.
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