stand up, fight back

Fourth grader Gabriella Corley is trapped. She has type-1 diabetes and is allergic to the kind of insulin her insurer makes affordable — and her family can’t pay for the kind she needs every day to stay alive.

Glancing at the cheerleader from Elkins, West Virginia, at a recent football game, held up on her teammates’ shoulders, her grin as wide as her two fists in the air, you might not think anything was wrong.

Then you might notice the insulin pump about the size of a pager tucked into her black compression shorts, clear tubes going under her shirt. It infuses insulin directly into her body through a tube connected to a site on her abdomen.

“She’s a beautiful, intelligent, amazing little 10-year-old girl who stands up in the face of adversity every single day without blinking an eye and does it with a smile,” said her mother, 32-year-old Andrea Corley.

Soaring insulin prices and inflexible insurance policies have forced this working-class mom to take desperate measures outside the system to keep her child alive.

Gabriella is allergic to the kind of insulin her insurer covers at a $25 out-of-pocket cost. She can only take Apidra, but her insurance only covers 25 percent of the price, leaving the family to pay hundreds of dollars a month they can’t afford.

So her mom has turned to the black market, trading for the medication with other families with diabetes she meets online, a tactic that regulators and health experts warn is a health risk. And she cut a back-end deal with a sympathetic drug rep: If she bought one vial he would give her 10 vials from his sample kit, nearly a one year’s supply. Gabriella’s grandmother covered the cost.

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when nico and will start realizing that wow, he actually likes me and wait, does he want to kiss me too and eventually end up together, it happens slowly. like really slowly

like, for the first three weeks they’re all small smiles and lingering eyes and blushes that look like they’re sticking to their cheeks permanently

everyone can see that they like each other

everyone can see that they know they both like each other, and it’s just so frustrating

but they’re fifteen, they’re shy, and they’re recovering from multiple wars, and there’s no rush. they have time

so they continue their little dance, sitting close enough at campfires that their shoulders touch, taking long walks in the woods, drowning in their deep conversations for hours and hours, until one day when will gets brave enough to link his pinky with nico’s under the table during dinner it feels like the most natural thing in the world

it might be a small thing, a tiny little detail, but nico’s heart feels like it’s bursting, and he can’t stop smiling all night

and then it happens again, and again, and again; will links their little fingers together during an obnoxiously loud campfire song, in a counsellor meeting, when they’re walking back to the cabins after a game of capture the flag

and nico does the same during breakfast, and when they sit reading by the athena parthenos, and right when will turns to head back to his own cabin after telling him good night

and it’s sickly sweet and slower than percabeth and so frustrating that most of the other campers just want to lock them up in a closet until they get their shit together

but that wouldn’t be necessary, really

because when this has been going on for almost two months and a newly claimed son of aphrodite asks nico out, all he gets is a dull look and the words “i’m sorry, i’m already in a relationship”

and people are so confused, because when did this happen???

because what they haven’t seen are the lingering touches when no one’s looking, and soft kisses in the supply closet in the infirmary, and whispered confessions in the shadows behind the hades cabin

and maybe, when asked about it, they prefer to tell people that they’ve been like that all along

no one needs to know that they had only really talked about it the night before nico got asked out

or that their first kiss was more or less an accidental headbutt when they both reached for the same roll of bandages to cut (and nico ended up biting his own lip hard enough to draw blood)

the only times i EVER see anything that could be even remotely described as “”””””policing“””””” is people saying “dont draw fat characters skinny” “dont whitewash” “dont draw characters as racist caricatures” “dont draw trans characters in fetishized ways” “dont draw child characters in sexualized ways” that sort of thing.