by Julie Wright
Wait.
What am I thinking?
Everett was in the driver’s seat, stripping down to his soul for me, and I was thinking about colds?
“So?” Everett prodded when it became obvious that a lamppost was more likely to give a response than me.
“Everett, I . . .”
“I know. You’re not looking for a relationship, but what about a reset on the friendship button? I won’t push. I won’t prod. I won’t kiss.”
That startled me out of the shock he’d put me into. No. I wasn’t cold. Too hot. It was definitely too hot. “No kissing?” I tried at a laugh that sounded awkward and jittery. “You say that as though kissing is a bad thing.”
The look he gave me would have murdered Frosty the Snowman into nothing but a hiss of steam. My stomach wobbled a little as he said, “I’m not kissing you again until you kiss me. But if you kiss me, you won’t be sorry. I promise.”
Why did that feel like a magnificent promise? It really was too hot in the car. Before I could respond, he said, “So are we on?”
“For a kiss?” I kind of totally hoped that was what he meant.
“For a reset. I want to be your friend. I want to help you study and take notes and be there when geriatric men with excellent taste make passes at you. Can we reset?”
I nodded, not really certain what I was agreeing to. He’d been a little all over the place, and he was right about me being captive in his car. It wasn’t like I could walk away from the bizarre and uncomfortable conversation.
It also wasn’t like I wanted to.
“Yeesss.” I drew the word out slowly, the gentle ssssss of a teakettle telling its preparer that it was ready. “A reset is a good idea.”
We went to a late-night diner, found a cozy sort of booth, ordered ice cream, discussed our varying experiences in medical school, compared professors and methods, and lamented over the tests that nearly toppled us over the edge into the chasm of insanity.
Everett politely missed the chance to bring up the break down I’d already experienced with him as my only witness.
He told me about Miss Pearl, who'd apparently imparted all kinds of fabulous wisdom, and who had steered him toward pediatric medicine.
I told him how I'd survived on my own terms, without my father’s help, but with the occasional monetary gifts from Grams.
He asked after Grams and her health, he asked about Nathan’s life and mentioned he kept up on Nathan’s career via internet stalking.
I asked after his sisters and found that his oldest sister, Riley had become district attorney and that Hazel, the sister just older than him, had started a profitable social good company that made children’s toys. He explained their successes with a sort of sigh in his voice.
“What?” I asked. “You’re not happy for them?”
“Sure, I’m happy for them. My sisters are great. It’s just a little tough to compete.”
I squinted at him as if squinting would help me see him better. When it didn’t, I took a bite of melty vanilla ice cream that had frothed into a hot fudge soup. “Why do you feel like you’re competing with your sisters? You’re as successful as they are.”
He took a bite of his ice cream too, as if he needed that moment to try and figure out the best way to explain his family. I felt bad that it had never occurred to me to ask before. With all those study groups and all those times I'd been in his apartment while Greg and I dated, and all the classes we shared, I never bothered to look deeper than the medical student.
“Compete is maybe the wrong word,” he finally said. “I kind of wish our relationships were more like you with your brother. You guys are pretty solid.”
“Well, when you have to join forces to battle the foolishness of parents, your only choice is to stick together.”
“Exactly. My sisters never had to join forces with me. They have my mother’s total and complete attention at all times.”
This news interested me a great deal and pinged a little place in my own heart. Disinterested parents killed enthusiasm for pretty much everything. The fact that both Everett and I dealt with such a thing and still strove for greater prospects in our lives made me feel a kinship to him I hadn’t known could exist with anyone besides my own brother.
“What’s the deal with your mom then?” I asked.
“Feminist, the bad kind, not the good kind. She’s the sort of feminist who is so worried about making sure women have rights that she practices a bizarre reversal of sexism. According to her, men are slothful, lazy, unintelligent creatures who are only interested in sex and video games.”
“Ouch.”
He stirred his ice cream soup some more. “It’s not that big of a deal—more frustrating than anything. My mom was thrilled to get two daughters and less-than-thrilled about being handed a son with her third child. She spent our lives making sure her daughters had opportunities.”
“And you?”
He grinned. “She spent my life making sure I had lots of video games.”
I wanted to say ouch again, to let him know that I felt the sting in that kind of displacement in your own family, especially when you knew you were capable of more than they believed. But I didn’t. We didn’t really have to say all that. Because he’d met my parents. He already knew I understood.
The evening had been relaxing, filled with genuine friendship, and when it was all over and Everett dropped me off back at my apartment, he only smiled at me, gave me a quick hug and said, “See you tomorrow, Andrea without an E.”
He was down the stairs and to his car before I could say, “Goodnight, Everest without an S.”
He hadn’t tried to kiss me. The elimination of that sort of physical-contact-obligation freed up the entire situation to be something wonderful and different. It allowed Everett and me to be genuine friends, instead of being a part of an awkward couple situation. Having Everett and our friendship reset would be sort of like getting Janette back in my life.
Everett’s quick-on-his-feet thinking and his cool level head indicated that he’d be a fabulous doctor, which meant I had the world’s best study buddy. I took a deep breath as I watched him drive away.
I floated up the last few steps, the smile sliding off my face with each one. Noise vibrated through the front door. Noise and smell. I opened the door to a cloud of cigarette smoke that tumbled out of my living room and into the nighttime air, as if escaping some unexplainable horror. Evil-roommate-Becky and Evil-Roommate-Anne had decided to host a party without asking. A party that ignored our landlord’s insistence that there be no smoking and no pets in the apartment.
The parrot that swooped through the living room and over my head violated the no pets rule.
“Shut the door!” Evil-Roommate-Anne shouted. Out of sheer shock, I dumbly obeyed her ordered and slammed the door shut, locking myself in with the smoke and the bird that hadn’t managed to flee the crime scene.
The bird landed on an old coat rack that was part of the furnished in the advertised furnished apartment, squawked, and squirted a white stream from under its tail feathers onto the floor.
“What is this?” I asked over the music thumping so hard in my chest, it felt like arrhythmia.
“Parrot,” Evil-roommate-Becky slurred. She’d been drinking too. Weren’t we all a little too old for this college party scene?
“I see that it’s a parrot,” I shot back. “What is it doing here?”
“It’s Leon’s service animal,” Evil-Roommate-Anne said in a slur that easily matched Becky’s.
I didn’t know Leon, didn’t want to know Leon, didn’t want to deal with the crazy unfolding in my own apartment. “Clean that up.” I pointed to the parrot poop swirling down the wood pole of the coat rack. “And you’d both better hope you can figure out a way to get rid of the cigarette smoke because I am not going to die of lung cancer for the two of you! I mean it! Get rid of it now!” I stomped to my bedroom but not before I heard Evil-roommate-Becky say, “She’s the Hoover vacu
um of our living arrangements. She sucks the fun out of everything.”
I opened the door to my bedroom, slipped inside, and slammed it closed again before the smoke could follow me inside. A slight haze hung lifeless and yellow in my room, so I stuffed a towel in the crack under the door and opened my window to let real air inside.
My grandfather had died from lung cancer. Nothing infuriated me more than someone committing slow suicide and trying to take me with them to the grave. Working in the health industry gave me greater appreciation for my health and a stronger desire to not be like the patients filling the beds at the hospital.
I had to get out of this disaster of an apartment,
Now.
I had to get out now.
I checked my phone to see if Emily had written anything more regarding the only thing that would save me from committing homicide.
She hadn’t. I went to sleep with noise cancellation headphones and the chant just a little while longer on my mental playlist.
Chapter Nine
It had been a week since my date with Everett. In that week, I’d actually managed to get on friendly terms with pretty much everyone I worked with. Well, everyone except Adam who had taken to ignoring me once he realized I wasn’t interested in him. Adam had a problem being late to everything and also had a habit of disappearing whenever anyone looked for him. It was actually as I was looking for him so I could have him meet Dr. Niles that I heard a commotion come from one of the rooms. I peeked in to see a full on disaster in progress.
“I can’t do this! I can’t do this!” Alyssa said, her voice rising in pitch until I thought she might actually scream.
Not that she didn’t have just cause. Mrs. Bennion had just vomited back up her pain pills all over Alyssa’s white lab coat and stethoscope while Alyssa had been listening to her lungs. Flecks of red vomit clung to strands of Alyssa’s red hair.
At least it matched.
But Alyssa wasn’t the only one upset by the situation. Ninety-two-year-old Mrs. Bennion sobbed, the stain of red from the afternoon’s gelatin side dish seeping into the front of her hospital gown. And her big silent tears rolled down into her mouth as she wept.
Alyssa totally needed a hug, but I was not about to give her one while she was covered in bodily fluids. “You’re okay,” I told her. “You absolutely can do this, but you need to go clean yourself up first. I’ll take care of Mrs. Bennion.” The old woman, whose big, sad, crying eyes were enough to make me want to begin crying as well, also needed a hug, but I had no intentions of giving her one either, not with her gown soaked like it was.
The nurses were nowhere to be seen, but I called one to Mrs. Bennion’s room and then pulled several towels out of the dispenser and ran them under warm water. There was nothing to do except ease Mrs. Bennion’s discomfort, and the only way to do that was to clean her up as well as possible until the nurses came to change her clothing and bedding. I gently wiped her face with the warm, wet paper towels which seemed to be enough to get the tears to stop.
Dorothy Bennion had come in for pneumonia. She preferred people to refer to her as Mrs. Bennion, even though she was a widow of nearly thirty years. My rounds put her into part of my daily routine, checking her lungs and other vitals, gauging her improvement. Pneumonia was always something that could quickly get out of hand if left unchecked, and in a woman of her age, it had been truly severe before she came to the hospital. Her body had gone septic. She had a kidney infection, bladder infection, and sinus infection on top of her double-pneumonia.
Her temperature and lungs had to be carefully monitored to make sure the many infections didn’t get away from us. And while I took her vitals and tracked her progress back to health, I asked her questions and found out about her life.
At her age, she’d outlived her parents, siblings, spouse, many of her friends, several of her children and even some of her grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Dorothy Bennion had lived a long time, and, vomit in her hair or no, she was an amazing woman.
“Those pain medicines always make me sick,” she said. “And now I’ve made a mess. I’m just a mess.”
I mentally went through her list of prescriptions as I cleaned her face. “No. You’re not a mess. Messy maybe, but that’s not the same thing. You’re doing fine, Mrs. Bennion. Just fine. Your lungs sound healthy and you’ll be out of here and sky-diving in no time.”
She actually smiled. “Yeah, right. I wouldn’t have gone sky diving even when I was a girl. I never could understand why a person would leap from an airplane that wasn’t going to crash.”
Her raspy voice sounded like she had a tickle in her throat that needed to be cleared away. Without her teeth in, her gummed words slushed a little like Evil-roommate-Becky’s when she’d been drinking.
We talked until the nurses showed up to change her.
I patted Mrs. Bennion’s hand. “We’ll get you some different pain pills—ones that won’t make you sick.”
“Tell that poor girl I’m sorry,” Mrs. Bennion looked properly ashamed of what had happened.
“Don’t give it another thought. She’s fine.”
“She won’t want to be a doctor anymore with things like that happening.”
Again, I assured her Alyssa was fine and moved out of the way so the nurses could take care of the clean-up.
“That was a total lie, you know,” Everett, who had been listening at the door, said.
“What?”
“Alyssa’s freaking out in the bathroom. She’s far from fine right now.”
I sighed, long and low and stopped to use the counter at the nurse’s station to make some notes regarding the incident. “It’s a lie, but if I told her that Alyssa was probably having a break down in the ladies room, Mrs. Bennion would feel bad. Would you have wanted me to tell the truth?”
“You have a really great bedside manner. That’s something you can’t learn from a textbook.” He bumped my shoulder, making me miswrite in my notes. I scowled up at him, but he was grinning, so he clearly didn’t care about my scowl. “I’m impressed, Andrea without an E. I’ve never seen anyone make the kind lie actually seem genuinely kind before.”
I didn’t see what there was to be all that impressed by and didn’t really know what he meant by kind lie. An old woman was in serious distress and a young med student was having a breakdown. What else could have been done in such a situation? “Don’t be too impressed. Everyone has breakdown days. It’ll likely be me next time.” He already knew about my breakdown days. I checked the time on my phone and let out a yelp. “I’m falling behind, and I still haven’t found your worthless roommate. Gotta go. See you, Everest.”
“Andra?”
I turned.
“The worthless roommate is in the cafeteria.”
I saluted. “Thanks for the tip!” I headed to the elevators. The cafeteria? Was he usually in the cafeteria when he ditched out of his responsibilities? How had this guy managed to pass exams? How would he manage to pass his secondary exams if he was always living his med student life as a no-show?
Adam was in the cafeteria all right, leaning against the counter and flirting with the cashier who didn’t look old enough to be legal. Not that I was in a position to be critical of such things. I didn’t look old enough to be legal, either.
“Dr. Niles is looking for you!” I called out.
He jumped like he’d been caught shop-lifting. “Oh. Hey, Andra. I’m just helping . . .” he fumbled for the girl’s name.
“Kristin,” the girl supplied and then scowled at me like it was my fault the guy couldn’t remember her name.
“I don’t actually care what you’re doing. I only came to tell you that Dr. Niles is looking for you.” How did Everett get saddled with this ridiculous excuse for a med student as a roommate?
“Gotta go. Doctor stuff.” Adam actually winked at the girl as if he’d said something terribly clever or important when all he did was trivialize the entire medical profession.
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He fell into step beside me and let out a huge groan of frustration. “Third year totally sucks, don’t you think?”
“How would you know? You haven’t been around for most of it. No one can ever find you.”
Adam either had the intelligence of a slug or he purposely chose to misinterpret my meaning because he said, “That’s just it. Everyone here is always looking for me, telling me what to do, telling me what time to wake up, dismissing me for the night only when they feel like it. And crap totally rolls downhill. I have never been shouted at so much in my life. The resident has a bad day, he yells at me. The preceptor has a bad day, she yells at me. The nurse has a bad day, she yells at me. The patients have a bad day, they sit on their sagging, geriatric bedsores and yell at who? You guessed it. Me! I’m so sick of it. I keep waiting for the janitor to take a shot at me.”
“I’m sorry that’s been your experience. I haven’t been yelled at by anyone yet, though it’ll probably happen. It’s a stressful job, and they need us to be accountable and readily available. This is where we prove we can be doctors trusted with people’s lives, not just students who need to be babysat.”
He squinted his eyes at me. “No one has yelled at you?”
“Nope.” I smiled and hoped what I was about to say next would clue him in a little. “I work hard to never give them a reason to. If you do your job and are available when they need you, it’ll probably go better for you.”
“No wonder Evs is so in love with you.”
“Everett is not in love with me. We’re just friends.”
“Huh. If that’s true, then you should go out with me sometime.”
I stopped in the hallway, for a moment forgetting that Dr. Niles wanted us immediately, and gaped full on at Adam’s brazen behavior. “Me not dating Everett does not make you an attractive option. Let’s keep things professional, shall we?”
“That’s why nobody ever yells at you. You’re a stick in the mud. Sticks never get in trouble.”
I didn’t know why the comment hurt my feelings, but it did. I wanted to reply, to explain that my personality rocked in the most fun-filled way possible, but didn’t know if that was true or not. Emily, the girl getting me the apartment, seemed to think fun didn’t exist in my vocabulary. Either way, I could sleep at night being me. I would never be able to live with myself if my actions and attitudes mirrored Adam’s. I stomped off instead of answering. Dr. Niles was waiting and would be irritated enough at the length of time it took me to find Adam. Adam’s earlier rant carried some truth. The thing about being a medical student was that nothing you did was ever fast enough. You could be ten minutes early and someone might still insist you were late.