With best regards,
Girl Geek
***
This blog post had been a long time coming…and as a result of the insults against womankind that I’d suffered in-game, DE and elsewhere. Days later, I was still dealing from the fallout of it.
I’d been called out by the male-run blogs and other avid supporters of Dragon Epoch, claiming that “it was all in my head” with a hefty helping of mansplaining on the side. I had to turn off comments on my blog post, block multiple harassers on my social media sites and stop looking at my inbox because of the angry comments—and even some threats.
It was not a good week for all of this to happen. Not after Mom’s bad news and the MCAT looming ever closer.
I tried—hard—during the time I would have been working on the blog or on social media to get into the right frame of mind for the test. I knew the material backward and forward, but getting myself to focus long enough to work through the hypothetical problems was another thing entirely.
It didn’t help that my hours at the hospital increased significantly due to the oncoming summer season. Though I welcomed the diversion from my own depression over Mom’s news and the associated increase in my paycheck, I hardly had any time to study.
And less time to sleep.
And no time to game.
Fortunately, FallenOne kept in touch with me every day via text message. And I looked forward to every single one.
Hey, he’d chime in at some ungodly hour. You doing okay?
Yeah. Busy as hell, I replied.
Test coming up soon, right? You all ready to ace it? I could almost hear the smile in his voice—what little I remembered of that deep, smooth, and yeah, a little sexy, voice coming through the crackling phone line.
I’ll settle for marginally succeed. The MCAT is specifically designed to eliminate 75% of all medical student candidates who sit for it.
Well, that’s a cheery thought. But hey, Heath did say you were a brainiac.
Heath knows nothing. :p
You’ve been studying for this thing, for what? Two? Three months?
Every day for four and a half months, yes.
You got this. I’m cheering for you.
Are you waving little pompoms and shouting out fun rhymes?
Something like that. Good luck, Mia.
When Heath returned from his trip, he showed up at my door. The camping hadn’t gone as planned. Brian had complained during most of it, so Heath decided to spend some time away from him by hanging out in my “dive” (as he called it). It was good to have him with me in my time of need.
But between the extra hours at the hospital, the last-minute, frantic studying and school itself, I was spread really thin. And exhausted.
A week later, the day of the test arrived.
I dragged myself out of bed early, guzzled caffeine and carted my five sharpened number-two pencils and scientific calculator with me.
Hours later, I walked out of that room feeling like I’d been hit by a bus. Crushed. Flat. Broken.
I’d been warned.
The MCAT has often been referred to as a colossal mindfuck. Many a student walked out feeling like they’d utterly failed. Basically, how I felt.
But I was reassured by numerous online MCAT forum posts discussing how they dealt with the aftermath—and the thirty-one day wait for the results.
It would be sheer hell to wait for those results. But I was in good company—feeling like I’d failed while hopeful that I’d known my shit. It had been difficult to concentrate on the problems and my mind had continued to drift.
But I’d finished early…
That was a good sign, right?
I’d find out in thirty-one days.
Chapter 7: Test Results
The wait was killing me. Killing. Me.
Gaming online wasn’t helping much because Fallen was gone for the next three weeks on some mystery trip, Kat was on sporadically, and Heath was in the final stages of buying his new condo.
Yeah, I worked a lot of hours, but I no longer had school, as we were on summer break. So I found myself needing something more.
That led me to actually hanging out with people my own age…in the same room…face to face.
And, astonishingly, enjoying it!
“Waters rise!” Alex practically shouted as she turned over a new card.
“Ah, c’mon, Alejandra. Again? You’re practically a flood jinx.” Jenna, Alex’s roommate, sighed.
I regarded Jenna, who sat across from me. She was gorgeous with pale blond hair—complete with a lone dark teal streak—and serene blue eyes. She twirled one of those platinum strands around a long, thin finger. I had just met her the week before, while still under post-test shell shock, so we didn’t immediately click. She was more reserved than the boisterous Alejandra, but tonight I found myself slowly warming to her.
My eyes dropped from her to the cards laid out in a tile pattern on the table between us. Alex puzzled over how to play the cards she’d pulled while Jenna leaned forward, giving her ideas. As Forbidden Island was a cooperative game, we all had to work with each other rather than against.
Jenna seemed almost oblivious to the two males at the table, who were practically drooling over her. According to Alex’s gossip, Jenna was dating both of them at the same time. If that was true, she was managing them both like a pro right now and not even sweating it a little.
Or maybe it was just an unfounded rumor.
“So Mia, are you seeing anyone?” Alex asked.
I stopped myself from raising my eyebrows in surprise as I drew my three adventure cards and laid them out on the table in front of me: goblet, statue, statue.
I cast a wary glance at the guys, whom I barely knew, and said, “No one in particular.”
No reason to go into the fact that I never dated or the reasons behind it. This wasn’t the place to bring up the nightmarish ex-boyfriend and the horrible incident in high school.
“I’m between boyfriends myself,” Alex said with a smirk at Jenna. They exchanged a knowing look, sharing an inside joke. Alex was actually sitting between Jenna’s two boyfriends. The whole thing appeared lost on the guys, whose names I couldn’t remember. “Okay, Mia, draw your flood cards.”
“Some people are really good at moving from one relationship to another with ease,” Alex said. “I’m not one of those. I need recuperation time in between.” She shot a pointed glance at Jenna, who just as pointedly ignored her. “I guess not all of us are in search of Mr. Right.”
“Mr. Right?” Jenna said. “You’re actually looking for a knight in shining armor. You were born about four hundred years too late for that, chica.”
Alex rolled her eyes and told Jenna to take her turn.
The girls were a lot of fun, and I was actually learning from them. Learning that I could always use more friends. Of course, I had my online virtual friends and Heath. But they couldn’t always be there for me, and I couldn’t expect them to be.
Everybody had their own lives—and I had mine, such as it was.
But sometimes, I was finding, things could get lonely.
So in forcing myself to open up more with new friends, I was learning the value in opening myself up to new relationships. New experiences.
It didn’t mean I was going to go out searching for a boyfriend any time in the near future, no matter what Alex said. No need to go crazy!
***
A few weeks later, Heath showed up at my house to mooch the Internet from me, ironically enough. He and Brian had just moved into their new place—a nice two-bedroom condo in the hills—and his wasn’t installed yet. So tonight would sort of be like old times, us gaming together in the same room.
“You all ready to go? I think we agreed to working on Kat’s complete heal spell quest.” Heath checked his watch. “We’re meeting online in an hour.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Logging on to check if the MCAT scores are up today. Officially, they don’t go up ‘til tomorrow
, but word on the street says that they are sometimes available after end of business the night before.”
“Well, log in, then! Let’s check it out. You were saying you felt like you did okay…”
“I have no idea how I really did.” I’d just gone with reassuring myself over and over again whenever my mind wanted to scream out that I’d failed spectacularly.
Suddenly, there was a rock in my stomach. What if I’d bombed it? There was no doubt I’d been distracted while I took the test. On the other hand, I had a good command of the vocabulary and background knowledge. Could I have really screwed up that badly on the application of it all? Ah, the MCAT mindfuck at work…
I nudged the keyboard away from me. “Wait…wait. I’m not sure. I kind of like not knowing.”
Heath pushed the keyboard closer to me. “Better to know. You ace every test you take, anyway. The best friend a guy could hope to cheat off in high school.”
I nodded and took a deep breath, navigating to the Association of American Medical Colleges website and using my account info to log in. It seemed to take forever to pull up my scores. And when they did appear, my stomach dropped. Then I hit refresh, unable to believe my eyes.
“Eighteen,” I barely squeaked out. Even I could hear the disbelief in my shivering voice.
“Is that good?” Heath asked, every muscle tensing as if poised to jump up and pull me into his arms in a congratulatory bear hug.
“It’s terrible,” I rasped. “It’s beyond terrible. It’s abysmal. It’s…” My words stuck in my throat and nausea threatened.
“It can’t possibly be that bad,” Heath scoffed. “It’s eighteen out of…what?”
“Forty-five,” I croaked. “I performed in the bottom twentieth percentile.”
He cleared his throat, a worried look on his face. “Well, surely it’s salvageable with your grades, right? I mean you have straight A’s in every class. You’ve never even had an A minus.“
I shook my head, my eyes flooding with tears. “Not even my grades can save this. It’s give-up-my-med-school-dream bad.” I gasped for air. I hadn’t been confident that I’d performed perfectly…but I had no idea how low I’d sunk.
How was I ever going to tell Mom? That rock only grew heavier as I thought back to that time, a month before, that I’d taken the test. How could I have been so off base? To have performed this poorly, and yet I had absolutely no clue that I’d bombed it to this magnitude. Talk about a double-whammy.
Heath straightened, watching me closely as I fiercely blinked back my tears. He’d seldom seen me cry, and I’m certain that it disturbed him greatly to see how close this was bringing me.
“Then you retake it. All isn’t lost. You can retake this thing over and over again, right? Like me with that shitty SAT? Goddamn verbal pissed me off.”
I avoided his gaze as every bit of life and excitement rushed from me, pooling into a despondent puddle on the floor beneath my seat. All that studying. All those hours I’d given up doing something fun—doing anything I’d rather be doing. All that mental and emotional energy. I wasn’t even sure if I could muster the courage to do it all again. Would I just get the same results?
“Yeah, I guess,” I whispered.
He put a hand on my shoulder. “You know what? We’re not going to think about this now. We’re going to log on and blow shit up tonight.”
I shrugged off his hand and shook my head. “I think I’m just going to take a nap.”
“Mia—”
I held up my hand. “I’m sure you can pick up an enchanter or enchantress tonight for the group quest. Please? I just…I feel super gross right now and I’d like to be alone. Can you hit the Starbucks for their Internet?”
Heath looked at me for a long time. “Let me log in and cancel. I’ll stay and hang out with you, make sure you’re all right.”
I pounded the desk in front of me. “I am all right, and I won’t be able to crash if you’re here. Please. I just need to be alone. I’ll be okay. I promise.”
Heath’s forehead creases deepened. “Okay…how about I go down to the Starbucks in the Circle so I can look in on you on my way home?”
I shrugged. “If my light’s off, don’t knock. I’ll be sleeping. It’s about time I got some sleep. I’m just so exhausted. I’ll call you in the morning.” I hated the way my voice shook.
Heath’s brows creased so close together they threatened to form a permanent unibrow, but he finally left.
And then… and then. Alice tumbled down the hole, ass over teakettle. And she didn’t end up in Wonderland. Not even close. She wallowed, instead, marinated in the salt of her own tears and failure, in a stew of her own making. Haunted by if only.
If only I’d worked harder.
If only I’d stayed focused. What kind of a doctor would I make, after all, if I couldn’t set aside personal worries and do the work I was trained for? What kind of doctor would I be if I got distracted when lives depended on me?
If only Mom hadn’t gotten sick.
If only…
If only I hadn’t lost hope.
I’d stayed in contact with Mom during all of this, calling her every day. Already she’d had four chemotherapy sessions, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before it would take its toll. I’d managed to make it back home each weekend that I could scrape up the gas money—and the time—for the trip.
Whenever I talked to her, she sounded just a tiny bit more tired. Soon, her hair would fall out, if it hadn’t started to already. Who knew what she wasn’t telling me in attempt to protect me from the truth? So I wouldn’t be distracted. So I’d succeed.
I couldn’t even imagine the crushing disappointment she’d feel when she heard this news.
I hadn’t just failed myself. I’d failed her.
And it hurt. It hurt. So damn much.
Maybe I wasn’t good enough to be a doctor after all. This test was designed to weed out the wannabes from the meant-to-bes. Maybe I was a wannabe.
This thought more than any other left me sore, aching. Exhausted, I cried myself to sleep.
And since I had no class the next day, I slept in—well, I would have if my phone hadn’t chimed at 8 a.m.
You okay? It was FallenOne.
I blinked sleep from my eyes and tried to process the message. Why had he texted me? Was he checking to find out why I hadn’t logged on last night? Had Heath said something? How much should I tell FallenOne?
Hi. I’m fine, I replied.
His response came back in seconds. I don’t believe you.
Why…because I’m such a hopeless addict that only the direst of circumstances would pull me away from logging in to DE? My sarcastic tendencies prevailed, even when emotionally exhausted and in a text message.
Something like that.
What did Fragged say to you guys?
He said you weren’t feeling well. Is it okay to check up on a friend?
My thumbs hovered over the virtual keyboard, hesitating before I typed, No, it’s not. I’m fine.
Again his response came back quickly. So that’s it? Just fine?
I sighed, though he couldn’t hear me. You’re being a pest. Haven’t you got a class or something?
Or something...but not for an hour. I have time. What’s bugging you?
I got my MCAT results back…
My thumb hesitated over the ‘send’ button. Did I really want to go there with him? Was I prepared to dump this on a virtual-only friend? Then again, he was there for me when Mom got her diagnosis. Fallen had stayed up with me the entire night, proving that he cared.
I took a deep breath, hit the ‘delete’ button and retyped the message. I bombed the MCAT.
You have the results back already?
Yeah. Total fail.
Define “bombed,” though. Does that mean you didn’t get the score you were hoping for?
I bit the inside of my cheek as I continued to type, haunted again by what went wrong. Stress? Poor preparation? Who knew… It means I
’m an utter failure.
Um. Not. I reject that statement utterly.
I’m afraid it’s true.
No, Mia. So you got a shit score. You’ve had a lot going on in your life lately.
I’m afraid the AAMC doesn’t accept excuse notes from my Mommy.
That’s not what I meant. I meant you can retake it.
Until I figure out what went wrong, that’d probably be a mistake. But I might have to accept the fact that—I gulped out loud as I typed these next words—I’ll probably never be a doctor.
Now you’re just being silly. Of course you’ll be a doctor. A damn good one. One who cares.
I need to figure out if that really is true, or if I’m just a wannabe who can’t concentrate their way out of a paper bag enough to take a test.
That test is very hard, I’ve heard. I looked it up when you first told me about it. And you did have a lot going on. You can take it again. I’ve just Googled three different locations in the LA area that are giving it next month. I’ll send you the link.
I suddenly realized that, not only was he trying to help, he was being incredibly sweet by attempting to cheer me up. And I was summarily pooping all over his little pep talk.
I bit my lip, thinking. I should probably back off the negativity. If I was being honest, he was making me feel a little better…
Thank you. I don’t think I’ll retake it again right away until I come up with a plan of attack. But when I do retake it, I’m definitely not driving to LA when it’s given regularly in Anaheim and Fullerton. Much closer.
Seconds after hitting ‘send,’ it occurred to me that I’d just revealed my location. But after worrying for a split second, I shrugged it off. Over three million people lived in Orange County. It wasn’t like he could stalk me from that info—even if he did decide to fly out to my side of the country and try to meet me, or something else weird.
TMI. I could be a serial killer, you know.
I laughed out loud and snorted through my nose. I was starting to get that vibe from you, but after this test score I just got, I kinda have a death wish.
I hope you are kidding. Please tell me you are kidding.
I was actually grinning now, despite feeling like shit. I’m kidding.
Girl Geek: A Gaming The System Prequel Page 7