“Wow,” she said. “You’re actually okay. What a disappointment.”
I gave her an incredulous look. She ignored me, twirling a coil of her hair around her finger.
“Sanity Circle convened,” she said, “and we just knew that you were gonna be crushed. A decision was made”—she reached over and placed a hand over mine—“to give you your birthday present extra early.” Then she tilted her head, holding back a smile. “But, seeing as you’re fine, I guess we’ll just wait until it comes up.”
I perked up, both touched and embarrassed that my imminent breakdown had been the topic of a round table discussion.
“My present?” I gave Nia a mournful, wide-eyed look that I knew was more cartoonish than cute and held out my hands. “Please? Pretty please?”
“I don’t know,” Nia said, even as she stood to retrieve it. “Markus, Michelle, and I agreed that this was for a rainy day . . . so you better act like you’re devastated when we call them.”
“I’ll put eye drops in,” I insisted. “Trust me. I’ve had a lot of practice crying over the last couple days. I can do it.”
Nia’s laughter boomed through the apartment as she disappeared into her room. A moment later she returned with a gold envelope. Eyeing her, I peeled it open and found . . . concert tickets. To see Beyoncé. I nearly fell out of my chair.
“They’re shitty seats, chill,” Nia said, practically bent in half with laughter as I gaped down at the precious, pristine slips of paper in my hands. The eve of the Best Day of My Life was marked in black blocky letters: June 5, 7:00 p.m. Two days before the Scariest Day of My Life, when I started on the wards. I’d been so lost in my head about my Step exam and Tabatha and Frederick that I’d forgotten to stalk tickets to the tour.
“Fuck a man,” I said, holding the envelope to my chest in shock. “All I need is you.”
Nia smirked and patted me on the head.
“About time you figured that out,” she said.
*
Dr. Wallace’s office hadn’t been renovated since the 1970s. The chestnut wood paneling, once fashionable, had lost its sheen over the years, and no one in maintenance had bothered to reapply its lacquer. Still, it was a spacious office and private to boot, and Dr. Wallace took advantage of that space by filling it with books, boxes of unopened academic journals, and various paraphernalia from conferences past. It was the office of a true academic, meaning that it was only about three years away from being featured on an episode of Hoarders.
“Sorry about the mess,” Dr. Wallace said, as if the mess were new. She pushed her monitor aside to look directly at me. “So. Step didn’t go so well.”
I sagged in my seat. When I first started medical school, Dr. Wallace had been a mythical figure. The sole Black woman on the tenure track at our institution, she had a résumé that would have made my parents weep: undergrad at Johns Hopkins, medical school at Yale, residency and fellowship at the Brigham.* But her achievements had not stopped with her training: Dr. Wallace had carved herself a niche in gastrointestinal sarcoidosis,* and her serious, round-faced facade graced half of the hospital billboards down the interstate. I had emailed her to make my introduction a week after matriculating into medical school, and she’d been checking in with me every few months since. Disappointing my parents sucked, but at least it was par for the course; disappointing Dr. Wallace made me feel like a failure.
“It didn’t,” I said. I sighed. “I know. I’ve closed a lot of doors for myself.”
“Okay,” Dr. Wallace said, not entertaining my self-flagellation for even a moment. “First question: What specialties are you interested in?”
I bit my lip. I still didn’t really know. It had taken me years just to realize that I even wanted to be a doctor outside of my parents’ influence. When I was born, my father had raised me into the air and declared, “Our firstborn will be a doctor!” and for most of my life, I’d gone along with my destiny. The determination of my career path seemed a small price to pay for their sacrifices, and a natural one; after all, I was academically “gifted,” and medicine was a respectable field.
But then, one day, something changed. I had been shadowing in the Emergency Department, as was the premed tradition. It was a slow day, and I was bored stiff; most of my shadowing shifts consisted of trailing after whichever resident* had gotten saddled with me and pretending to understand medical lingo. The Emergency Department techs wheeled a patient—a man, early thirties, Black—into one of the many empty rooms. He asked for pain medications, but when pressed for details about where he had pain kept giving us different answers. “My shoulder,” he’d said the first time. “My back. My stomach.” Every part of his body that we touched evoked a reaction, but further questioning was met with either silence or beratement—“Why are you asking me all these questions when I’m in pain?”