Later, after we’d sent Michelle home and Nia and I had settled into our Uber, I finally checked my phone. There were three texts from Markus, all gifs cut from TV shows of people tearfully waving goodbye. One from Dr. Wallace asking if I had selected a project from her list yet. Six from Ricky.
Ricky: Hey.
Ricky: Confession. I did not honor your request to lose your number. Sorry.
Ricky: Actually, scratch that. I’m not sorry. I didn’t want to. Because cosmic influence, you know. It would’ve been bad for my karma to mess with fate
Ricky: For real. Big city, and we all ended up at a Beyonce concert. I don’t even like Beyonce! That’s got to mean something, right?
Ricky: Markus is gonna choke if he keeps eating like that
Ricky: Angie. I know you’re mad. But can we please talk? Just to clear things up?
I stared at the texts for a full minute, my brain short-circuiting because no way was he still trying to endear himself to me, the girl he’d taken for a ride, not even twenty-four hours after I’d caught him out with his girlfriend! Maybe when we were still sitting on a bench in Lydia’s garden, doing a deep dive into each other’s vulnerabilities, invoking fate had felt appropriate. Now, it seemed like a joke. To think, for a time I’d thought Ricky was different. Special. Emotionally intelligent and accessible in a way that was rare and precious in a guy.
But I’d been wrong. He wasn’t special at all, just a palette-swap of the “irreverent manchild” model with which I was already intimately familiar. I’d be stupid to miss him. Dick is abundant and low value, Tabatha used to say, shortly after discarding a potential suitor. And this particular dick was of the bargain-bin, dollar-store variety.
“You all good?” Nia asked. She had asked me that question countless times over the last few days.
“Yeah,” I said. This time, though, it felt less like the truth.
Seven
A week later, the Beyoncé concert, brunching with my best friends in the world and some guy who refused to remain a stranger, my orientation to the pediatrics rotation—all of it would feel like a dream.
“Angela,” Momma said. It was 6:15 a.m., far too early for an Appiah Family Confrontation, but my parents had never been particularly considerate of my time. I had woken up to three missed calls from them near midnight, all followed by panicked voicemails—Angela, call us right now. I’d listened to them while walking into the hospital and obviously feared for an emergency, only to find that I’d fallen into their trap.
“Your father and I have been looking online.* People have gotten their Step 1 exam scores back. Have you gotten yours?”
Twenty-four years, eleven months, two weeks and four days old, and my parents were still hovering over me like flies over horseshit. I found an alcove in the hospital hallway, far enough away from the nurse’s station that I could have some privacy. There was no use in lying to them; they already knew the truth.
“Yeah, they came out,” I said.
My parents said something to each other in Twi, too quickly for me to pick out the words.
“Email us the score report,” Daddy demanded. Ever since I’d left his house, he’d gotten into the habit of speaking in a voice an octave deeper than his usual tone in an effort to sound authoritative. Instead, he sounded silly, like a child imitating an adult.
I sputtered, indignant. Tabatha had started her MBA this year, and not once had they demanded to see her grades. This kind of indignity, it seemed, was reserved only for me.
“I,” I said firmly, “am pre-rounding on my patients right now. In the hospital.”
“It’ll take you only a moment to send it,” he insisted. “Why won’t you just forward it to us now? Did you fail?”
Unexpectedly, a ball formed in my throat. You’re fixing this, remember, I told myself. After the Beyoncé concert, I texted Dr. Wallace back about my chosen project. It was a literature review on DVT prophylaxis*—boring, but achievable. Still, it was hard to escape my shame, especially now that I was surrounded by my classmates again. The anticipation of finally being released onto the hospital wards had been sullied more than once by gunners* “accidentally” revealing their high scores. And instead of helping me look forward, my own parents saw fit to berate me.
“No, I didn’t fail,” I admitted. “I just didn’t do well.”
There was a hushed gasp from the other end. “Awurade Onyankop?n,” I heard Momma mutter. I set my jaw.
“See, this is what I was telling you,” Daddy started. “You were spending all that time in the city playing the fool, instead of coming home to study in peace. Playing around with a boy who can’t even drive some small distance to come honor your parents—”