“I agree with student doctor Appiah’s assessment,” Dr. Mallort said. “You’re looking good, Marisol.”
“You mean we can go home?” Mercedes said. “Thank god. She’s starting to get antsy.”
“You can go home. Just give the team a couple of hours to get everything together,” Dr. Mallort said. Marisol laughed, her pink glasses glittering with the movement, and I took that as my cue to leave.
We hadn’t gotten far from the room before I heard the patter of footsteps behind me.
“Angie, wait,” Ricky said.
I swore under my breath, then swiveled to face him.
“Oh. Hi,” I said, plastering on the smile I reserved for annoying parents.
Ricky scooted to a halt in front of me. Behind me, Dr. Mallort and Shruti stopped too, and my ears burned with embarrassment.
“I’ll meet you at 4062?” I said to my team, hoping desperately that they would leave and not bear witness to my third and most unfortunate reunion with Ricky.
Dr. Mallort opened her mouth to protest, but Shruti, bless her, spoke first.
“Okay, see you there.” She looked pointedly at Ricky, then at me, and smirked before walking away.
Once they were out of earshot, I could drop the nice-girl act.
“What’s up?” I said. He still had his paintbrush in his hand, like he hadn’t thought to put it down before taking chase.
“I . . . Look, I just wanted to apologize.”
I scoffed.
“Apologize for what?”
“Well, for crashing your brunch for one,” Ricky said. “I knew when Diamond offered that I was intruding. It was clearly an ‘old friends’ thing—”
“Apology accepted,” I said. “I’ll see you around.”
“Angie, come on,” Ricky said. “Look, I didn’t mean to give you the wrong idea before. I just . . . I thought we were getting to be friends. But you’ve been weird since, and—”
And there it was. Friends. My mind shuttled back to that day in the garden, a day that felt like eons ago. To the press of our thighs together, the hungry pressure of his gaze. The bashful smile he’d given me when he confessed that he’d felt compelled to talk to me. I’d made out with guys before and not felt that level of heat. And today, he’d practically taken flight in pursuit of me. He’d even left a child behind to do it! There was no mistaking it; Ricky was on me like a dog on a bone. I wasn’t a stranger to friendships with straight men; Markus and I had been tight since freshman year of college and had none of these theatrics. I didn’t know what Ricky wanted, but friendship wasn’t it.
I considered just walking away. I knew I was about to be that girl, the uncool, overly clingy one who has the nerve to expect emotional accountability from people she’s only just met. But maybe because I was tired, maybe because I was already getting beaten down by the posturing of my third year, maybe because I was sick of the Fredericks and the Rickys of the world making me question my own otherwise keen EQ, I couldn’t take it anymore.
“Stop it,” I hissed. “Stop acting like you weren’t coming on to me. Like you don’t have a girlfriend who’d be pissed if she knew that you kept running me down! We are not going to be friends. We are not going to be anything. Leave me alone!”
It was not my first time erupting on someone, but it was my first time doing it to someone who didn’t expect it. Ricky’s smile crumpled; his hands dropped to his sides. For a terrifying moment, I thought he was going to cry. But then his face shuttered and became cold. I could never have imagined that he could look like that—like someone who could hate.
“Well damn,” he said. “I was just trying to be nice. Not every guy who’s nice to you is hitting on you, you know.”
I laughed humorlessly.
“Nice? You’ve got to be joking,” I said. “You are not nice.” Then, before he could say anything else, I spun on my heel and stomped all the way to room 4062.
*
Nia got home late that night. She had begun taking an improv class at the undergrad campus when I started on the wards, which meant that her Tuesday and Thursday nights, previously all mine, were now shared with ten other comedy hopefuls. I sent her a text （You won’t believe who I ran into in the hospital today） that I knew she wouldn’t respond to for the next two hours and studied in petulant silence. Nia was the only one of my crew I really trusted with stories like this. Michelle, who drew men to her like flies to honey, couldn’t empathize with my romantic woes. Markus always thought I was being overdramatic and needed to “chill.” I’d once whined to Tabatha about a short-lived flame, and she asked, perplexed, Didn’t you only go out with him, like, three times? But Nia understood, because she was just like me—unlucky in love, but somehow always falling into it.