“Ah,” I said, “so that’s what this is about. Your position for a quirky Black bestie’s just opened up, and you’re interviewing candidates.” I stuck my tongue out at him. “Weird way to grieve, Ricky.”
Ricky rolled his eyes and punched the timer on.
“Starting now, I guess.”
I snickered. “You realize I was premed once, right? You think I didn’t pump out these study exercises like a pro?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Except it was seven minutes every hour.”
“Oh, of course. You even sound like a freaking premed,” Ricky said. “We used to look left and right to make sure you guys weren’t lurking in the bushes somewhere before complaining about how much work we had to do, because you’d always pop out to talk about how none of it compared to organic chemistry.”
I laughed.
“Guilty! But where I went, we didn’t bother you art school students as much. You guys lived in a studio.”
“Ha, well then I would’ve definitely been a target,” Ricky said. “Majored in poli sci and English.”
I did not know that.
“You’re self-taught?” The little green monster in my chest I’d last felt the first time I’d seen his work lurched again.
“I took a few classes my senior year once I figured out what I wanted to do,” he explained. “But yeah, for the most part.”
We talked a bit about school then: the evolution of his career aspirations （“I want to open my own design firm someday”）， the study abroad trip to Colombia he’d gone on after his sophomore year, the year-long power struggle with his grandfather when he decided to pursue his passion instead of translate his very law-aligned coursework into a doctorate.
I slapped at his laptop playfully.
“Let me see what you broke your grandpa’s heart for, then.”
He flipped it around. Unexpectedly, it was a brochure, and a dry one at that. My face must have dropped because Ricky slumped forward onto the table and laughed out loud.
“What do you think graphic designers do, Angie?”
I threw up my hands. “I thought you were drawing!”
Ricky’s shoulders still shook with mirth.
“What?”
“You should see yourself,” he said. “Pouting like a baby!”
I was really pouting now. “Leave me alone. I can’t control my face.”
“You really can’t,” Ricky said. “You’re like a cartoon character. Everything comes out through the face. The rest through your hands.”
I looked down at my hands, and, lo and behold, they were fidgeting with my earbud cords in my lap. I balled them into fists.
“You’re observant,” I said.
He smiled lazily.
“I like looking at interesting things.”
Before I could figure out whether he’d just insulted me or hit on me, the timer went off.
“That’s it. Time for you to hit the books.”
When Ricky had suggested meeting in the coffee shop to help motivate me to study, he hadn’t been playing around. He was a drill sergeant. All my attempts at sneaking in conversations were rebuffed. He barely looked away from his computer screen to direct me back to studying, sometimes by pointing at my books, once by stepping on my toe when he caught me on my phone. Eventually, I gave up on distracting him and actually started doing practice questions. There were a thousand of them in the bank, a number that seemed impossible in the six weeks I had for my ob-gyn rotation. I’d been paralyzed by that number, by the low returns, by the fact that one hour of studying would get me through only twenty. That my one day off a week, the one day I had away from Labor and Delivery and the disapproving attendings and the emotionally friable residents had to be spent grinding. Maybe that’s why I’d avoided it, why I’d let myself sit and stew in my bitterness instead of trying to keep myself from failing my next shelf.
The timer went off, and I jumped up in shock. I’d done eighteen questions in half an hour. Not bad. If we kept this up for two more hours, I’d get seventy done, which was way better than zero.
“You must be very smart to have gotten into medical school,” Ricky said, “because you totally lack discipline.”
“Jerk,” I said. “I’ll have you know I was very productive, despite you breathing down my neck.”
“You really think you’d have gotten anything done without me here?” Ricky said.
“Of course,” I said. “How do you think I got this far? Start the timer.”