“He bought us so many drinks just so we could hear him out,” I said, nearly choking on my coffee. I could still remember him babbling into his glass, alternating between making thinly veiled passes at Michelle and complaining about how we “all had him wrong.”
“Since when is therapy free?” Michelle said, wiping away tears of mirth. Then she pointed at me. “But anyway, back to you. Not to get all up in your business, but when are you going to let Ricky up in your business?”
Such a nasty mouth for such a small woman. Michelle’s reaction to the news that I had kissed Ricky at King Spa was to punch the air and shout, “That’s my girl!” Unlike me, Michelle wasn’t the type to sit on her hands and wait for a man to approach her; she liked to do the choosing. In college it was par for the course to lose Michelle at a party because she’d decided to go on the hunt, and only slightly less common to be harangued somewhere on campus by one of her discarded former flames, begging us to pass on a message. At some point, her pile of broken hearts grew so high that Markus started calling her the Praying Mantis.
I whipped behind me, checking to make sure we were out of earshot from anyone we could know.
“Ricky has been great,” I said, my ears hot. And he had been, remarkably so. Now that I was in the adult hospital, we couldn’t have our regular coffee breaks, and so he’d taken to texting me instead. Nary a day passed without a checkin, sometimes a How’s studying going, occasionally an article for us to discuss. I messaged him shortly after Nia’s announcement, and forty minutes later got a buzz on my apartment intercom from a delivery driver from Dough 24/7 with three M&M cookies, ordered by him from across town. Shockingly, nothing seemed to have changed between us after King Spa; if anything, Ricky seemed to be even more available than before. When I requested his help with learning more about Shae and Nia’s new friend group, he obliged without a second thought, and every now and again I could expect a random photo of a member of the Lesbrigade, followed by a question about their name, profession, and preferred pronouns.* It didn’t take me long to learn almost everything it was acceptable to know about Beck, Charlotte, Latrice, and Wenji. And even though the realization that Nia was creating a new set of memories with a gaggle of folks I had never met stung something fierce, he made learning about them almost fun.
Michelle studied my face for a moment. She enjoyed being provocative, especially to people who would see her heart-shaped, pert-mouthed face and assume she was just another docile Asian girl,* but I knew that she was forcing me to think about what she’d said to me that day in L&D. And talk about poor timing too. With Nia gone, I had a crushing realization: I wasn’t first, second, or third priority in anyone’s life. Markus could hardly catch a break for long enough to give me a phone call. Tabatha was too wrapped up in premarital bliss and wedding planning to give me much mind these days. Even Michelle, bless her, could spare me a moment only when it was convenient. At first, this revelation had hurt beyond measure, but after several days of alternating between feeling sorry for myself and studying away the pain, I’d come to terms with it. Because I had Ricky, and with him, I could at least pretend to matter.
I didn’t tell Michelle any of that, though. It would only make her pity me more, and I already pitied myself plenty.
“Anyway,” I said, desperate to change the subject. “I just got my schedule this morning. You know we get only one day off a week on internal medicine, right?”
Michelle wasn’t dumb, so I knew she saw through me. Thankfully, though, she took the bait.
“And we’re paying thousands of dollars for the privilege!” she declared. “Why did we choose this life again? Like, why? You know what our attending said when I showed up to orientation this morning?”
I smiled and listened to Michelle go on a rant about her quirky neurology attending. This is you becoming an adult, I decided. Letting go. Learning restraint. Learning how to go home to an empty apartment, and to interface with friends like this—in stolen moments at work, or in the line for lunch, not sitting at a creaky old dining room table for hours.
I held on to this mantra like a talisman against my despondence for days, and it worked. Suddenly, witnessing Nia’s slow disappearance from my apartment didn’t hurt so much, or, at the very least, I could pretend it wasn’t happening. When I searched through my kitchen drawer for a missing utensil only to realize that it was Nia’s, I could pull out my phone and order one online before the misery could settle in. I bought my own overpriced face wash. I was doing okay.