“Thanks,” I said. “For everything.” These days, I felt like Tabatha had overtaken me in my sisterly duties. Was she really the same brat who used to cry when I got presents on my birthday because she felt left out?
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Besides, don’t thank me yet. You’re going to be returning the favor three times over once I get deep into wedding planning.” Then her face became serious. “Also. Momma says good luck. And she wanted me to tell you”—she looked left and right, then leaned into the camera like she was sharing a secret—“that she’s proud of you.”
“Wow,” I said. “Proud of me? No way.” Had I humbled the great Dorothy Appiah?
“I know!” Tabatha said, rolling her eyes. “I almost asked her if she’d hit her head. Anyway, I just wanted to pass that along. Go out there and crush it!”
I pushed open the heavy wooden doors to the conference room where Dr. Reed and I would be presenting our proposal to members of the Beenhouwer Association, named after a physician who had spearheaded qualitative research in medicine in the seventies. The room was unexpectedly small, outfitted with only ten or so seats, and identical to the conference rooms where my teams usually did table rounds.* The room’s sole occupant, a round-faced middle-aged woman with chunky blond highlights, looked up from her stack of papers upon my entry.
“Dr. Harrison, Dr. Petrucci, and Dr. Philips should be here shortly,” she informed me. Then she gave me a small smile. “Angela, right?”
I smiled back.
“You must be Cynthia,” I said. Cynthia had been fielding my formatting questions for the better part of the month, addressing my anxious requests with unmatched patience. I had sent her about five different versions of my final PowerPoint, the subject line of each email some iteration of Appiah Final Version, Promise. “Thank you so much for putting up with me.”
“It’s no problem,” Cynthia assured me. She directed me to the podium at the front of the room, turning on the projector and showing me how to use the pointer.
Over the next several minutes, my judges filed into the room one by one. They seemed relaxed, their white coats either hanging off their arms or nowhere in sight. I opened my mouth to introduce myself, but then, thinking better of it, tucked my lips shut and checked my phone for the time. Just two minutes until showtime, and Dr. Reed was nowhere to be found. Nervous, I glanced up at the screen, where my title slide was projected. After Tabatha critiqued it in the private study room, Ricky had gone out of his way to edit the theme. He’d emailed the revised version to me in the middle of the day on a Tuesday, and when I taunted him about not working on the projects that actually paid his bills, he’d texted back, earnestly, that he’d deemed this more important. I had some downtime today, he said. I wanted to make sure you got it in time. At the time, his conscientiousness had left me simpering; now, it all seemed like part of a pretense. You asked him if you could be his girlfriend, I reminded myself, and in response, he dropped off the face of the Earth.
Still, our summer fling had been good for something—my presentation looked slick and professional. Even Tabs admitted that it looked like something a consultant would whip up, not a stodgy medical student like me.
Just as the clock hit eleven, Dr. Reed stumbled into the room . . . accompanied by Dr. Wallace.
I froze in place, watching as my mentor rounded the table and took a seat next to Dr. Reed. She gave me a small smile and bobbed her head in greeting. I hadn’t met with her in person since before my internal medicine rotation, and I’d most certainly not kept her abreast of this project. Had Dr. Reed looped her in?
“Afternoon, Trish,” one of the judges said to Dr. Wallace. “Long time no see. What brings you to the east wing?”
“My mentee is presenting today,” she said, nodding toward me. I fiddled with my remote, flooded with warmth.
“We ready to get started?” Dr. Reed asked the room.
“We were just waiting on you,” one of the other doctors said, grinning. He clicked open a pen, then gave me an encouraging smile. “Whenever you’re ready, Angela.”
I cleared my throat. Three months of clerkships had gotten me accustomed to having the undivided attention of frighteningly intelligent audiences, but this time thousands of dollars were on the line. But my judges were relaxed, and Dr. Reed was throwing me a thumbs-up, so I stood, cleared my throat, and began.
“That Black patients in America are more likely to experience significant delays in care is well established in the current literature—”