Page 2 of Obeying

So when they talk about whatever the internet decided to care about overnight, I do what I've gotten good at. I nod. I laugh half a second after they do and hope nobody notices it's half a second late.

Priya drops into the spot next to me, already mid-yawn. She's a second-year, and my closest friend here.

"Morning," she says. "You look how I feel."

"Woke up too early. Couldn't fall back asleep."

"Ugh, I hate when that happens. Lying there awake when you could've had another hour? Tragic." She doesn't bother with whatever's got the others huddled around the phone. "What's the move today? Anything good on the board?"

We trade the small stuff, who's on what service, which attending is in a mood. It's easy, and I've learned not to take easy for granted.

The years are mixed in our group, interns up through residents, so nobody blinks at standing shoulder to shoulder with someone a level above or below. What they blink at is me. The decade above. I caught it the first week, the quick recalculations when my age came up, and I don't hold it against them. I'd be curious too. A resident starting this late is a question with a story behind it. But they've never once made me feel like I don't belong here. That part, I do all on my own.

Priya's the easiest of them. When my age came up, she didn't go wide-eyed, didn't ask the thing everyone wants to ask. She just nodded as if it were one more fact about a person and moved on. I don't think she knows how much I appreciate that.

Rounds pull us out of the lounge and onto the floor, and we move bed to bed behind the attending, the residents taking turns presenting. Between patients, he asks questions, the kind meant to catch you flat-footed. Differentials, next steps, what you'd order, and why. I know the answers. I keep my voice low and let whoever's presenting take them, but they’re there before he finishes asking every time, sitting on my tongue where no one can see them.

By the time we break, I'm starving, and Priya and I end up against the wall outside the lounge with vending-machine coffee that tastes like a dare.

"Okay, I have a theory about you," she says.

"That sounds dangerous."

"I think you're some kind of secret genius."

"What do you mean?"

"I see you. Every question thrown out, you whisper the answer, and it's always right. Every time." She points the coffee at me like evidence. "You were top of your class, weren't you? Back in the day."

I huff. "No, I wasn't."

"Oh, there it is. You're being way too humble. I can tell you're smart, Kristen. You don't have to do the bit."

"Thanks. You too."

She lets it go and tells me about a consult of hers that went sideways. I listen, and we trade the usual complaints until our coffees are gone and the break's over. She heads off to her own floor. I head to mine.

And it's only when I'm walking the hall alone that what she said catches up to me.

I wasn't being humble. I was top of my class, all the way through, the kind of student who didn't know what second place felt like. Then med school happened, and I met someone who outscored me. Not always, but enough that I finally learned the shape of coming in behind. I hated it, but I let it make me better. We did that to each other. Two people who couldn't stand to lose, sharpening each other for four years. He was both my rival and my motivation.

I wonder sometimes where he landed. Somewhere impressive, probably. Some gleaming hospital with his name on something, or off being the private physician to people whose names you'd know. He could do that. He was built for it.

I could have too. If I'd wanted it. If a lot of things had gone differently.

Maybe someday.

For now, instead of a high-profile patient, I've got a high-maintenance one. And he's waiting.

Walter Hale. He is in 412, and he is, by every account but mine, a nightmare.

He's seventy-three, four days out from a hip repair, and he has run off two physical therapists and made a nurse cry, less from cruelty than from a stubborn streak that makes him bristle at help. He won't do his walking for PT, won't do it for the nurses. The chart is full of polite notes that all mean the same thing—the patient refusing to mobilize.

Yet he does it for me.

I don't have a good clinical reason for it. He's my post-op patient, so I round on him, check the incision, and follow his recovery. That's the job. The walking isn't the job. The walking is PT's, and I have a hundred things I should be doing instead. But the first day I met him, he looked at me for a long moment and said I reminded him of his daughter. The next time PT gave up on him, I told them I'd handle it, and now somehow it's a standing arrangement nobody approved.

So I get him up on his feet, his hands wrapped around the walker, and we make our slow way down the hall.