Deep End

by Ali Hazelwood

“It’s ridiculous that med schools have foreign language requirements.” “It’s not. What if you decide to do Doctors Without Borders, and your ability to save a life depends on knowing whether ‘the scalpel’ is male or female?” I scratch my neck. “Die skalpellen?” “Bam, patient’s dead.” Maryam shakes her head. “You fucked up, my dude.”

She alternates staring at Pen (with worry) and me (with…murder?), and I feel a sudden spark of compassion for Lukas. Maybe people shouldn’t go about indiscriminately glaring at others, after all.

I shift on my feet and think longingly of the locker room, the Epsom salt tub, a creepy porcelain doll factory—anywhere but the here and now.

“I know it sounds counterintuitive, but I’m usually overthinking something. Desperately trying to avoid screwing up and working myself up to a panic.” Am I taking up too much space? Boring you? Disappointing you? Would you rather be somewhere else, with someone else? “Overwhelmed by the burden of wondering whether I’m doing it right.”

desire to follow the footsteps of my heroes, such as Hippocrates of Kos…which is how I realized that my favorite bacterium was Bordetella parapertussis…and as I looked at Queen Amidala dying on the screen, I decided that I would become a doctor to help people like her survive to see their Force sensitive twins thrive…’ ” Maryam is bulge-eyed. “Who are you?” I grab a throw

I’m relaxed enough to kick off my shoes and genuinely laugh at his terrible nonparametric statistics joke.

Upstairs I find a small sunroom, and slump on an IKEA Poäng chair—the exact copy of the one Maryam and I assembled last year, during a macabre comedy of errors that nearly became a fatal, mutual murder.

“He mentioned something about…captain stuff? Not Crunch, sadly. God, I haven’t had those in a while.” She chews her lower lip for a moment, writes Buy Cap’n Crunch on one of her Post-its, and then proceeds to slay at cancer biology nonstop for forty-five minutes.

“What I meant is, you care about me being well more than about me being good at something—anything. And when you’re around I don’t feel as anxious or scrutinized as I do with—”

but has an interesting reputation. Less than nice, some say. Mean as a banshee, most say. Personally, I’ve had enough experience with the way not-beamingly-outgoing women tend to be written off as bitches to mistrust the rumors.

she flunks an entry so bad, chestnut-backed chickadees in the Pacific Northwest must have felt the spray.

“Seriously, I’ll make you as smooth as a nineteenth-century brothel’s satin sheets.”