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Once Beyoncé’s curvaceous silhouette graced the stage, I was hype. When she opened her mouth to send forth her outrage, I echoed it with all the feeling in my body, eyes clenched tight, joining the chorus of ecstatic-angry fans.
I wondered whether he understood that Lemonade was about men like him, who could smile in the faces of the ones they loved all the while betraying them.
“That’s your foot in my back, Markus,” Michelle said. She had an arm over her eyes. I didn’t feel too sorry for her. She’d earned that hangover.
“Oh please!” Nia said. I realized then that she was actually annoyed, not just hunting for gossip. “You were grumpy all last night. Then just now! Why were you so damn salty? Yeah, maybe Diamond could’ve told you she was going to invite her friends—who you made absolutely no effort to talk to, by the way—but don’t you think you’re being a punk about this?” I flinched, properly admonished. Nia had put in a lot of work organizing everyone just to make me happy, and I’d managed somehow, someway, to not be. Always over men, I thought with a pang of guilt.
“I don’t live here! You think I can just roll up anywhere in Nashville and order red velvet French toast?” “It’s Tennessee, Markus,” Michelle deadpanned. “They’ll probably deep-fry your red velvet if you ask.” “First of all, leave Tennessee alone—” Markus started, just as the waiter sidled up to our table.
Michelle and I divided our dishes in half and doled them out to each other with the automaticity of an old married couple.
If Markus was disappointed that I hadn’t been more excited about his discovery, he hid it well, and he didn’t try to force interaction between us again. I appreciated that about Markus. He always knew when to drop what needed dropping, and when to pry.
Behind me, my resident let out a huff of impatience. It’s just the first block, I tried to remind myself. I don’t have to know everything— But, clearly, I should have known that. So much for acing my clerkships. My residency application was going to be a disaster.
Twelve years old with a medical history so long and depressing it made my eyes cross. Poor baby.
If I hadn’t read her chart, I would never have believed Marisol was twelve. Lying in bed, blanket tucked in under her contracted arms, she reminded me of a fawn. Her eyes stared, listless, into the distance. If it weren’t for the lurching of her chest, I would have thought she was dead.
When she was well, she was a delight. Being mostly nonverbal didn’t stop her from attempting to sing along to her favorite song, “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen, or pulling pranks on her older brother.
I could feel Ricky staring, like he always did when we ran into each other. Didn’t his grandma teach him better?
It was not my first time erupting on someone, but it was my first time doing it to someone who didn’t expect it. Ricky’s smile crumpled; his hands dropped to his sides. For a terrifying moment, I thought he was going to cry. But then his face shuttered and became cold. I could never have imagined that he could look like that—like someone who could hate.
Nia was the only one of my crew I really trusted with stories like this. Michelle, who drew men to her like flies to honey, couldn’t empathize with my romantic woes. Markus always thought I was being overdramatic and needed to “chill.” I’d once whined to Tabatha about a short-lived flame, and she asked, perplexed, Didn’t you only go out with him, like, three times? But Nia understood, because she was just like me—unlucky in love, but somehow always falling into it.
Nia looked . . . amazing. Like, “done up” amazing. Her curls glistened with mousse, and her makeup was especially done, complete with contour and red matte lipstick. She was twirling in a green vintage dress that billowed around her, looking for all the world like the poster child for the pretty fat girl performative femininity she was always railing against. It was not an outfit one wore to improv on a Tuesday.
Nia launched into a long description of her new sweetheart, a person named Shae, interspersed every few seconds with a declaration of how “cool” they were. I guided Nia to the couch and grasped her hand as she spoke, my chest seizing intermittently with quiet despair. The last time Nia had been this goo-goo-eyed over someone was with Ulo, and that was two years ago. My best friend had been falling in love and I’d been too deep in my books to notice.
I blinked owlishly at her.
Nia dropped her hands into her lap, her expression shifting quickly from annoyance to delight.
“Ha,” I barked. And then I logged the event into my calendar.
Over the course of my pediatrics rotation, my self-grooming had taken a nosedive—during my first week, I’d worn makeup every day, twisted my hair before bed every three.
She need to put in some braids and tinted sunscreen
I clenched my fists as my stomach, already in knots over the concept of running into Ricky again, nearly leapt out of my throat at the reality. But then I looked up at Nia—my best friend in the whole world, my soul sister, and the expression on her face almost turned me into a puddle. Nia looked . . . happy. Not that Nia didn’t always look happy, but these days she seemed to carry a load on her shoulders that I hadn’t been able to define (Stress from her job tutoring high school English? Typical millennial angst?) but looking at Shae seemed to lift that burden right off. It was as if she were
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Nia’s beam brightened, and I almost had to turn away from the blinding intensity of their bliss.
“Oh, and, I know this goes without saying, but if you hurt Nia, I will come for you.” “Well, duh. That’s how it should be. Ricky, why aren’t you threatening Nia? Don’t you love me?” Ricky balked, not expecting to be the subject of our collective focus.
“Because I don’t believe in fighting losing battles!” he sputtered. “Nia would destroy me!” Nia gave me a gleeful smirk before letting her face go unreadably blank. I schooled my expression, knowing what was coming next. “You think I can beat you up because I’m fat?” she asked.
“I’m not booing you—” I started, but Nia and Shae were already skipping away toward the stage, kicking up their knees and giggling like children.
What dorks lol
I studied his face with the same intensity with which he always seemed to be studying mine, looking from his wide eyes to the nervous bob of his Adam’s apple to his reddening ears, nearly concealed by the darkness of the room.
“You don’t mind inconveniencing me, though?” he said. I hardly had time to ponder the curious way my heart thudded in my chest before the lights went out and a roving spotlight appeared.
If Fate was what kept bringing us together, She and I needed to have some words. It seemed cruel for Her to force this man, who pressed every single one of my buttons and seemed determined to have me in his orbit, into my life. I thought of Camila, of her sweet, gap-toothed smile, and how she had trusted me immediately upon our meeting. How would she feel if she knew of the unholy thoughts I was having about her man?
“Do you know what happened, ma’am?” one of them asked her. “Was he involved in anything he shouldn’t have been?” I felt sick. How dare he ask her a question like that while her son clung to life by a thread only a few feet away? Would that question save him? Would it give him back his face? Shaking with fury, I walked back to the workroom and silently gathered my belongings. I remembered the young man from the Emergency Department so many years ago, brushed off as an addict even as his abdomen filled with blood. For both this boy and that man, the message was implicit—whatever suffering they
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In tenth grade, when my great-aunt Gifty died, I had nodded passively as my father flipped through photographs of her walking through the market with me wrapped onto her back. It was as if he wanted the images to trigger a memory of her, hoping to inspire in me even a sliver of the loss that he felt.
He flipped through page after page of our old photo albums, trying to imprint her visage into my mind, trying to keep her memory alive within his offspring.
“You have been protected,” she said, her voice trembling with a deep, soul-dampening disappointment that Tabatha and I would crumple under for weeks. “You don’t have to even look upon suffering. All you have to do is work hard, and study, and be kind. And this is what you choose to do instead.”
“So, you’re bilingual?” I said. Ricky smirked, then said something in Spanish. I didn’t catch any of it, but my heart still stuttered in my chest. He could have just told me my breath stank and I still would’ve thought it was sexy.
“Ricky,” I said, “he’s her son. Of course she’s going to worry about him.” “Respectfully, Angie,” Ricky snapped, “I don’t think you can relate.”
“How’s Camila?” I said instead, meeting his eyes in a challenge. Ricky’s smile didn’t waver, and he didn’t look away.
I cringed at the most recent picture: a photo of Camila in a hot pink bikini, staring up at her “kicked out of the third episode of The Bachelorette contestant” boytoy like she was about to rip off his swim trunks.
Lol!
My baby sister, the same kid who used to cry when she didn’t get a chocolate in the checkout line, the girl I would read bedtime stories to on the nights when both of our parents worked late, was getting married! Before I could stop myself, I was crying too. Nia, a softie at baseline, had already fetched tissues.
Except, now I knew better. I knew why I was losing Nia. It was because, when Nia looked at Shae, she saw a home. She saw a person who accepted her as she was, with all her bumps and crevices and cracks and beauty and graces. Just like Tabatha accepted Chris and vice versa, and my parents accepted each other. Forever was a long time for a twenty-three-year-old, and yet here was my baby sister, promising it without hesitation. And none of the stories I read could have ever hoped to capture dedication like that.
“When me and Shae were in college, we’d do this thing,” he explained, “where when we were working on a project, we’d give ourselves seven minutes to talk, then thirty minutes to work. Rinse and repeat.” “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.”
“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.”
Who would have thought we could come so far in a month—from squabbling on the peds floors to sitting in a coffee shop across from each other, discussing Ghanaian engagement traditions? Maybe he’s storing this away for future reference, Hopeless Angie said in a small voice, and, annoyed, I shoved her back into the hole from which she came.
Chris’s reaction to the Knocking traditions had been immediate acceptance, and he had merged into our household so seamlessly that Momma had taken to joking that he probably had Ghanaian ancestry. “He looks like a village boy from Obosomase,” she teased, watching him pile his plate with waakye at one of the Naperville Ghanaian shindigs. She’d made her preference for the ethnic makeup of her daughters’ future husbands explicit long ago, down to a ranking system: first, a Ghanaian boy,* then Nigerian (“the alata fo are like our cousins”), then assorted West African, followed by Black American or
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The sheet outside her room that summarized her reason for her visit had told me that she was twenty-two years old and twenty-six weeks pregnant. Younger than me. I still forgot that I was now firmly within the age of what was considered socially acceptable for motherhood. Yet most days I could barely take care of myself, let alone a tiny, fragile human.
I examined her, clumsily. Somehow, I felt like she’d transmitted her anxiety to me, turned my usually sure movements jerky.
I’d known after day one of the rotation, when I’d watched a woman fill a bedpan with blood during an incomplete abortion,
Wow!
“When did you break up with Frederick again? Aren’t you missing”—she dropped her pitch, affecting a sultry Southern accent—“a man’s warm embrace?”
“Well, I should let you guys go,” he said. Then, without preamble, he reached for me, loosely cupping my elbow. “We’re still on for tomorrow, right?” My eyes darted down to his hand, then back to his eyes.
“Angie, I can’t believe that I have to be the one to tell you this . . . but that man wants to screw you into the carpet.”
Not me fake squealing
“Why do you feel this way about yourself?” she snapped. “Like you’re not enough, or something?” “I don’t think I’m not enough,” I said plainly. “I think I’m too much.”
You med students are always soooo slow. Why haven’t you gotten me gauze yet? Come on, chop chop!’” Ricky took his eyes off the road just long enough to give me an incredulous look. “And you didn’t chop chop her upside her head?” he asked, shaking his head in disappointment.
