I had no clue who he was talking about. He nodded his head in the direction of a pretty blond girl in the corner of the lecture hall. Well, she would have been pretty if she had less junk in the trunk. Abe didn’t mind, though—I took one look at his face, and I got it.
“Sounds good,” I said.
Poor guy—I had already heard Heather yakking about her boyfriend.
In the lab, Heather is a complete disaster. I mean, really bad. She’s trying hard, but she just doesn’t get it. And I have much better things to do than waste my time explaining every little thing to her five times. Good thing Abe has endless patience with her. With his hand-holding, maybe she has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.
I prefer Rachel, Heather’s roommate. Rachel doesn’t have a clue either, but she doesn’t care. Plus she has fantastic tits, and she never, ever wears a bra. I think about her alotwhen I’m alone in my room, if you catch my drift. The best part is that she despises me. It’s really fun to try to get a rise out of her. The easiest trick is calling the cadaver Frank. Rachel hates that.
“Can’t you respect that he is a real human being?” Rachel snaps at me. “He’s not some inanimate object that you can just give a name to.”
“He seems pretty inanimate to me,” I say with a shrug and poke him in the arm.
Her brown eyes flash. “It blows me away that you’re going to be responsible for other people’s lives.”
Rachel doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. You can’t make it in medicine if you don’t learn to distance yourself from the patient.
My fifth lab partner is Sasha. She’s at least a head shorter than me and was practically mute at first, but it soon becomes obvious that Sasha knows her stuff when it comes to anatomy. The first words we exchanged were when Sasha was looking at the tattoo on Frank’s arm. She had stretched out the skin taut in an attempt to read the words. The dye had faded somehow in the embalming process, and the words were barely legible.
“To protect and serve,” Sasha read.
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s the police force motto,” she said.
I was sort of blown away. What was a cop doing in an anatomy lab? It just seems… strange. But whatever.
58
My life is studying.Okay, not entirely. I eat sometimes (while studying). I take a piss (sometimes while studying). I sleep a little. But mostly, I study.
I go to the hospital library every night and read through my textbooks until my eyelids are like lead. Then I head home, where I study some more. It’s hard. But my grades make it worth it.
Sasha is often at the library as late as I am. At first, she sat at the far left corner of the library while I was on the far right. But then I moved to the left corner because it was closer to the anatomy textbooks in the library. I’m guessing that’s why she chose that corner too.
The medical student lounge has free coffee, and usually, Sasha would go downstairs to get a cup every night at around eleven o’clock. Eventually, she started bringing me a cup too. Black—cream and sugar are for losers. I’d die without coffee.
“Don’t you ever go home?” I ask her one Friday night in the library.
“Don’t you?” she retorts.
I wink at her. “I think it’s pretty obvious that I don’t.”
Sasha smiles. “I just want to be a good doctor.”
She’s holding the anatomy textbook in her hands. Her hands are so damn tiny, it’s almost weird. The book is so heavy that I can see her fingers shaking. If Abe were here, he’d offer to carry the book for her, but that’s not my style. Still, the truth is, I’m pretty into Sasha. She’s not hot in an obvious way, but I dig that about her. She’s been replacing Rachel in my fantasies lately. Some guys get intimidated, but I’ve always thought smart girls were extremely sexy.
“Why do you want to be a doctor anyway?” I ask.
Sasha raises an eyebrow. “Is your next question about how I’d change the health care system in America?”
I laugh. “No, I’m serious. I don’t want your bullshit med school interview answer. I mean, everyone’s got a reason for being here, right?”
“What’s your reason?” Sasha asks.
“Money, power, and respect,” I reply without hesitation. “Not necessarily in that order. Although at the interview, I think I said something along the lines of ‘wanting to help people’ or some crap like that.” I smirk. “Okay, your turn.”
“My father had Parkinson’s disease,” Sasha says. “He got it young and died a year before I started medical school.”
