by Cara Malone
“That’s okay,” Megan said.
Alex was about to hang up the phone, when instead she asked, “Do you have a minute to talk?”
“Yeah,” Megan answered. “Definitely.”
“I just feel like things between us ended so abruptly,” Alex hurriedly added. “It’s just hard to get over something like that without any closure.”
“Yeah, I’ve been having trouble with it, too,” Megan admitted, which surprised Alex. “I’m sorry that you saw that kiss.”
“You’re sorry that I saw it?” Alex asked, incredulous. “What’s that supposed to mean? How many others were there before the one that I caught you in?”
“No, no,” Megan hurriedly answered. “There were no others. I just meant that I wish it hadn’t happened because I know I hurt you.”
“Then why did you do it?” Alex demanded.
“I didn’t, at first,” Megan said. “Chloe kissed me, and I should have pushed her away but instead I let it continue. I kind of lost my mind for a second.”
“Bullshit,” Alex said. “You’re using the insanity defense?”
“Okay, fine,” Megan answered. “I was scared.”
“Of what?”
“I was afraid because you and I were getting closer, and I didn’t want it to end the way my first relationship ended,” Megan said. “I dated her for a long time and it got to the point where we were only together because it was easier than trying to separate our lives. We lived together, we were in the same sorority–”
“You’re a sorority girl?” Alex snorted, unable to help herself.
“Social chair three years running,” Megan said with a smirk. “Can you picture it?”
“No,” Alex said, shaking her head.
“That’s because it’s wasn’t really my thing. I did it for her,” Megan said. “I changed my life in a lot of ways for her, and it was a long time before I realized that I didn’t recognize myself anymore. So we broke up.”
“I’m sure that was hard, but it happens,” Alex said. “That doesn’t mean you’re responsible for it.”
“Oh, I am,” Megan said. “It wasn’t the fact that we broke up. It was the way I handled it. I basically just shut her out of my life one day because I thought it wouldn’t hurt as bad that way. I didn’t think about how awful that would be for her.”
“So you were trying to protect me by doing the exact same thing?” Alex asked with a sigh.
“Obviously,” Megan said with a small laugh. “It sounds pretty stupid when you put it that way.”
“It sounds really stupid,” Alex said. Then after a small pause, she asked tentatively, “So have you learned your lesson?”
“About kissing my roommate and leaving a trail of destruction in my wake?” Megan asked. “I never meant to do any of that. I didn’t mean to hurt you, and I don’t know how I can promise that it won’t happen again.”
Alex sighed again and said, “How about you start with not kissing other girls?”
“I can do that, but I can’t promise that I’m not going to hurt you in some other way,” Megan said.
“I can’t promise not to hurt you, either,” Alex said. “No one can. Pain is an inevitable part of life.”
“I can’t do this, Alex,” Megan said. “I know that it probably sounds so trivial after what you’ve gone through, but I can’t be broken again. Not now. I’m sorry.”
And then the line went dead, and Alex just stared at her phone for a minute, dumbstruck. Had that really just happened? She got up from her desk and went into the kitchen, where her mother was just beginning to boil water in one of the copper pots that came from none other than the Home Shopping Network.
“Can we have spaghetti some other night, ma?” Alex asked.
“Sure, baby,” her mother said. “Is everything okay?”
“I would love to get out of the house for a while,” Alex answered, and when her mom asked what she had in mind, Alex grinned.
The shopping mall that Alex brought her mother to was crowded with people preparing for the upcoming holidays. Alex felt anxious as she drove, and even more so as they went inside—she was taking charge and attempting to draw both of them out of their shells, but really, she had no idea whether this was a good idea or a horrible one.
She drove past the mall that they always used to go to with her father, and instead went a few miles closer to downtown Chicago to the shopping mall that her dad rarely visited. It was a longer drive from the house and it had more expensive shops, but Alex thought the unfamiliarity of the place might help her mom. She’d begun to come back to life after Alex threw away the television, but she still hadn’t left the house very many times in the past year, and Alex thought it would be best to ease her into it with the most familiar setting she could find. She watched her as they walked through the crowded corridors and poked their heads tentatively into a few small boutique shops.
“Will you quit it?” her mom snapped about halfway through their second store.
“Quit what?” Alex asked with a frown.
“Quit looking at me like you’re Jane Goodall and I’m an ape,” she said. “Like you’re waiting for me to do something crazy.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex said, backing up a few paces and giving her mom a little more space. She watched her mom pick up a cashmere scarf hanging on a row of hooks on the wall, running her hand along the soft fabric, and when she saw the price, she laughed and hung it back up.
“They had one just like it on the air last week,” she whispered to Alex. “Twenty dollars less.”
“Did you buy one?” Alex asked, and her mother huffed.
“No,” she said, but then she cracked a smile. “I bought two. Yours is light blue and you’re getting it for Christmas.”
Alex laughed and breathed a sigh of relief. Her mom seemed to be doing okay after all. They spent about an hour winding their way through the smaller stores, not buying anything. Alex only had her mother to shop for, and her mom had already bought presents for every holiday and gift-giving occasion from now until the apocalypse thanks to the Home Shopping Network.
By the time they got to the big department store at the other end of the mall, they were laughing and joking and having a good time people-watching like they used to do when Alex was a kid. They were walking behind a large family, the mother weighed down with shopping bags and her five kids taking up the whole aisle as they munched on various treats from the food court. For the first time in weeks, Alex didn’t feel like she was in a hurry, rushing to get somewhere and find something to distract her, or going to class so she could focus all of her attention there. She felt at peace.
And then one of the kids started choking.
The soft pretzel in his hand fell to the floor and his mom, oblivious thanks to the mayhem of the mall and the wall of shopping bags she carried, just kept walking. The kid turned to one of his older siblings for help, and Alex saw that his lips were a light shade of blue. That’s when his mom noticed, turning around and dropping all of her shopping bags as her eyes went wide. She was frozen in shock, but Alex knew exactly what to do.
She turned the kid around and dropped to her knees to get down on his level, then wrapped her arms around him and pumped her fist into his abdomen. His lips turned a darker shade of blue and his mother screeched as Alex tried again. This time a chunk of barely chewed pretzel flew out of his mouth and he started gasping.
Alex let go and stood up, and before she knew what was happening the kid’s mom threw her arms around Alex’s neck, nearly knocking her backward with the force of her gratitude.
“Thank you,” she said as she released Alex from her grip. “Oh my god, I don’t know what I would have done if you weren’t here.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Alex said, and the woman tried to press a twenty-dollar bill into her palm, but after a few rounds back and forth with her, Alex was able to give it back, and the family went on their way. Alex took a deep, shaky breath—the first one she’d consciously tak
en since the kid started choking—and a smile formed on her lips.
“Good work, kiddo,” her mom said, patting her back. Alex looked at her, and her mom was smiling. “You’re going to make a great paramedic when you graduate.”
She looked proud, and it filled Alex with gratitude. No matter how many times she’d had to argued for her decision to enroll at Evanston instead of going back to the University of Illinois, she knew that she’d made the right decision. Now her mom understood it, too.
Alex let out a sigh and said, “Thanks. I was about to suggest we go to the food court to get our dinner, but now maybe your appetite is spoiled?”
“Nope, I’m starving,” her mom answered. “I will pass on the soft pretzels, though.”
Alex laughed, and then in a more somber tone she said, “I’m sorry I threw away the television.”
“It needed to be done,” her mom replied. “We don’t need it anymore.”
Twenty-Seven
Megan and Chloe were walking to class on the last day before Thanksgiving break. Chloe was talking about her research assignment and her excitement over the upcoming module, which would be on a new subject after the break. That explained why Ivy liked her so much as a study partner, because aside from throwing shade at her competitors, Megan had never heard Ivy utter a single thing that wasn’t school-related.
For her part, Megan was thinking about her recent conversation with Alex, and wondering why she didn’t have the guts to just apologize and tell her that she wanted to be with her. Megan hadn’t stopped thinking about Alex since the night she kissed Chloe and messed it all up, and yet she couldn’t bring herself to take the necessary leap of faith… if Alex would even be up for something like that after how she treated her.
When Megan and Chloe got to the lecture hall, the room was already nearly full so they found seats toward the back. Dr. Morrow had brought in a guest speaker, and Ivy was sitting front and center with her pen already poised over her notebook. Megan rolled her eyes and slumped into her seat while Chloe sat arrow-straight and alert beside her.
“Good morning, everyone,” Dr. Morrow said as she approached the podium at the front of the room. “Today I’ve got a special treat in store for you, a little extra motivation to get you through the upcoming holiday break. If you please, join me in welcoming Dr. Lily Thomas, our guest speaker for the morning session.”
The room broke into polite applause, and a woman sitting in the front row stood up and approached the podium. She was tall and remarkably pretty, with ebony skin and a hundred-watt smile that Megan could tell was friendly and genuine from all the way at the back of the room. She put her hands on either side of the lectern and said into the microphone, “Hello, I’m Dr. Thomas. Thank you for having me.”
Her voice boomed into the room and a few people winced while she laughed, took a step back, and said, “Sorry about that. I’m not used to being amplified.”
Megan could hear Ivy laughing from the front row. Suck up. Dr. Morrow made a quick adjustment to the microphone and then sat down in an open seat in the front row. She was just one chair away from Ivy, and that was probably making her day. Dr. Thomas continued, at a safe distance from the microphone this time.
“I’m a third-year resident in the pediatric department at Lakeside Hospital, and Dr. Morrow invited me here to talk to you all about the philosophy behind the phrase, first do no harm,” she said. “Who can tell me where that saying comes from?”
Ivy straightened up and shot her hand into the air, answering before Dr. Thomas could even finish pointing at her. “It’s from the Latin primum non nocere.”
“Excellent,” Dr. Thomas said. “It’s something that we hear a lot in medicine, and we generally understand that it means our first obligation to our patients is to avoid medical intervention that will do more harm than good. Seems like a fine principle to live by, right?”
She paused, and a round of nods and murmurs of assent went through the room.
“It is,” she said. “It is. Except when you let it paralyze you. All of you are at the half-way point of your medical school training, and your interactions with patients are going to become more frequent and more hands-on very soon. A lot of the time, medical students will get a case of the yips at this point in their careers, where they feel like they have a whole lot of knowledge but very little practical experience. Now that it’s time to work on real patients, they find that they are afraid to do harm, to screw something up, to fail. So they do nothing.”
Megan sat up a little straighter in her chair. Yeah, she thought. That was exactly what she had been trying to do with Alex—avoid leaving her worse than when she met her. And she failed miserably.
“Let me tell you all a story from my childhood,” Dr. Thomas said. “It’s going to sound like a tangent, but I promise you’ll start to see where I’m going with it soon. To set the scene, I was eight years old, with two older brothers who never wanted anything to do with me because they were teenagers and I was an annoying little sister. My family went camping one weekend when I was in the second grade, and without their friends around, my brothers had to resort to playing with little old me.”
A few people laughed, and Megan smiled. It was a feeling she could relate to—she never wanted anything to do with her younger brother Finn when she was a kid, and he was always so grateful when she’d throw him a bone now and then and act like he wasn’t an annoying little twerp.
“My parents had just finished setting up the tents and building the fire to cook dinner,” Dr. Thomas said. “They went down to the lake not far from the campsite to catch a few fish, and my brothers and I were playing the most pathetic game of football ever. Okay, I guess you couldn’t call it that. They were tossing the ball back and forth to each other and I was running around like a lunatic, demanding loudly that they pass me the ball.”
She paused as a murmur of laughter rippled through the room, and then went on with a little more weight in her voice.
“I finally convinced them to pass me the ball. My brother, Jace, told me to go long and I did. I was so excited to finally get my chance at catching the ball that I didn’t hear them both screaming at me to look out and I went so long that I stepped right into the campfire,” she said. “I sustained second degree burns over fourteen percent of my body and I spent almost a month in the hospital.”
There were a few awed sounds throughout the room, and Dr. Thomas let this sink in for a moment. Then she stepped out from behind the podium, staying close enough to use the microphone. She pointed at her right leg.
“As you can see, I lived to tell the tale, and I have full function of the affected area,” she said. “Not all burn patients are so lucky, and I know for a fact that the reason I’m telling you this story and not a more tragic one is because of the bravery and good instincts of my medical team. When I arrived at the hospital, I was unconscious and it didn’t look good. The lead doctor on my team said that the best course of action would be to debride, cover, and stabilize before making any further treatment decisions, but there was this one spunky resident who thought I could handle a more aggressive treatment.
“He argued for early surgical intervention to remove the dead tissue, which would also reduce the risk of infection and lead to far better functional and aesthetic outcomes,” she said. “He had to fight for that, and justify his recommendation, and convince every member of that team—along with my terrified parents—that what he wanted would do more good than harm. He won that battle, and I won the full use of my leg.”
Dr. Thomas stepped back behind the podium and continued.
“I’m not asking you to know everything, or to be completely confident in every one of your decisions right out of the gate. It would be dangerous if you were,” she said. “What I am asking you to do is remember what you’ve learned here and never forget that there are worlds of knowledge that you don’t yet have, and that you may never have. Be aware of what you don’t know, which is the hard part, and then rely on your ins
tinct and training to know when to take a risk. You have a support system, so don’t ever be afraid to lean on it, and don’t let yourself be paralyzed. Do no harm, but fight for what you believe is right.”
Megan walked home from class that day with Dr. Thomas’s words resonating in her mind. They kept contrasting with the last conversation she’d had with Alex, and Megan finally realized that what Dr. Thomas had said—and what Chloe had been saying for weeks—was true. She had become paralyzed by the fear of falling for Alex because she was afraid to lose her. But what had that fear done for her besides throw a cherry bomb into their relationship and hurt everyone involved?
She went back to the apartment and watched Chloe pack for her bus ride home for the long Thanksgiving weekend, and she wondered if it was too late to win Alex back. She hoped not, and she was ready to try again, just as soon as she had the apartment to herself.
Twenty-Eight
Alex went to her last class before the break, and then she and Sarah went to the college library together to schedule their certification exams. They’d have just a few more weeks of class after Thanksgiving, and then the program would be complete and it would be time to take the test. Alex thought that would probably be enough time to get Megan out of her head, after she’d definitively told Alex that she had no room or desire for dating. Five or six weeks to forget about her and focus on studying, and then there would be a small graduation ceremony and Alex would be an Emergency Medical Technician, trained and ready to work.
That was why, a few days before Thanksgiving, she was confused and a little dismayed to find her phone ringing, the name on the screen being Megan’s. Alex pushed aside the notes she’d spread across her desk and looked at her phone for a minute, wondering if she should even answer. In the end, though, it was impossible not to.
“Megan?” she asked in lieu of hello.
“Hey,” Megan answered. “Am I calling at a bad time?”
“No,” Alex said. “I’m just studying for my certification exam.”
