When I could haul myself out of bed the next morning, I was assaulted with a text from Sandy.

We need to talk about your behavior on your last shift.

I considered shipping myself to Canada. Or perhaps Japan. A remote mountain village where no one could find me.

But regardless of everything that she was, she was my supervisor. I met her at a coffee shop a few hours later, primed with a pin in my hand in case I started to cry. It started off with her offering to buy me coffee. I turned her down, not wanting to be indebted to her before the conversation.

“Do you know why you’re here?”

I shook my head. “Is it because I did poorly on that call?”

Sandy scoffed. I hate people who scoff. I thought about poking her, just a little, with my pin.

“Your general behavior on shift. Not ranking up, leaving when things go wrong, being too empathetic with that patient. It’s not something that is good for the organization.”

The hundreds of hours I had volunteered, the missed homework assignments and failed tests flashed before my eyes. She had no idea how much I wanted to be good for the organization.

“It’s probably because you’re too friendly with the other members. You don’t have perspective.”

Perspective was not something that I lacked because of being too friendly with the other members. Being friendly with the other members was what gave me the little perspective I had.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Is this about John?”

“Of course not,” she said, looking away.

“You know, when I started in EMS, I thought you could be a mentor to me. It was a boy’s club, that you seemed to navigate so well.”

“Thank you.” She moved her coffee cup to the window. “It was a difficult ride.”

“Which is why I don’t understand why you would push people like me around and try to make things harder for them.”

I felt myself floating out of my body, no longer in control of what I wanted to say. My body wanted to let everything come out. I laughed, scaring the table beside us. “I know all about she-who-must-not-be-named and how she manipulated her way up the chain of command. I’m surprised you were able to resist her advances. She sounds like quite the charmer.”

“She slept with John too.”

“John told me.”

She locked eyes with me, trying to intimidate me in some way. I glared back and pressed the pin into my finger, this time to keep myself from walking out and leaving her there with her artisanal coffee.

She broke contact first. Staring out the window she said, “I won’t let you rank up. You won’t last. You only have a few more months before you’re brought to the Executive Board for removal.”

I watched her leave, wishing she would stay and we could resolve this. Wishing she would go far away so I wouldn’t have to deal with her. The rest of the coffee shop watched her leave, and then moved their attention to me. I waited a safe amount of time before following her out of that coffee shop.

As I walked back to my dorm, I wondered if Sandy was right. Maybe medicine wasn’t what I was meant to do. Sure, I loved it, but I wasn’t any good at it. My mom thought doing something easy was the best way. Her thinking was that people would assume you were dumb if you tried something too hard and failed at it. I had fallen right into that problem. Maybe I should have picked something that I excelled at and specialized in that in college.

I shook my head to clear the doubts. I had to finish this semester. I would never know what would happen if I didn’t at least let it go through the end. Maybe I would tell John about what Sandy said, and maybe she would get in trouble. But then it would have seemed like I was a tattletale in the second grade. I had to suck it up and prove she was wrong.