April

That week, after John passed me on my last call, I spent every free moment in the office. Scenarios were the scariest part of ranking up. If you did really badly, the Supervisors would stop you from doing any more until you were actually ready because there were only a few sets of them. I could feel my courage turn to a weak broth at the face of each scenario. They would close the door to discuss and I would feel my emotions crawling up my neck, threatening to strangle me.

They told me that scenarios were designed as a teaching tool but I was sure they had turned into a rite of passage. “When I did that one…” a sentence would often start. The idea was, if you had never seen a cardiac arrest or a really serious trauma, these would put you in a place where you knew how to deal with them. We didn’t get a lot of life-hanging-in-the-balance calls, but when we did, we didn’t want life to hang. Ruby had been a superstar through hers, passing some that only a few people before her had managed to pull off. I cried after each set of scenarios, furious at myself for failing and forgetting and seeming to be turning my wheels in the thickest mud.

Lily saw me after one set, curled up in a ball in the hallway where I thought no one could find me. I tried to stop crying, hating that she was seeing me weak. Lily hadn’t had trouble passing the tests.

“Come on. Let’s go get some fresh air,” she said.

I tiptoed after her, hoping the soft padding of my feet didn’t disturb her. Outside, we sat on a nearby bench.

“You need to calm down,” she said.

“This makes me feel better.”

“Your pity party in the hallway isn’t going to get you through scenarios or to where you want to be. You can’t take this process personally.”

“It is a personal process. I have to do well,” I said.

“Do you ever get that feeling, that you’re on the outside and you’re looking at yourself impassively? Like someone else is operating your body for you?”

“Yeah...” I said.

“Relax,” she said. She patted me on the shoulder. “It helps.”

I wondered if that was how Lily made it through being with Carl. I couldn’t process it for two long though. I went back in to do scenarios and was actually able to pass two of them. I used my fake confidence and authority mask that I was learning and I figured out what I needed to do. I danced all the way home to my dorm. Looking back, that memory is still bright in my mind. Sandy was only able to sully it a little when she used the fact that I cried after scenarios as a reason I shouldn’t be elected to a leadership position.

It took another two sets of scenarios for me to get my last pass. Getting there felt like pulling teeth while climbing a mountain. Balance and pain were definitely problems.

After I had passed, Ruby and Lily took me out to ice cream. It was the most adorable place with the best mix-ins, they said.

“It’s actually a front for drugs,” Ruby told me later. “But they serve ice cream, so who cares?”

We giggled the way we should have been able to at the beginning of our friendship, sharing spoons and acting like restaurant critics.

“You’re officially in,” Lily said. “You made it.”

“Just in time, too,” I said. “We only have a few more weeks left of school and even fewer before the EMS conference. Everyone forgets everything during the summer.”

“John passed her on one,” Ruby said to Lily with a shrug.

My hurricane sensed conflict and began to spin, whirring amongst my organs like a bumper car. Stay, I told it. Disobedient thing. You’re going to ruin everything.

“You sound like Sandy,” I said. “You passed three finger lacerations. How hard was that?”

We ate our ice cream in silence.

“Anyone want a napkin?” Lily asked.

“To clean this up?” I asked gesturing to the ice cream on the table, to Ruby, to Lily.

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“I don’t understand why you think you can still run for a position. You’ve only been a Responder for a few hours. I’ve been a Responder for months,” Ruby said.

We are well aware of that, I thought. Even Lily looked uncomfortable.

“You know this is why I’ve been trying to rank up so quickly. I want to change our training program.”

Ruby looked like she was going to throw her ice cream, slender handled mug and all at the wall. Gem of fire, indeed. I don’t think the establishment would appreciate scraping ice cream off of their carefully chaotic walls. But I liked that I was able to bother her. I was in now. She couldn’t keep me out because she felt like it.

“It’s not up to us,” she said, an attempt at grace.

“It’s not up to you.”

“I love this cookie butter,” Lily said.

We both raised our eyebrows at her. But she had done it, cracked the tension just enough that we could let the mushy goop of our friendship seep through and cover our animosity.

“I can’t believe they sell drugs here!” I said.

We laughed together, our conflict put aside, but never forgotten.

Flint came back to the dorm a few days later. His roommate showed the most emotion that I have ever seen him at that moment. He hugged Flint in that enveloping way, the one you save for people you never thought you’d see again.

“If you’re going to die, you do it when I don’t know you anymore, we clear?” he said. Flint slapped him on the back and smiled. “You got it.”

My father had called my phone at that moment, and I had run out of the room. I regretted not greeting Flint but there was more at stake.

“How are your grades?” he asked, forgetting or ignoring “hello”.

“Fine,” I said.

“Don’t be short with me. You got yourself into this mess.”

“I’m going to figure everything out,” I said.

“It might be too late. Who is going to hire you with grades like that? I’ll tell you, it’s not going to be me.”

“I wouldn’t want to work for you.”

“Then what do you want to do? You’ve always been wishy-washy. You want to go this way one day and the next way the next.”

I tried not to let the truth behind the insult throw me into the whirl of the hurricane, but I could feel the storm brewing. My father had an unfortunate knack for stirring tropical damage.

“Is this EMS thing even worth it? You don’t make money and your mother would be so disappointed if you were a menial laborer for the rest of your life.”

“It’s not menial labor. We help people.”

“People on ambulances pick people up and put them down. Glorified bus drivers,” he spat. “You should quit before you turn into one.”

The difference between a quick response service and a transport service would be lost on him, so I didn’t try to explain.

“I’m figuring it out. I am,” I said. “I just need more time.” I surprised myself with the force of my voice.

“Your mother wants to see you. We’ll be coming up in the next week or two.”

He hung up.

Good old excuse. My mother wants something and my father is so obliging he can’t say no. When in reality, the idea was probably his all along. I wondered why she didn’t pack up and visit me herself if she felt so strongly. It was just another opportunity to control my life, steer it towards the ideal of, of….of what I didn’t know.

I returned to greet Flint to find that he was in his room. “Resting,” his roommate/guard dog said. “He’s been through a lot.”

In lieu of seeing Flint, I made myself a tea from the bathroom sink and hid in the blanket fort. What did I want to do? Why could I never pick something and decide on it? Did I have some fundamental flaw that prevented me from focusing on and doing any one thing well? I had chosen to study the technical fields because they promised jobs and stability, something I knew my parents respected. After all, you can’t pretend everything is peachy unless you have money to hide the mold spots and clean up the skin. Apparently, EMS wasn’t technical or a job or stable enough. It was a job for those “other” people. I was too good for EMS in his eyes, but not worthy of anything else.

I thought of hurling my cup across the room like he often would, to see if it would make me feel better, if the outward destruction would mollify the inward forces. Thinking about the pieces of ceramic that I would have to pick out of the fibrous carpet and that mess the tea with honey would make had me thinking twice. My father would have just thrown it, knowing that my mother would come along and clean it up. Oh, she would have said something, some light rebuke about denting the wall or alerting the neighbors, throwing a pink polka dotted kitchen towel over our troubles so no one could see what was really going on.

Ruby had started vacating our room for days on end. She wouldn’t go to the office, because I checked for her there. Sometimes, Akul would come looking for her. He would find her room empty and spend a few hours sitting in her desk chair, playing with the unkempt threads that were dangling out of her sheets. Sometimes he would tilt the chair back against the dresser and put his feet up on the desk, forming a “V” with his body. She would arrive back in the morning sober and quiet, but she smiled more often these days. Not to me of course. She never forgot that we were competing for the same thing. Cold was a word I could use to describe our room, even as summer approached.

“Where were you?”

“None of your beeswax,” she said.

“Akul came by,” I pleaded.

“What did you say to him?”

“I told him the truth.”

She whirled around. “What?”

“That you were out,” I said, more upset than triumphant that she had confirmed my suspicion.

“Leave it alone, Andi. This has nothing to do with you.” She flipped the desk chair to its upright position and then climbed under the mountain of comforters on her bed.