On Rotation(52)

“Sure, sure,” Markus said, disbelieving. Then, his tone softened. “Just chill, Angie. You two will be okay.”

But would we be? As I tugged open the glass doors to the office, I tried to recall the last time that Nia had felt distant and came up empty. Sure, we squabbled every now and then, but our anger had always been like a spark—hot, bright, and gone as quickly as it came. Whatever this was, it was cold and lingering. I hated it.

The academic hospitalist area was significantly less grand than Dr. Wallace’s office. There were a few private offices, labeled with the names of the most senior hospitalists, but most of the space was filled with standard-issue cubicles. A few of the hospitalists had personalized their cubicles with pictures of their children; one had a magnetic dartboard hanging from the back of his swivel office chair. Dr. Reed’s cubicle, though, was sparse, its only personal touch a four-by-six black frame of him and his husband.

“Oh, Angie,” Dr. Reed said, swinging around to face me. With his heathered gray Patagonia sweater, sea-foam-green scrubs, and youthful face, he looked like he could be one of the residents and was regularly mistaken for one.* “Wait. Let me get you a seat.”

He stood abruptly and walked around me to steal a chair from his neighboring cubicle, pushing it behind me until the cushion brushed against the back of my knees. I swung my backpack forward, reaching in to pull out my laptop.

Dr. Reed got right to it.

“I’ve sent our interview script to one of my mentors,” he said. “He thinks it’s good, but he’s wondering if journals will worry that we pulled the questions out of our heads. We may need to start with a focus group.”

For any other project, I would have cringed at this news; a focus group meant more time, more resources, and another six months to our journal submission deadline. But in this case, he was right. Our data would be stronger if we could say that even the questions were generated by our target population. “I think a focus group is a good idea, actually,” I said. “How do you think we can recruit participants?”

Dr. Reed and I brainstormed for the full hour, adjusting the slides in our skeletal proposal presentation according to changes in our plans. We would have to edit the IRB to include a focus group, and though the prospect itself was cumbersome, I felt like we were conspiring to do something good. And Dr. Reed was unlike any attending I had worked with before: easygoing but driven. When he jokingly chastised me for not updating a figure as promised, I didn’t shrink under his admonishments or worry that I’d sabotaged a recommendation letter, but rather added it to my list of to-dos. He followed each of his suggestions with What do you think?, as though, despite my status as a lowly medical student, my opinions actually mattered to him.

I returned home an hour later to an empty apartment and kept myself busy studying for my ob-gyn shelf exam, which was, impossibly, next week. The sun made its course across the sky, casting our apartment in a warm orange glow until it disappeared entirely and left me working only by the light of my laptop screen. Immersed in my work like this, I could almost ignore the oppressive silence around me. It was as though there were a Nia-shaped space sitting across from me, one that should have been filled with her giggles or a pithy joke but instead was conspicuously empty. It was eerie. Nia and I had been physically apart, sure, but she’d never felt truly gone. If anything, I thought of her as omnipresent, always a text or a call or a not-safe-for-work meme away. But the text I’d sent her before my meeting (Have fun with your friends today! Where are you guys going, again?) had gone unanswered.

But there was no time to wallow, not when I had three hundred practice questions to get wrong. Eye on the prize, Angie, I reminded myself. There would be time to worry about best friends and boys after this shelf. In the meantime, I had to worry about myself.

About eighty-three questions in, I heard the front door open. My pulse quickened with nerves; Nia was home.

“Hey,” I said, watching her tug off her shoes at the door. Nia glanced up at me, giving me a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. She looked cute in a striped romper that I didn’t remember seeing in her closet.

“Hey,” she said. I trailed her with my eyes as she hung up her keys and made a beeline for her bedroom. My stomach sank; there was no way she wasn’t angry with me. Mentally, I card-flipped again through any possible transgressions: Had I talked about the kiss too much? Left the dishes out again? Had she noticed that I’d stolen some of her expensive face wash? Her expression wasn’t giving anything away. There was no helping it. I needed to take Markus’s advice and “just talk to her.”

“Nia, wait,” I said, standing up.

To her credit, Nia paused at the threshold of her door. When she looked up at me, it was with a placid expression, almost like she was looking through me.

“What’s up?” she asked.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I said, walking toward her. She watched me cross the room skeptically, like a cat scoping out an unwelcome guest. “Girl . . . what’s wrong?”

Nia’s eyebrows twisted.

“Nothing,” she lied. “What, do you think something is wrong?”

“Yes, of course,” I said, disbelieving. “And I’ve been trying to think about what it could be, and I keep coming up empty. And . . . I don’t know, I figured I should just find out from you.” I dropped my gaze to our feet. Nia’s socks were cute today, pastel pink and patterned with smiling bananas. “Just . . . Whatever it is I did, I want to make it better. And make sure I don’t do it again.” I looked back up at her, biting the edge of my tongue. “But you have to tell me what it is first.”