The Queen of Hearts(99)
I harbored an unspoken fixation on him long before our fateful rotation on the trauma service. I’d first noticed him when I’d been a first-year med student, back in the days when first years were given about as much patient contact as the average janitor. Mostly, we were kept sequestered in a lecture hall where we were bombarded with clinically useless information about sodium ion channels and the histological characteristics of squamous cells. Every now and then, though, somebody would slip and bring in an actual doctor to lecture us on something interesting, and one Monday in January, this had been an associate professor in the general surgery department. I remembered one thing very clearly: he’d had a resident with him who had assisted in the slide presentation. This had been Nick, and he’d noticed me sitting in the front row. He’d caught me in an unguarded moment when I’d been staring at him, probably with an openmouthed longing expression. He’d grinned and cocked his first two fingers at me in a smug salute. I’d dropped my eyes and flushed with embarrassment.
Even though that encounter was minimal and slightly humiliating, it had led to a small obsession for me; I recognized from a wordless ten-second interaction that Nick had all the charisma I lacked. I didn’t know his name or nickname then, and thought of him only as the Hot Surgery Guy, but his face was the stand-in for my fantasies of a real boyfriend for the next two years. When my class progressed to more hospital interaction, it had been dismaying to realize everyone, male and female alike, had some form of crush on the guy called Dr. X. I had come to think of him as mine.
And then: trauma.
“Which team are you on?” Zadie had squealed, delighted to find we had the same rotation—trauma surgery—first. I had told her: B Team; the chief was Ken Linker. Then I asked about Zadie’s team.
“Mine says ‘A Team.’ Nick Xenokostas. Who’s that?”
It was completely irrational to feel hatred for your best friend for something she hadn’t even done yet. I’d looked at Zadie. She was wearing a long-sleeved button-down flannel shirt and jeans that tightly encased her slender figure; she also managed to be voluptuous, with curvy hips and a tiny waist. Her face was pleasingly symmetrical and somewhat mischievous, framed by her abundance of pale hair, and her round nose was wrinkled adorably. “Oh, hot damn!” she had bellowed. “Is that the dude everyone calls ‘Dr. X’?”
Like some ghastly self-fulfilling prophecy, it all unfolded exactly as my overactive worst-case imagination had envisioned. Nick had wanted Zadie, like I’d feared. I’d watched suspiciously during every joint meeting between our teams, but at first there was nothing to see; Zadie was her usual perky self, collecting covetous glances from males as disparate as Ethan—the pale and bookish fourth-year on the A Team—all the way to Clyde Bevins, the scarlet-faced, lecherous respiratory tech in the TICU. But she said nothing about any particular interaction with Nick, and I relaxed my guard a little. I feigned interest in a vapid but attractive future orthopedist so Zadie would not suspect me of having an obsession with Dr. X. I started dating Graham again.
And then. Out of the blue, one night Zadie had come dragging home from the hospital and moped around our apartment, bothered by some unexplained event in the TICU that day, which I’d later learn had been a botched intubation. But of course, all I could remember of that night was the sickening revelation that Zadie was dating Nick.
I was sure Zadie must have picked up on my distress, since I was flushed and could control my breathing only with great difficulty. But she didn’t notice, distracted at first by her worries about the day she’d had and then by the pleasurable phone attention from Nick. She’d even joked about the impending evaluation Nick had to give her: Oh sure, he’ll say I’m the best student he’s ever had. Wink, wink.
Zadie might have been oblivious, but Graham was not. Known for his perspicacity, he must have immediately grasped the significance of my unusually heated reaction to the news my best friend was carrying on with her chief resident. “You don’t like that guy?” he’d asked after Zadie had gone.
“I like him fine,” I had answered uncomfortably, still conscious of my pink cheeks. “I just don’t want to see Zadie get hurt.”
Graham had given me a searching look. “You like him fine,” he repeated. Then, in a milder tone: “He’s not a good guy, though, huh?”
In spite of myself, I was interested. “I really don’t know much about him,” I said. “Do you?”
“Not really,” said Graham. “Bad vibe.” He’d settled on the sofa, turned the TV back on, and let the subject drop after one last lingering look at me.
So, warning signs abounded and harbingers of doom were everywhere, but I careened lemminglike toward the cliff’s edge anyway. I made eye contact with Nick during trauma rounds and tried to convey simultaneous desirability and aloofness, correctly sensing the thing Nick might most respond to in a female would be unattainability. The aloof part wasn’t much of a stretch. And I was unattainable—or seemed to be—by virtue of being the best friend of Nick’s current conquest. Of course, he would assume a true friend would never . . .
It worked.
Maybe I wasn’t consciously planning it. Maybe it began as an attempt to assuage my wounded pride—just seeking reassurance that it could have been me thrilling to the touch of the man I had mythologized. Certainly I had never carried the thought to its logical conclusion, that to obtain one relationship I wanted, I’d have to give up another. Two others, actually. I would never have made the decision, point-blank, to harm my friend. Or my loyal boyfriend.