Rosario Ortiz (reluciente) wrote in nevermore_logs, @ 2022-10-31 10:16:00 |
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About halfway through the summer, Merlin had abruptly decided to switch tack. Rosario had argued with him—she was just about getting the hang of meditation now! (she wasn’t)—but the wizard had only slid a deck of cards across the table and instructed her to draw. Rosario had drawn her lips together sullenly instead. “Why?” she’d demanded. Merlin, with only a small edge of impatience, had told her to think of it as another kind of focus, like a lens on a telescope. The cards themselves had no innate power, they were simply a means of channelling her gift, no different than stargazing or meditation. Rosario had bristled again. Of course it was different. Meditation was scientifically recognised! Okay, not for this specifically, but— generally, as a practice, for training the mind and awareness and stuff, you know? There were studies. Peer-reviewed. And as for the stars— (she didn’t want to think about what the stars might be) —well, obviously, that was just a her thing. Merlin had said that before. Even Apollo had said it. Her affinity, or whatever. But tarot? Tarot was one step away from crystal healing and palm reading and horoscopes, and Rosario might’ve learned to live with a little handwaving, but she was not becoming that person. Just draw a card, Merlin had pushed. One card, and then they could move on. Rosario hadn’t believed that. She drew one card just to shut him up, then it’d be well, that wasn’t so hard, now try another, and before she knew it Merlin would be hauling down books on cartomancy and that’d be her assigned reading for the next month. She knew him, and she wasn’t about to get suckered in again. She hadn’t meant to, anyway. But she’d had a know-it-all wizard goading her on (and god, he could be so annoying sometimes), and in a fit of pique she’d decided, you know what? Fine. Fine! She’d play his stupid game. She’d pull a few random cards—because that’s all they were gonna be, random—and show him just how big a waste of time this whole idea had been. She’d split the deck. She’d flipped over a card. And an irrational shiver had rippled up her arm. It was— a coincidence, probably. A simple one in seventy-eight chance that found her gazing in shock at the eagle: her eagle, her Aquila, the stars of the constellation picked out in winking gold foil along the narrowed V of the bird’s wings. Red dripped from its beak, or from its neck; Rosario couldn’t tell which. And she couldn’t tell whether the eagle was swooping or whether it was falling towards the two gold coins, each scored with a five-pointed star. The two of pentacles, Merlin had taken some pleasure in explaining, was the card of balance. Traditionally, it represented a person juggling priorities, a reminder to keep them in balance or a warning against overcommitting. It might also be interpreted as a sign of a looming choice— that it was coming time to pick one or the other. Rosario had swallowed down a lump and retorted that it sounded like the card meant whatever you wanted it to mean. But the cartomancy books had come off the shelves. And every week since, no matter how she shuffled the deck, without fail, the first card she flipped over was invariably the two of pentacles. She didn’t have time to dwell on what that might mean, though. She was a third-year now. Third year was clinical year, the shit-gets-real year, and since paediatrics orientation the present had been coming at her so thick and fast and sticky with bodily fluids, Rosario couldn’t even conceptualise any future past the next shelf exam. She’d known clinical was gonna be a lot, but still— clinical was a lot. Wake up before the sun. Shower, dress, choke down some breakfast, and be out the door in time to get the 5:33 L train. (During the first week, she’d fussed with her hair and makeup every morning, anxious to look put-together and professional. By day seven, she’d gladly traded in those fifteen minutes in front of the bathroom mirror for fifteen minutes’ extra sleep, and now her morning grooming routine consisted of scraping her hair back and throwing some water on her face. The patients didn’t care what she looked like, anyway.) She could squeeze in maybe a half hour’s study on the train and bus, if she was lucky. Make it into the hospital by 6:30. Review patient charts and preround. Morning teaching session at eight, then rounds with the team from 8:30 till lunch. Afternoons were for writing up progress notes, checking back in on patients and following up on tasks from the morning. Sign out at five, unless it was an on-call day, and then it was hang back with the night team and help manage any new admissions. Bus and train home. Eat, study, sleep. Repeat. One day blurred into the next, and Rosario wrung sense out of things in the only way she knew how, by dissecting them into orderly, handwritten bullet points: Tasks to be done, topics to revise, things to look up at the first opportunity. And then there were the lists she didn’t put to paper, but instead found herself tallying up in her head while she stared out the window of the L train, vision blurred with exhaustion. Lists of pros and cons. Con: If six weeks in paediatrics had confirmed one thing for Rosario, it was that she had zero desire to work in paediatrics. Peds consisted of sick kids (depressing), extremely sick kids (soul-crushing) well-child exams (monotonous) and newborns (anxiety-provoking), not to mention the parents who lied to you or ignored you or thought they knew better than you cuz they’d read a thing on Facebook about the toxic chemicals in vaccines. Peds was toddlers howling when you tried to put the otoscope to their ear, and an infant with a less-than-innocent distal femur fracture, and the mom of a mild otitis media case demanding, in order, antibiotics, a CT scan, an MRI, and a word with your supervisor. It was Rosario’s idea of hell. Pro: Getting paediatrics out of the way first was probably for the best, and for more reasons than one. “You’re lucky,” Rosario’s resident, Divesh, had told her. “Peds is a petri dish. You don’t wanna be here during cold and flu season, believe me.” Even with the benefit of summer, almost everyone in her group caught something within the first week. Rosario had dodged every cold and stomach bug so far. It would’ve been gratifying if it were luck, but she knew that it wasn’t, because— Con: Apollo was in her group. Rosario wasn’t even surprised anymore. The guy had bought her building as a ploy to make her spend more time with him, of course he was gonna make sure their rotation schedules matched. That didn’t mean it didn’t grate every too-early morning she dragged herself into the hospital wan-faced and ratty-haired to be met with Apollo’s golden tan and perfectly-tousled locks. She’d bet he didn’t even use any product; he probably just rolled out of bed that way. It should have been harder to run into each other in a hundred-bed hospital, but every time Rosario turned the corner (or so it felt) he was there— earning tearful smiles from parents who would only watch her with mouths set in dubious lines, or listening patiently to a stream of chatter from kids who answered her faltering attempts at approachable with one-word mumbles. During rounds, he commanded attention; students, residents and attendings alike seemed to orient themselves around him like planetary bodies caught in a stars orbit. His presentations were always faultless, as smooth and assured as hers were stilted and awkward. And look, it wasn’t that Rosario was jealous. He was the god of medicine, jealousy would be— it’d be stupid, obviously. Like being jealous of the Sun for being hot. It was a star, what else was it gonna be? Like, no shit Apollo was a crazy good doctor, he’d only been doing it for two thousand years. She knew that, she wasn't dumb. It was just annoying, okay? It was obnoxious. Was it not enough that she was flailing every day without having Apollo constantly, effortlessly succeeding all up in her face? Pro: Apollo was (ostensibly) here for the same reason she was. He had patients of his own to look after, which meant he was (usually) (hopefully) too caught up in his own stuff to take out too much time to try and parent her (substitute ‘parent’ for your choice of ‘follow around incessantly’, ‘kidnap for early-morning speedboat rides’, ‘creep on her friends and family’ or ‘buy her entire neighbourhood’). If Rosario was careful, she could go most of the day without having to deal with Apollo, aside from the unavoidable morning rounds and lunchtime. She’d glowered at him the first day he’d followed her into the cafeteria, but she couldn’t exactly object. It was a public place, and he had just as much right to be here as she did, and everyone knew Archer Goldenhawk was a stand-up guy. And Rosario had promised him an hour a week. So instead, she’d plunked her textbooks on the table between them with a meaningful thump and told him she hoped he wasn’t expecting small talk, because she was here to work. Apollo proceeded to both oblige and irritate her by being the model study partner, every afternoon without fail. Pro: Apollo wasn’t her only lunchtime company. “I’m meeting Lyra for lunch tomorrow,” she told him, the Thursday of their second week – and added, because it was dangerous not to spell everything out to Apollo, “You’re not coming.” It was a plausible story because Lyra had surprised Rosario at lunch on Monday. She’d been working on a high-rise a couple blocks over. Cathal worked on the other side of the East River, a crappy train ride and probably an even crappier drive this time of day, but that hadn’t kept him from offering— and Rosario, Brooklyn-bred, couldn’t help but feel a flutter of warmth in her belly at a boy volunteering to brave Manhattan lunch-hour traffic just for her. He took to joining her on the roof some evenings, stretching back on the lawn chair beside hers while she studied in the dying late summer light. It’d set her stomach somersaulting the first couple times. But when she’d insisted, in a muddled kind of apology, that he didn’t have to, that she knew this stuff was—she’d gestured at the pile of weighty medical texts—you know, it wasn’t exactly a party— Cathal had cut her short by producing a library book, along with a warmly conspiratorial smile. He’d come prepared with his own study material. Within a few weeks, it’d turned into a semi-regular routine: Rosario would set the timer on her phone, and for the next twenty-five minutes she’d attack practice questions on her ageing laptop while Cathal disappeared into his library book (Much Ado About Mothing was the latest one, and Rosario had a strong suspicion he’d gravitated to it almost as much for the pun as for the lepidoptery). Twenty-five minutes to study, seven minutes to hang out, and repeat; that was her system. And they did hang out. They shared pastries and swapped conversation. Cathal offered funny snippets from his day; Rosario tried hard not to vent too much about hers. He told her about what he was reading, and she geeked out about the latest JWST images. He made her laugh with his newcomer's insights into the city, and she filled him in on the local secrets. She started a list of places to show him. And as the sun stained the horizon and the last of their neighbours disappeared downstairs, they took it upon themselves to explore what other extracurriculars might be squeezed into seven minutes. Con: Sick kids were more than depressing— they were complicated. Children aren’t just small adults was the peds mantra. You could know everything there was to know about every field of adult medicine, and you’d only be partway there, because you also had to get your mind across all the complications of human growth and development, the different ways that common diseases could present in kids, the diseases that were unique to kids. The theory side alone was enough to make Rosario’s head spin. Doctor Stryker, her attending, knew it. He was a white guy, mid-forties, prone to wearing an aggressive amount of pomade and a shiny, expensive watch that—as he was regularly informing people—was identical to the one favoured by Elon Musk. And he was the worst kind of pimp. Pimping, in med school parlance, was the practice of firing increasingly unanswerable questions at students, usually during rounds— i.e. in the most public setting possible, for maximal humiliation. As a teaching method, it was supposedly a tool for attendings and residents to assess students’ knowledge and push them to think critically. Some docs even used it that way. Doctors like Stryker? They just liked to make you feel small. Okay, Rosa. Patient’s chart says he’s from Guatemala. Which malignancy is he at higher risk of developing due to place of birth? Like a bird’s-eye statistic on environmental cancer risks had anything to do with a case of appendicitis. Or, over a two-year-old girl who’d been brought into emergency with a febrile seizure: What questions should you ask before giving protamine sulfate to an adult male and why? It was a useless question. It couldn’t possibly have been less relevant. But maybe he’d just wanted to make her say the words salmon sperm. It’d gotten worse, though, much worse, at the start of week four, when he’d passed by the table where Rosario had been eating lunch with Apollo, and he’d done a double-take. Doctor Stryker, it turned out, had done premed with Apollo’s ‘father’. He’d still been talking animatedly about vacationing in Dubai when Rosario had slid her books towards her and muttered an excuse. He hadn’t even looked her way as she’d made her escape. But the next morning, she’d caught him watching her with a curious furrow, like she was a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. “So, you and Chase’s kid, ha! Small goddamn world.” Christ. What had Apollo said? What had Stryker assumed? When Rosario didn’t answer immediately, Stryker filled the silence. “Great family. Great family. We go way back, my old man and his— Archer Senior, that is. The kind of people that remember who their friends are, know what I’m saying?” There was something off about his tone. It was too friendly, almost paternal. When he pimped her during rounds that morning, every single question was a softball, and he rewarded her answers with an indulgent nod. Divesh eyed her quizzically. And all of a sudden that was her new normal. Rounds lost their former dread, but with every free pass, Rosario ground her teeth tighter. She’d wanted to earn it. She’d wanted to be the one to wipe the look of bored condescension off Stryker’s face, hit him with the answer he wasn’t expecting and force him to acknowledge, at least for a second, that she actually knew something. Maybe she could’ve done it. Okay, probably not likely, he was that breed of jerkhole, but— but fighting that losing battle would still have been better than being handed a win she didn’t deserve because of whatever Stryker thought about her and the Goldenhawks! Rosario’s aggravation hit boiling point a few days later when Apollo had the temerity to greet her with the wave of a hand from across a corridor. She stalked towards him with a stormy expression that failed to cloud his smile, until she stabbed an accusing finger toward his chin and hissed in a fury, “Stop. Helping.” And she swept past, leaving Apollo to stare after her in perfect, blameless bewilderment. The cards, Merlin said, were hers to keep. They were annoyingly pretty to look at. The stars of Lyra sparkled within the seven of wands, the instrument they formed more Celtic harp than Grecian lyre. Its golden frame was sculpted in the form of a winged woman. Ursa Major reared over the two of cups, calm and steady. On the nine of pentacles, shafts of rainbow light spilled across Boötes with his shepherd’s crook. In the privacy of her room, Rosario flipped through the deck, staring long at each picture. Her mouth was an uneasy line. Her finger twitched to trace the winking gold-foil stars, and at the last moment flinched away. She studied them, these stupid made-up cards printed with stupid made-up symbols that had no business telling her anything about anything— till the twisting knots in her stomach squeezed so tight, she swept the whole deck up and jammed it down into its box. A single card slipped free; Rosario cursed and made an unsuccessful grab for it as it tipped off the side of the bed. It landed on the carpet face-down and Rosario gazed at its blue-starfield back without needing to flip it over, an agitated knowing clumping in her throat. “Shut up,” she whisper-hissed at the two of pentacles, and shoved it back into the deck. Tarot cards meant whatever you wanted them to mean. And she was balancing her priorities fine. |