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Santos only heard Coach yell once. He never really needed to; he was the type of person who effortlessly commanded respect. Someone you wanted to make proud. Someone you would do anything to please, even things that you hated. He could be critical, sure, and more than a little stingy with praise, but he didn’t get angry. He barely even got disappointed, just lost interest in you and moved on to the next girl as if he had never been invested in the first place. Everyone always said that disappointment was worse than anger, but Santos knew that disappointment was still better than nothing.
She couldn’t remember what had prompted the dressing-down, but she felt like the girl had probably deserved it. That was how she saw it at the time, anyway, before her view of Coach had soured. Back when she still thought she was special and he wasn’t a disgusting perv. All she knew was that if he was flipping the fuck out on one of the older girls, they must have been asking for it. They didn’t take things seriously like she did. They weren’t special like her. He said as much in his rant: This girl was lazy, she was sloppy, she didn’t pay attention at practice, and he wouldn’t hesitate to hold her back a level if she didn’t get her act together.
She stormed out of the gym and never returned.
Trinity wasn’t sure if she should feel glad to be rid of her competition—not that the girl even was her competition, because, after all, Trinity was special. Still, she didn’t exactly enjoy anyone getting in trouble, no matter how earned it had been. But Coach was Coach, and Coach knew best, so she ignored that little seed of guilt.
In that sense, maybe Al-Hashimi breathing down her neck about charting and threatening to make her repeat R2 was a divine punishment for siding with Coach all those years ago.
Or, here’s a crazy thought, maybe she was just a shit doctor. There was a non-zero possibility that that might be the problem, if the day’s trajectory had been any indicator. She couldn’t even blame it on Langdon’s return, although that certainly didn’t help matters. Even if he was back to reclaim his position as the ER’s golden boy and yank away the hard-won comfort she had finally found at work, he wasn’t the one that made her fuck up her case. She could do that all on her own.
No, she just didn’t belong there. She wasn’t as smart as she thought she was, according to Javadi. Not only could she not hack a double residency, she apparently couldn’t even hack a single residency. She was somehow a year behind on charts when she'd only been there ten months. She projected too much and saw abused girls and battered partners where there was just a clotting disorder and a shitty boyfriend. (Normal-shitty, not abusive-shitty. Probably.) Langdon had called it on her first day: She was too stupid to be a doctor, too arrogant, or maybe too damaged, or maybe all of the above. That could be their next betting board; I'll take twenty-five bucks on the snitch and her trauma.
And Whitaker was right, it’s not like she wanted the guy to be a wife-and-child beater, but that didn’t make it any less of a kick in the teeth.
And if that kick came from a zebra, she had no excuse for missing the kick that came from a horse.
Mel didn't miss it. Mel was a good doctor. Mel did her charts.
Santos should have seen it, too. She had enough experience with eating disorders; they were practically a rite of passage in the gymnastics world. She had never fully succumbed to one herself, just dabbled in orthorexia and anorexia from time to time, usually when she was feeling stressed before a big meet. Some twisted part of her took pride in the fact that she had never tried to make herself throw up. Skipping meals and counting calories was an elegant form of extreme self-control. Puking was too base, a bandaid for the girls who didn't have the willpower to skip dessert. Girls who weren't dedicated like her, weren't special. She reconnected with her old friends again in med school, where classmates who were supposed to know better bragged about surviving on black coffee and Adderall.
Her brain and stomach twisted in unison, and she knew eating would be agony later. Because of course she couldn't have a good day. She'd had too many good days lately. She had friends, maybe, or at least one friend-slash-roommate. She had a kinda-sorta girlfriend, maybe. They hadn't exactly labeled what they were, but Yoyo made her feelings pretty clear in bed (often to said roommate's chagrin). She was good at her job, maybe. Unlike Coach, Robby wasn't afraid of positive feedback, and after some months she had finally started to ignore the little voice in the back of her head that told her he was lying, that he secretly pitied her for how Langdon had acted, and she wasn’t really a good doctor, she just wasn’t bad enough to get chewed out. Of course it couldn't last. What goes up must always come crashing the fuck down.
Huckleberry’s posterior STEMI was her last fucking straw. The ink hadn't even dried on his diploma yet, but he could find a zebra, no sweat, and train the newbies while he was at it. Robby meant all the compliments he gave Whitaker. He didn't pity Whitaker the way he pitied Santos. Like Mel and Whitaker were now pitying her, as she burned with anger and shame. She was so stupid that she didn't know how stupid she was. She was the last one to find out.
When she was a kid, her cousins briefly had a scrawny little rescue Chihuahua named Rat, who had what her tita called a “sore spot” on his ribs. No matter how gently you touched it, Rat would snap at your hand, sometimes hard enough to draw blood. He once bit baby Matteo badly enough to need stitches, and that was the last Trinity saw of Rat, who had been rehomed in disgrace by the next time they visited.
Sometimes Trinity felt like she was made of nothing but sore spots, and she couldn't stop herself from snapping. Sometimes she liked the taste of blood.
She snapped at Whitaker and didn't bother to apologize. Why settle for being stupid when you can be stupid and an asshole, right? Now there's a double residency she could pull off.
She banished herself to the computer for more charting, but every furious keystroke felt like another stab into the heart of her fledgling career.
Time of death: 10:58 AM.
Santos buried her head in her hands and contemplated walking out of the Pitt unannounced, never to return. It might be inevitable anyway. Robby was leaving, his replacement didn't like her, and, if push came to shove, she didn't doubt that the rest of the ER would choose Langdon over her. Hell, for all she knew her girlfriend might choose him over her.
And it wasn’t even lunchtime.