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“Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Yeah, sure,” Cassie scratches her chin and puts her tablet away, “What’s up?”
“It’s about, um…,” Victoria lowers her voice, “boys.”
“Boys? I might be a few decades too late for that.”
Victoria shifts on the balls of her feet. The comment makes her feel topsy-turvy, somehow.
“Hey, Samira?” Cassie calls out, spotting the senior resident on her way to the nurse’s station, “did you get the results back on our escalator guy?”
“Nope. Still waiting.”
Cassie pouts. Victoria charges ahead (well, figuratively. Not literally).
“Let me guess. Does this have anything to do with one curly-haired nurse?” Cassie teases, testing the waters. She’s always doing that in some way. Testing.
Victoria smiles shyly, “We went out for coffee a few months ago, while I was doing my rotation in internal medicine.”
“Oh, I forgot to ask-how was that? Anything catch your eye?”
“Nothing stuck, no. I really missed it here. Here, specifically, not- upstairs. Anyway, we’ve been talking more and…,” Victoria pauses, waiting for her brain to catch up with her mouth. Or was it the other way around? “He’s great. He listens, doesn’t talk about himself all the time like some of the other boys I’ve had the misfortune of going on dates with.”
Cassie’s mouth quirks. “That’s great, Javadi. Him and…I’m glad you’re putting yourself out there.”
They start walking to South Central, their shoulders bumping along the way, to their patient who’d lost a toe in a rollercoaster ride. 23-year-old woman, tachy on arrival but otherwise normal vitals. McKay crouches down to inspect the area (swollen, severed distal phalanx, bleeding stopped) and orders some more pain meds.
The woman comments on Javadi’s Tiktok and she ducks her head as they leave. Cassie pays no mind.
McKay pushes the door out and holds it open for Javadi to pass through, then soaps up her hands and says, “Hey, I know I don’t have the best track record when it comes to dishing out advice. I mean, I- I saw how it went down with your mom and I…I wanted to apologize for that. I don’t know the dynamic between you guys, I think I may have been projecting,” Cassie sucks in a breath, “Your business is your business, I just thought…”
“No, please. Don’t apologize for that,” Victoria waves her off. The mere thought of McKay saying sorry to her is ridiculous, “I know you just wanted to help.”
“Okay,” McKay says, nodding. “Now, what’s on your mind?”
“I think he wants to. Go further, I mean.”
Cassie stiffens. Just barely, but it’s there. Victoria’s stomach swirls. Suddenly this feels wrong. She feels the eyes of everyone she’s ever acquiesced with on the back of her neck.
On Cassie’s next inhale, Victoria thinks about the harsh lines of her mother’s face.
“Is everything alright?” Victoria asks. She says it to herself just as much as she does to McKay.
“Yeah. It’s just…weird, thinking about your coworkers,” she shakes her head, as if to put the image out of her mind, “did I ever tell you Chad thought me and Mateo were a thing? It’s like- wow.”
“Wow,” Victoria repeats uselessly, “That’s…”
Cassie laughs. Then, they both laugh. It occurs to Victoria that there’s nobody else she’d rather come to for this. McKay doesn’t make her feel like some silly kid. She feels like her own person, maybe someone she could even begin to like.
Still…it remains. That changing tide. Victoria is reminded of the way McKay looked at her in the room with Roxie, that deep-blue porous stare, beckoning something from her, bargaining. Cassie always looks. And it’s through this looking that Victoria thinks she comes to understand that she knows nothing about the world, not really, that knowing books and how to treat metacarpal fractures pales in comparison to the simple pleasure of someone else’s hand in your own. Having the bravery to reach out and touch.
Mateo’s hand was clammy, but warm. Her stomach swirls again.
“I can’t talk to my mother about this,” Victoria blurts out, then recovers, “I mean, clearly.”
“Yeah, I get what you mean,” Cassie’s hand finds the back of her neck. Victoria wonders idly if she needs a massage, “My mother never had that talk with me. She just…sat me down once and said, ‘boys will be boys’.”
Victoria didn’t know if she wanted boys to be boys.
“Not the most helpful advice.”
The corner of Cassie’s mouth turns upwards. She heads to her workstation, begins typing on the computer, “Yeah, well. Different generations. Don’t know how much attitudes have actually changed though…that’s why I’m worried what my son will be exposed to when he gets older, you know? I know I can’t monitor everything, but the internet, locker room talk..”, she pinches the bridge of her nose.
“He’s a good kid,” Victoria offers.
“The best,” Cassie agrees, eyes still glued to the screen.
Victoria wonders if Cassie is thinking of that troubled kid from her first day, the one who spun out rumors that he was the Pittfest shooter. She realizes she does this a lot, makes a game out of what she suspects Cassie is thinking about. She is wracked, suddenly and violently, with the need to know exactly what Cassie thinks of her, in explicit detail.
“Well, I don’t-“ Victoria picks at a piece of fuzz on her jacket, “I guess I just wondered…emotionally? Like, what do guys want?”
McKay gets that look again. Like Victoria is seven years old and her parents told her to leave her scab alone, don’t scratch it, you’ll make yourself bleed…
“That is a very loaded question.”
“Reading is different than doing,” Javadi says, whipping around to face McKay fully after she’d spun to locate the source of a crashing sound, spoken like she’s just uncovered some great, fossilized truth. What, does she want a head pat for it? Reading is different than doing.
“That is very true,” she stops typing and turns to Victoria, “Look, when I was your age, I made some pretty reckless decisions. Got caught up with the wrong crowd, and let them…,” Cassie breaks off. The sterile fluorescent lights seem especially loud, “let them do things that I didn’t…the point is, communicate with your partner, okay? And don’t let anyone pressure you into anything. The world is your oyster and all that, but safety is the number one priority.”
“I wasn’t planning on it. And I have protection,” Victoria omits the obviously she wants to tack on to the end of that sentence. Of course she’d prepared.
“That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Victoria echoes, noticing and not-noticing the way Cassie lingers, the tendons of her hand flexing out, extensor digitorium, extensor indicis…
“Do you talk to everyone like this?”
“What?”
Victoria realizes she’s just teetered over the edge of something she had no business approaching in the first place. She feels…proud? Exhilarated?
“I talk to different people in different ways, Dr. Javadi. Would’ve thought you’d noticed that by now.”
Regret curls in her gut at Victoria’s shellshocked expression.
“I - I’ve been seeing someone, too,” Cassie offers, extending an olive branch in an attempt to clear the air, to pacify whatever tension has nudged itself between them, “went on our third date last week, actually.”
“Was he nice?”
Cassie smiles. “Yeah. He is.”
“Did you…go there?”
For some reason, Cassie looks despondent. “Yes. I- we did.”
“I’m sorry if this is making you uncomfortable,” Victoria decides she needs to add, on account of the whole ghostly-despondent look.
McKay just sighs, almost wistfully.
“It isn’t you. I’m just a little rusty in this department. It’s taken a while to get here, you know?”
Victoria doesn’t know. But she agrees as if she does, then swallows, turns away. Wonders how much of this was really about Mateo.
ETA three minutes on an incoming trauma, Dana relays to them. Victoria pockets her notepad and glances once more at McKay, who is already looking back.
She looks at Victoria and she sees herself. She sees brilliance. She sees life’s possibility undercutting everything. A kind of buoyancy she’d never have allowed herself to imagine.
Something will happen to her and she will happen to something, to someone. She will be the sun and the planets orbiting around it. She will touch and she will love, and whoever is the recipient of her gracious, extended hand will never truly know how lucky they are. And Cassie will be there for none of it.
“Thanks, McKay.”
Cassie sets her jaw and nods, their conversation over. This was nothing at all.