Willow interjected, “Are there any Disney movies where the birds actually sing songs?”
“No, weirdly, they usually tweet,” Simone said, establishing that she was the resident movie expert. “A lot of mice sang. Some bears. The crows sang that one time, but they’ve been canceled. Also, that creepy suicidal firefly.”
“You said Clarissa’s different,” Roan interrupted to move back to a topic he cared about. “Is she okay?”
“Sometimes,” Simone said. Her next words had a lot of meaning. “Make her feel good.”
This time she wasn’t making a sex joke. “That’s the only thing I want for her.”
The door opened down the hallway and Clarissa came out. Her roommates abruptly changed their postures, pretending they hadn’t just been bickering or talking about her.
Roan’s heart both leapt and lurched at the sight of her. She was in a bright blue dress, and her hair was pulled back into low-slung pigtails. She erased the tiredness from her features, smiling when she saw Roan. “Hey there.”
He reached for her coat from the hook nearby and said, “You ready to go? I was just chatting with your roommates.”
She made a show of checking the expressions of both of her roommates. “Oh no. Did they ask you weird questions? I’m not responsible for that. I never talk about us, really.”
“It’s fine. They’re your friends,” Roan said, trying not to over-examine her in the context of what Simone had mentioned. Instead, he zipped up her jacket and took the notorious mittens out of her pockets. “Let’s make sure these stay in your coat this time.”
She stuck her adorable little tongue out at him and held up a photo of Tank on her phone to her roommates. “Tristan’s still sending me random text messages. If you see this guy—I sent you his picture—don’t just run, go full duck and cover.”
Willow winked. “Oh, don’t worry. I’m the world’s best secret keeper. Even better than the Harry Potter secret keepers.”
Simone re-covered the Ramen and drained the water into the sink. “Bad choice. Every single secret keeper in the Harry Potter series was terrible at their job. Becoming the secret keeper is the guarantee that the people you’re trying to keep the secret of will be dead.”
“It only happened five or ten times. Which is fewer times than sentient beings becoming Horcruxes. Well, I mean, they could also be turned into a snake sometimes when they’re not a real person. Or be a Horcrux,” Willow said.
“Okay, I am so out. You two enjoy yourselves. May the best doctor basketball team win.” Clarissa laughed at them, grinning up at Roan.
He took her arm and led her out of her row house to his waiting SUV. He even helped her into the car and made sure she was strapped in before he got in himself.
They started driving, and he was still turning over what Simone had said in his mind. Clarissa, however, was chipper and chirpy. “So, I got almost two hours of sleep on my last call. After, I got to go to bed for a whole eight hours, and, even though you weren’t there, it was still pretty good sleep.”
He cracked a smile. “I promise not to keep you up too late.”
“I’m okay with it if you make it worth my while. You can review the Mallampati scores with me.”
“I don’t see how that’s kinky sexy,” he said. “Nor is it that difficult.”
“Yeah, my next upcoming lecture that I’m giving to the peds residents is pediatric airways. One more this month, then I’ll ignore all of that because I’ll be in the NICU, and Mallampati scores for airways probably doesn’t apply.”
“Newborns generally don’t have tonsils,” he agreed.
“If you’ve ever been to the NICU, sometimes they don’t even have mouths,” she said, a morbid but sad truth about the congenital deformities that came through the NICU.
He decided to take the risk of opening the pediatric cancer can of worms. “Is everything going okay with you at work?”
“There’re no issues,” she said too quickly. “Why are you asking?”
“You’re the same year as Simone, and she seems kind of tired.” He went with using a tried-and-true method of deflecting but still addressing the problem.
“She should be. Her patients have a lot higher mortality rate than mine. And second year, you’re doing a lot of the same stuff but it’s heavier,” she said in a way he did understand.
“It’s probably because you have the same amount of control as an intern with a lot more responsibility.” He saw the similar weight in a few of the surgery and intern residents, provided they weren’t hooking up with paramedics.
“We’re residents this year, no scaredy-cat interns,” she said.
“True, but as an intern, your senior residents were monitoring you and making sure you weren’t making mistakes. Now you have to monitor the interns and your own patients. Twice the work and no one is checking your work.”
