We stare at each other for a prolonged moment.
“I take back what I said earlier. It seems as if you haven’t changed much at all,” I tell him. “Unfortunately, you’re just like I remembered.”
“And you’re still your own worst enemy.”
“Fine, then. Since you’re giving me no choice, I have to be there by ten.”
“I’m glad you’re finally seeing reason. We’ll leave at nine. It’s going to take at least a half hour to get uptown to Temple. Why the hell you choose to live so far from everything and everybody is beyond me. You live thirty minutes from work, an hour from home and you still refuse to learn how to drive.”
I’m petrified of people and their road rage. I don’t want the responsibility of being a defensive driver out on these mean streets.
“Is there anything my parents didn’t blab to you about me?”
“They didn’t have to tell me anything. You don’t have a car when your parents can definitely afford to give you one and the Uber app is on the home page of your phone. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why.”
“I’m supporting people who need to feed their families when I order an Uber.”
“Just be ready at nine and fair warning, Gigi, I’m not that nice in the morning.”
I pretend to be an officer paying respects to her dictator-like leader and give him a salute.
“Warning received, sir.”
Little does he know, I won’t even see his grumpy ass in the morning.
I'll be long gone.
Ten
Gigi
* * *
It was a long day at work today and mostly business as usual. Because I work as an independent contractor and not as a full-time employee, I don’t work every day, but when I am scheduled the days can be tough.
Today I worked with three different medical students. The first student had not familiarized herself with all the terms she needed to know for today's session, so she received a subpar evaluation by her professor and left the room in tears. The second one is an international student from Sri Lanka and while I think he has a great bedside manner, we often have difficulty understanding each other's accents. So when we do our patient scenes together, we have to take a lot more time than I would normally take with the others. My last student is my favorite student to work with. He's always worried that he will forget crucial information for our scenario work, but that is never the case. He's always prepared, enthusiastic about the scenes we do, and I think he's going to make an incredible doctor once he finds his confidence.
The people who work as standardized patients come from all walks of life. Most of the time, they’re people who need secondary income or folks who are in between jobs and have families to support. I'm probably the youngest one here with the least amount of responsibilities. I rarely go out for drinks or dinner with my coworkers for a lot of reasons, but tonight I may agree to go because I'm looking for any excuse not to go home and deal with Knox's wrath.
He's been texting me all day with angry messages because I tricked him this morning and left by myself at seven-thirty instead of nine. The truth was, I had to be at work by nine and not ten, and I didn’t want him as an escort, so I took matters into my own hands.
* * *
8:30 am
Jackass: Real cute what you did. Call me now.
9:30 am
Jackass: Ignoring me isn’t helping.
11:45 am
Jackass: You’re going to have something more to worry about than a shoe hitting your head when your ass walks through this door!
I admittedly have a great laugh as the texts come in. To me, they are worth the reprimand I know is coming when I return home tonight. I realize that leaving early was a one time “gotcha” trick, but at least for one more day I still have my independence and got one over on him.
“Did you see Carla crying in there?” my coworker Bernadette says to a group of us. “How is she going to be a doctor if she can’t memorize any of the presenting symptoms?”
