F. Wilson - The Select

"I'd like to speak to you a moment, Mr. Harrison," Dr. Emerson said.

He took the younger man aside and did most of the talking. Quinn couldn't hear much of what was being said but caught brief snatches such as, "—if you wish to keep your stipend—" and "—no place for one-upmanship—"

Finally Harrison nodded and turned away, moving toward the far side of the lab. Dr. Emerson, too, moved on, not bothering to stop at their table.

"You set that up, didn't you," Quinn said.

"'Hoist with his own petard.'"

"Easy," Quinn said. " Hamlet . But does this mean I have two guardian angels here?"

Tim smiled. "Could be."

*

"I don't know if I can handle this."

Judy Trachtenberg was speaking, holding a forkful of prime rib over her plate and staring at it. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, she wore no make-up, and looked very pale. She and her roomie Karen Evers occupied the room next to Quinn's. She'd hooked up with them on the way to the caf. Tim and his roommate Kevin Sanders, a big black guy, a quiet type who didn't say much, had joined their table.

"If it's too rare for you," Tim said, "I'll take it."

Judy rolled her eyes and returned to fork to her plate.

"I'm not talking about the food . I'm talking about this... this whole medical school thing."

"This is only the first day," Quinn said. "It'll get better. It has to."

She said it to encourage herself as much as Judy. She knew exactly how she was feeling. Like Judy she'd found today almost overwhelming.

"I can handle the courses easily enough," Judy said. "I mean, give me a textbook, put me in a class, and I can learn anything. But these labs . Have you seen the lab schedule? Every afternoon! And Anatomy Lab has got to be the worst ! Am I right?"

A chorus of agreement from the table.

She went on. "I mean, I've washed my hands half a dozen times since we got out of lab and they still smell like formaldehyde—and I was wearing gloves ! My God, I still smell it. It must have gotten into my nose . I mean, even the food tastes like formaldehyde. I don't know if I can handle a whole year of this."

Quinn sniffed her own fingers. Yes, there was a hint of formaldehyde there. She'd thought she'd tasted it for a while, but that was gone now. Maybe Judy was more sensitive to it—or more dramatic. Either way, she was not a happy camper.

"Does that mean you're not going to eat your meat?" Tim said, eying Judy's plate.

Judy shoved it toward him. "Here. Be my guest. Eat till you burst. Doesn't any of this bother you?"

Tim speared the prime rib from Judy's plate and placed it on his own.

"Sure," he said. "It's sickening. But I don't dwell on it. It's something you've got to get through. And if you can't handle it, maybe you shouldn't be a doctor."

Judy reddened. "I don't intend to practice on preserved corpses. I plan to have living patients."

"Right. But you've got to have a certain amount of intestinal fortitude, got to walk through some fires along the way to get to those living patients. If you can't handle this, how are you going to handle spurting blood and spilling guts when people are calling you doctor and looking to you for an answer?"

Quinn watched fascinated as Tim somehow managed to cut his meat, poke it into his mouth, chew a couple of times, and swallow, without breaking the rhythm of his speech. His expression was intent—on his food—but his words struck a resonant chord within Quinn: You do what you have to do.

Maybe she and Tim weren't so different after all.

"Looking at the way you eat that red meat," Judy said, "I can see you've got no fear of blood and guts."

Amid the laughter, Tim grinned and held up his knife.

"Okay. How about this? We've all met the estimable Mr. Harrison, haven't we?"

Nods and groans all about the table.

"A dork of the first water," Judy said.

"Indisputably. But consider the fact that he's a second-year student. That means he took whatever The Ingraham threw at him in his first year and came through. In your moments of self-doubt, gird yourself with this little thought: I will not be less than Harrison."

Judy stared into Tim's sunglasses for a few seconds, nodding slowly, then she reached across the table and retrieved the remainder of her prime rib.

"I will not be less than Harrison," she said.

Amid the applause, Quinn looked at Tim and made a startling discovery.

I like you, Tim Brown. I like you a lot.

But she'd never tell him that.

CHAPTER NINE

Tim's head was killing him as he pulled into The Ingraham's student parking lot. He leaned forward and gently rested his forehead on the steering wheel.

Jack Daniel's...too much Jack Daniel's. It happened every time someone talked him into trying some sour mash.

He shook himself and straightened. He'd made it from Baltimore in forty minutes—record time—but he hadn't raced all that distance just to take a nap in the parking lot. He glanced at his watch. Two minutes to get to Alston's lecture. He jumped out of the car and hurried toward the class complex. He eyed the security cameras high on the corners of the buildings, wondering if they were eying him.

As the days had stretched into weeks, Tim had found himself falling into the rhythm of The Ingraham's class and lab schedule. The basic first-year courses were mostly rote. Anatomy, pathology, and histology were purely memory. Biochemistry and physiology were more analytical, but still mostly regurgitated facts. And regurgitating facts was Tim's specialty. Poor Quinn needed hours of crunch study to master what he could absorb in minutes.

So he'd found himself getting bored. Sure there was the roving bull session in the dorm, but he could take only so much of speculating and arguing about the future of medicine. Novels and his tape collection could hold his interest only so long. With everybody's head but his own buried in a book most of the time, he'd begun to feel like the only seeing, speaking person in a land populated by the deaf and blind.

The only answer was to get off campus. The nearby county seat of Frederick was little better than staying on campus. He needed a city. Baltimore and Washington were the two obvious choices.

He was passing the pond when he heard a familiar voice.

"Where have you been?"

He turned and saw Quinn hurrying up the walk behind him. He stopped to wait for her, nodding to others he knew as they swirled past him. She looked great but he didn't want her to get too close. He figured he had a terminal case of morning mouth.

"Miss me?" he said.

"I was looking for you last night. Kevin told me you took off after dinner. God, you look awful. Where on earth have you been?"

"Baltimore."

He knew a little about the city. Some guys he'd hung with in high school had gone to Loyola and he'd made a few trips down there during his four years at Dartmouth. But last night he'd headed for downtown, far from Loyola's suburban neighborhood. He'd hit Baltimore Street: The Block. Baltimore's down-sized equivalent of New York's West 42nd Street or Boston's Combat Zone.

He hadn't gone there for the porn shops, the peep shows, the strippers, or the whores. He'd gone for the games. He'd learned on his past visits that there were a couple or three backroom card games in progress on any given night, games with stakes high enough to make things interesting.

Trouble was, they hardly ever played blackjack. Poker, poker, poker was all these guys cared about. Tim knew he was a decent poker player, but nothing close to what he was in blackjack. Still, he was desperate for some action, and Atlantic City was too far.