F. Wilson - The Select

Tim glanced at Quinn and saw her blond head nod once, almost imperceptibly.

"But you should not lose sight of the fact that this is an important day for The Ingraham as well. You are the cream of the crop. Your college careers are testimonies to your desire to strive for and your ability to achieve excellence. You are the people we want as Ingraham students, as Ingraham graduates. This is not a situation of you, the individual, against us, the institution. We're not trying to keep any of you out. We want you here. We'd love to take you all. We wish we could afford to take you all. Unfortunately, the Kleederman Foundation's funds are finite.

"But for those of you who are accepted, what a world will be opened to you! Not only will you receive the gift of the finest medical education in the world, but you will have a chance to go out and shape the future of American medicine, to make it the model and envy of every country on Earth.

"So I wish you all well in today's examination. And please remember that no matter what happens in the coming months, each and every one of you is already a winner. I know I speak for The Ingraham College of Medicine and the Kleederman Foundation when I say that we are proud of all of you."

More applause. Tim clapped mechanically.

"Amazing," he said. "Platitudes trip off his tongue as if they'd sprung into his mind de novo ."

Quinn looked at him sharply. "I think it was very nice of him to take the time and come speak to us. I mean we're just applicants. None of us has even been accepted yet. Give him a break, will you?"

Tim winced. He was not scoring points with Quinn.

Why was he attracted to this twitchy, type-A ingenue anyway? She was sweet-looking, bright, and she had a nice butt. So what? The same could be said of plenty of other girls he knew. Obviously she disapproved of him and his style. So what else was new? Plenty of people disapproved of him. He liked it when uptight people disapproved of him. He reveled in it. So why did her little put down bother him?

And why the hell was he racking his brain now for a way to mollify her?

Matt, ever the peacemaker, said, "Tim doesn't trust politicians."

"Senator Whitney isn't a politician. He heads a foundation."

"The fact that everybody still calls him Senator Whitney says something," Tim said. "I hear he spends most of his time lobbying his old cronies at the Senate. Once a politician, always a politician." Tim raised his orange juice glass in Whitney's direction. "But if he's going to foot the bill for med school for me, he's a prince."

Another cool look from Quinn. This was going nowhere. He took his empty plate and stood up.

"Seconds anyone?"

*

Tim chewed the eraser on the back end of his #2 pencil as he considered question number 200.

The test was a bitch.

A lot like the MCAT only worse. The biology questions were off the wall. The chemistry questions were even tougher. This baby was out to separate the men from the boys, not to mention the women from the girls.

Tim glanced around. About twenty-five of the hopefuls had been seated in this classroom, the rest were scattered through the class building. Nothing special here. Green chalk board across the front of the room, gray tile floor, overhead fluorescents, a pair of TV monitors suspended from the ceiling, and one-piece desks. Only the life-size skeleton hanging in the rear corner offered any clue that the room was on a medical school campus. In the seat to his left, Quinn's brow was furrowed in concentration as her foot beat a soft, nervous tattoo on the floor. To his right, Matt was hunched over his exam booklet, scribbling figures on his scratch sheets. All around Tim, nervous people trying to score for their future.

He could almost hear them sweat.

Not that Tim was taking this lightly himself. His folks could manage to send him to med school, but it wouldn't be pocket change like for Matt's family—not even close. They'd have to make some sacrifices, maybe get a home equity loan, but they'd find a way to come up with it. And gladly. Still, it would make things a hell of a lot easier for them if Tim got accepted here.

But taking pressure off his family was only part of why he was sweating this exam. A small part. The big part was being free. Making it into The Ingraham would be a sort of declaration of independence. No more checks for dad to write for tuition, room, and board. For the first time Tim would be one hundred percent self-sufficient. He'd feel like a man. That would be great.

But question 200 was strange.

It asked for the first corollary of the Kleederman equation. No problem there. Tim knew the answer. Trouble was, he couldn't figure out how he knew it.

Usually he could simply picture the book, page, and paragraph where he'd read about any given subject. It just came to him, as naturally and easily as breathing. He remembered how as a kid he used to wow the grown-ups at family gatherings. Someone would hand him a driver license, he'd glance at it, hand it back, then reel off every letter and number on it. Next he'd do a page from a magazine, and then go to his grand finale: a page from the phone book. They thought he was a genius, but Tim came to understand that his ability had nothing to do with intelligence—it was simply the way his brain worked.

But what about now? Johann Kleederman—Tim could see before him a page from U.S. News & World Report , an article on Kleederman and his foundation. Born in Switzerland in 1935, where he and his wealthy parents weathered World War Two. Johann took over the reins of the family pharmaceutical company after his father's death in 1960, and immediately began a rapid extension into the U.S. market. He set up his Foundation in 1968, and became a pioneer of managed health care during the seventies. He'd spent the latter half of the eighties and early nineties buying up nursing homes and turning financially-troubled hospitals into medical centers, a move considered by many to be eccentric and financially risky. Still, the medical centers and nursing homes controlled by Kleederman Medical Industies, a multinational conglomerate that included the innovative and extraordinarily profitable Kleederman Pharmaceuticals, were considered the best managed, most cost-effective healthcare facilities in the world. Tim even could see an old photo of the reclusive, balding, mutton-chop-sideburned Kleederman in the upper left corner of the page.

But the Kleederman equation? Nothing in the article about that. No picture came. Just the answer.

Tim gave a mental shrug and blackened the "B" box next to 200 on his answer sheet. Who cared? When the sheet went through the grading computer, the machine wasn't going to ask how anyone got the answer. It was only going to note if the response was correct or incorrect.

And correct was definitely better.

The next two questions also referred to the Kleederman equation. These answers too popped unbidden into his mind. So be it. He marked them down and went on.

The questions changed after that. Science segued into general knowledge. Tim had seen some of this on the MCAT, but there was much more of it here—from who won last year's World Series to the name of the Impressionist who painted "Starry Night" to the first name of the 18th-century British cabinet maker for whom the Chippendale style was named.

Tim smiled to himself. He knew what The Ingraham was up to: trying to weed out the science nerds, the oddballs who spent their entire lives hunching over microscopes or squinting at computer monitors without ever looking out the window to see what was going on in the world. They might be brilliant, they might be able to breeze through the toughest p-chem questions, but they fit the definition of culturally deprived. They'd make great researchers, but a medical degree would be wasted on them. They could be doctors but never physicians . And the Ingraham wanted to graduate physicians.