Fight, Flight, or Freeze: The Healer's Story
Chapter 33: First Day Of Med School

Chapter 33: First Day Of Med School

His question made me pause. I didn’t want to flat-out admit to being eight; I wasn’t prepared to lie to him like that. But at the same time, what do I say? No, I’m not eight. My soul was a 25-year-old woman who was preying on you.

Yeah, that sounded a lot creepier than just lying my ass off and hoping he never notices.

"Understood," he said quietly. "You’ll have to tell me that answer when you are comfortable. Something tells me that there is a story behind your silence."

"Yeah," I admitted. Whether I was admitting to being eight or that there was a story, we both knew the answer.

"So, you are going to just up and leave? Your mom knows you have a cell phone, right?" I joked, trying to infuse some fun back into the conversation.

"Yeah, but no cell phones are allowed during basic training. I don’t know what she is thinking," he muttered.

"Maybe she just doesn’t want me for a daughter-in-law. Who knows. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t change anything," I pointed out. If he thought I was worried about something as stupid as a MIL not liking me, he never grew up where I did. MILs were more like a mild annoyance than anything else.

"Anyways—" he changed the subject, talking about how excited he was for me to get into med school. I hummed and nodded appropriately, but my mind was still going on about all the plans I had made in the bathroom. Could I really do it all?

"I’ll start up a joint account for the two of us and put the money from the military in there. Use it however you want." Sometimes, I really wondered if he could read minds.

"Will do," I said, my voice happy. Now, I didn’t have to go to Mom and Dad to get the money I needed to start my hoarding plans.

----

Graduation came and went. I was shocked to know that I had scored number one in the university entrance exams. There was no such thing as entrance exams in Canada. Universities either accepted you or didn’t based on your marks.

But I kicked ass, so I was happy.

I hadn’t talked to Bai Long Qiang since graduation, but that was fine. A quick shift of my app and I could easily see where he was.

But now, it was September again, and I was about to start my first year of med school.

I wasn’t nervous, not like most of the people around me on campus. However, this was not my first rodeo; I had been and graduated from med school before, so everything should be the same.

"Awe, look at you; you are so cute! Whose sister are you?" asked a girl, coming up to me and crouching down so our faces were level. "Please tell me you have a hot brother," she continued, giggling to the girl who was still standing beside us.

"I am here for my first year," I deadpanned. I wasn’t here to make friends. In fact, if people thought that doctors went into medicine to help people and be all lovey-dovey, then they had another thing coming. There was no one more competitive than doctors. Grades, attention, food... it didn’t matter. If you could compete for it, we did.

And the losers were forced to drop out.

There were never enough spaces for doctors, it seemed. Most internships took maybe three or four of the top students, and that would depend on how many interns they already had. As far as every serious person here was concerned, there was only one position handed out at the end of the day, and we were more than willing to draw blood for it.

I smiled at her and showed my teeth. "And there is no way you are getting close to Big Brother, so look elsewhere."

Everyone wanted their own Dr. McDreamy. The medical dramas on TV show a lot more of the personal drama of the doctors than actual medicine. The first two years were nothing but weeding out the ones that didn’t take this seriously from those that did.

She snorted at me and rose to her feet, flipping her hair at the same time to let me know that I was being brushed off. That’s fine. I’ll be the assassin they never see coming.

The doors to the hall in front of us were opened, and we all filed into the amphitheater. It was very much a typical theater, but instead of coming in from the bottom, we came in from the top. Most people loved this, picking seats in the last few rows until they were all filled up.

Not me. I continued my way down the steep steps, my pink bookbag on my shoulder and the textbook in my arms. I had a very strategic place to sit, and I was not above shanking a bitch to keep it.

My preferred seating was three rows from the bottom, right in front of the podium. The first two rows were too close if the teacher turned out to be a spitter... trust me, I had to learn that the hard way at U of T.

But the third row was out of range, and sitting right in front of the podium meant that the professor would be able to see and remember my face.

There are only two crucial things to know in a class of almost 300 people. The teacher needed to know what you looked like and your name. If you could manage those two things, you were set for life.

Picking my chair, I sat down and started laying out my stuff. I knew I was an audio learner, so I could easily remember anything I heard. Reading and/or writing it down was a completely different story.

So I took out my laptop and set that up for audio, and then I took out paper and multicolored pens. I would be able to concentrate on just copying the slides or notes while listening to the professor, while the laptop did its job of recording everything so I could go back to it later.

I was ready for the first day of class. Now, all I needed was my professor.