Chapter Five
Jo
This one is for my independent girls. You’ve been through it. You’ve been gaslit, you’ve been drained dry, you’ve been told
what you can and can’t achieve, and you’ve proven everyone wrong along the way. And because you’ve endured, you’ve decided
that you are strong. And I’m here to say: enough of that. Strong isn’t a personality trait. It’s a sign that you’re neglected
and not protected. It’s just as much evidence of your trauma as it is of your triumph. So this year, I say, enough with strength.
I’m entering my damsel era. I’m eating cake and being pretty and crying when I’m hurt, and apologizing for none of it. Won’t
you join me?
“Two weeks,” Denise said, her voice mosquito shrill through my earbuds. “You have screened my calls for two weeks, Josephine. How am I supposed to make us money if you can’t be reached?”
I rubbed my temples, flinching when I caught the edge of the motion reflected in my monitor. Respectfully, I looked like shit.
It was a small mercy Denise had accepted a phone call rather than the video she typically insisted on in order to keep me
honest.
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. How mad is Tanaka?”
“Not mad yet, but they’re definitely getting impatient,” Denise confessed. “I bought you forty-eight more hours. But forget
Tanaka. I’m mad! What the hell happened?”
Oh, Denise. Four years ago, when she’d approached me via DM to offer to manage my Dr.Jojobee influencer platform, I’d been
impressed enough with her gumption to give her a try. She was unaffiliated, her agency’s single-member LLC only recently incorporated,
and her client list had featured only one other physician-influencer, a dermatologist-slash-fashionista who turned out to
be one of Denise’s old high school friends. But Denise was hungry and no-nonsense and constantly on the hunt, and I liked
that about her. It meant she got me paid. Her ability to monetize my platform was the reason why I could survive without my
residency salary. And critically, she minded her business and only got heated up when someone tried to sabotage it.
And right now that someone was me.
“Nothing happened. I got a little behind,” I said. It was technically the truth. Nothing had happened. I’d dragged my feet
because I was tired. Of twirling around in gifted dresses that overstuffed my closets; recording pithy, unrelated “inspirational”
voice-overs; and selling myself to four hundred thousand onlookers when I probably should be getting off my ass and taking
care of patients.
An email from my old pulmonary critical care mentor, Dr.Makinen, echoed my sentiments.
Have you considered applying to fellowship next year? You would have the full support of the department. And you wouldn’t have to make your living making ticky tocks anymore.
I didn’t respond to Dr.Makinen. The truth was, the concept of walking back into the hospital filled me with bottomless dread,
matched only by the concept of putting together another video/ photoshoot/ promotional campaign for a company that wanted
to take advantage of my sizable following and the letters after my name to sell people shit they didn’t need. Alas, I needed
to eat, and to pay rent, and I was lacking in skills that could be used outside the wards. Check, meet mate.
“Tanaka doesn’t have to wait forty-eight hours,” I said. “The video’s done. I’m sending it to you now.”
The woman in the video I played back to myself looked up at the camera coquettishly over an ornate painted teacup, the puffy
periwinkle-blue tulle sleeves of her Tanaka Couture gown billowing around her like plumes of smoke. Her teeth were bright
white (Crest Whitestrips; $8,000 for a video post, six-month ad rights), lips a romantic crimson (ColourPop; $3,000 for the
feed), and hair plaited into passion twists that draped down her back and over the swell of her chest (-$350, because Fatou,
her humorless Senegalese braider, could care less that her favorite client had a social media following nearing half a million).
She was giving Black Girl Luxury. Black Girl Opulence. Black Girl with Expensive Taste.
But that was two weeks ago, and that same woman was now sitting cross-legged in her office chair and giving Black Girl in
Crisis. Black Girl in Desperate Need of a Shower. Black Girl Trying Her Best to Convince Her Agent Not to Drop Her Like a
Hot Rock.
I clicked “compile” on my video editing software, then dragged the finished file into Denise’s and my shared drive.
“I’ll check it out in a minute,” Denise said, mollified. “But, my dear Dr. Miracle? This can’t happen again. Seriously.”
She hung up, and I leaned back in my office chair. Light streamed through my blinds, streaking across my lap in bright stripes,
and I squinted at the window, marveling at the passage of time. It was almost eleven in the morning, seven hours after I’d
crawled out from under the stifling heat of my comforter and onto my desk chair. I’d never been a good sleeper, and the beating
my circadian rhythm had taken during the shifting schedule of residency had only made things worse. But since Ezra’s party,
sleep had eluded me completely. Putting my phone away hadn’t helped. Melatonin didn’t touch me. Even the fifty milligrams
of Benadryl I’d downed last night in a moment of desperation had only bought me a few hours of fitful rest before summoning
my sleep paralysis demon. (Daisy, I’d named her. She liked to ogle me from the ceiling.) At the moment, I was about one more
sleepless night away from concussing myself just to give my consciousness a break.
A sharp sound, too loud to be blocked by state-of-the-art manufactured silence, forced me out of my thoughts. I popped out
my earbuds, my heart ratcheting up to my throat. I was supposed to be alone. Dahlia wasn’t getting back from her travel nurse
contract until the twenty-eighth, and—
I checked the date on my phone. It was the twenty-ninth. Christ.
“When’d you get back?” I said, walking into the kitchen.
Dahlia twirled to face me, clutching a blue owl mug to her chest. Her silk floral robe was open to her navel, exposing a curling sternum tattoo and the arcs of breasts that had no business sitting so high on her chest. Even from ten feet away, I could hear pop music blasting through her headphones. She nudged them off her ear with her shoulder, placed her mug on the counter, and launched herself into my arms.
“You stink stink,” she said lovingly, holding me tighter when, self-conscious, I tried to pull away. “And I mean that in all the ways.
Left me on read for two whole days. Gave me absolutely zero intel about the Adelman shindig. And you smell like Fritos.”
I winced. I still wasn’t totally used to having my absence routinely noted by anyone other than the Adelmans, and between
Dahlia and Denise, it was almost stifling. Almost. Mostly it was nice.
“Sorry,” I said. “You know. Had a bit of a slump.”
One thing I appreciated about Dahlia was that she never performed pity. There were no upturned eyebrows, no protracted awww s, no empty claims of Well, if you need to talk about it, I’m here. When Dahlia and I had first met, the ink on her divorce papers barely dry, the ink on her arms hardly healed, she’d made
it clear that she had no intention of being the sort of woman people felt sorry for. I liked that about her, liked even more
that she insisted on extending the same courtesy to me.
“You been taking your happy pills?” Dahlia asked matter-of-factly, settling onto the cushioned seat at our kitchen bar.
“Yup,” I said, popping off the p as I dug through the cupboard for our French press.
“Okay then. Anything set it off?”
“Adelman shindig, probably,” I answered simply. “You want any?” I asked, shaking a bag of coffee grounds.
“I was going to do tea today. Preserve my stomach lining.” She tapped long coffin-shaped nails against our granite countertop.
“Speaking of tea. Are you going to spill?”
I sighed, stirring the mixture of grounds and boiling water with a chopstick, watching the rainbow slick of oil form at the top.
“Well, for one, Ezra’s dating my childhood bully,” I said plainly.
Dahlia placed her mug on the counter so firmly I had to check to make sure the ceramic hadn’t cracked.
“ What? ” she said, all the mirth draining from her face. Then: “Tell me everything.”
So I did, amazed by how I could recount the events without batting an eye, like I’d witnessed them from afar. Ashley weeping
in the atrium, Ezra marching me into the study to scold me, before dodging a very much needed, much overdue conversation about
what we were. Finding Malcolm Waters, the surprisingly cute writer who’d holed himself up in my bedroom, and discovering that apparently,
we’d been chatting for the last six years on my platform. How easily Mal had managed to help me forget my angst until the
source of said angst showed up and burst our bubble. I’d been so in my feelings afterward that I’d stormed away after dropping
Mal off with a particularly elusive Renata and probably looked like an enormous ass to whom he would never want to speak again.
She’s kind of a bitch in real life , I imagined him telling his friends.
“Why would you think that he thinks that?” Dahlia said when I was done. Predictably, she’d started with the juiciest tidbit,
which was that I, Josephine “he’s all right, I guess” Boateng, might be interested in someone other than Ezra.
“Because I was,” I said plainly. I remembered how he’d looked at me when I’d left him with Renata: knowingly, like he’d expected
me to disappoint him.
Dahlia shrugged.
“Maybe he likes that,” she said. She blew over her tea. “Look, I know Ezra is your friend and all that, but what would you even do if he’d told you he was secretly into you too? Do you want to be girlfriend number five hundred and fifty-two? Especially right after this Ashley chick?”
“Number nine,” I corrected quickly, slurping my too-hot coffee through pursed lips. As predicted, Dahlia had cut right to
the meat of the matter. “And no. No, I don’t think so. I think I need to figure myself out first.”
Romantic love, or at least what I’d seen of it, was flighty. You could love someone desperately for five years and never speak
to them again for the rest of your life. It made you do stupid things, like choose your best friend’s childhood bully over
her in a roomful of people, or let yourself get to twenty-nine with less sexual experience than the average sixteen-year-old
because you were waiting on a guy who made it clear that you were just his friend to change his mind.
Actually respecting and regarding another person for who they were, without the cascade of hormones and impingement of lust,
was more long-standing. And what I wanted from the Adelmans was preservation. When, the morning after the party, Renata sent
me a text reminding me that whatever issues Ezra and I were having had nothing to do with her and assuring me that she would even seat us at different tables at her upcoming Knydus Nest health benefit if I wanted, I’d
felt overwhelming relief, like I’d been released from an obligation. It was okay that I’d responded to Ezra’s litany of pleading
texts ( Where did you go? Did you leave? I don’t want to fight. Can you talk to me, please? ) with a true, simple I need space . It was okay that I’d unfollowed him on social media and put his calls on “straight to voicemail.” We were friends. When I was ready, maybe we could come back to that again. If we’d crossed any more lines, maybe recovery would have been impossible.
Dahlia had a similar revelation before, two years ago, after finalizing her divorce from her high school sweetheart, Jonathan.
Jonathan had been a dreamboat of a boyfriend for a teenager: sweet, prone to grand romantic gestures, the kind of good Catholic
boy that her friends in her junior praise group prayed for. But he hadn’t transitioned well into adulthood. His college major
in psychology was meant to become a PhD, lead to an academic career, but he’d dropped out three years in with a masters he
never intended to use. While Dahlia worked her way through nursing school, he was intermittently employed, grumbling about
how the world had wronged him, directing his frustration toward his wife. Eventually, he’d had an affair with a nineteen-year-old
coworker at Best Buy, and Dahlia, who had spent the latter part of their marriage suppressing and remolding herself to bring
back the great love of her youth, let go.
Away from her childhood home and childhood love, Dahlia had rediscovered herself. She learned that the obsessive admiration
she’d occasionally had for other women was actually attraction, that the nursing job that she’d spent years pretending to
feel fulfilled in was in fact destroying her spirit (and her back). So she quit her job, started taking travel nursing contracts
that sent her to intensive care units around the country on her own time, started dating ( see sobbing over) girls, and embraced her new identity as a “baby goth disaster bisexual.”
“You won’t die without romantic love. In fact, it’s statistically more likely to kill you,” she’d said after I first confided in her about my lack of experience. “But I also wish you’d put yourself out there. Your world won’t stop turning without Ezra Adelman in it. Maybe it’s time to move on.”
And now she was sitting across from me, grinning like the Cheshire cat.
“You just had an epiphany,” Dahlia observed. “And I hope it’s that you should hook up with the writer.”
I sputtered around my coffee.
“How did you come to that conclusion?” I said, exasperated. “Shouldn’t you be telling me I need to heal or something?”
“Is this what you call healing?” Dahlia said, gesturing to my admittedly pitiable state. “Sitting in your apartment, half-jobless,
weeping about the same guy who’s been stringing you along for ten years while your coochie continues to grow cobwebs?” I winced,
stung that she’d given a voice to my most critical thoughts. She tapped a nail next to my phone. “No, girl, it’s time to try
something different. Hit up the writer. I can tell you want to. If he doesn’t respond, no harm done. It’s time to get you
laid.”
Getting me laid was a ridiculous place to start, I thought. The first place should probably have been a shower. The second, a check-in with
my therapist.
And yet. And yet. I thought of Mal sitting next to me on the bed, how I’d known implicitly that I could have fallen asleep at his side and he’d
take off my heels and tuck me under the covers. How his top lip was ever so slightly darker than the bottom; how, for a brief
second when he’d smiled, I’d wondered how he’d react if I’d caught it between my teeth. I’d liked how pliant he’d been, how
easily he’d taken my hand when I offered it. I’d liked the firmness of his chest under my hand even better. Would I? I’d considered, already knowing that my answer was I would.
“No,” I said, wagging the thought from my head. “No, I can’t do that to Mal. He’s sweet, and I’m not sure I should be trying
to jump into a relationship right now. I don’t want to hurt him.”
“A relationship?” Dahlia said with a snort. “Be for real, woman. You said he feels safe, you find him attractive, and you’re
ready to jump-start your journey to find your inner goddess, or whatever. Just say, ‘Hey, I would like to have sex with you,
no strings attached,’ and see if he’s down.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “He won’t feel objectified?”
“He’s a guy, Jo,” Dahlia said, rolling her eyes. “He’ll probably think he won the lottery.”
I laughed to myself. It was funny how, despite running a sex-positive platform, I hadn’t considered that I could just ask Mal if he wanted to sleep with me. I had always been practical about sex, which was why I hadn’t yet had it. Pregnancy, sexually
transmitted diseases—all of those had seemed risks too great to take on a random person who would most likely prove less effective
at getting me off than a good vibrator. And critically, sex required trust, and I didn’t trust many people.
But I could see myself trusting Mal. Eventually. Enough to proposition him.
Five years ago, when I was but a wee innocent medical student who blushed whenever I asked my patients about their sexual
histories, this suggestion would’ve been nuts. But I was grown now, and hungry. Picky too. It would be good to strike now,
while Mal was still exciting, before he had a chance to say something stupid that would dry me out like a sponge in the Sahara.
“Okay, okay. I’ll message him. But not because you bullied me into it,” I added, when Dahlia’s smirk turned too smug. “But
because I want to.”
My heart hammered in my chest, and I willed it to slow, reminding myself that Malcolm Waters was just a person, and unlike him, I was very good with people. I typed a message, showed it to Dahlia. “How’s this?”
Dahlia took one look at the screen and cackled. “Woo boy, you’re good at this,” she said, fanning herself. “Send it.”
So I did.