2. Kristen
KRISTEN
Third year of med school.
The anatomy study room is quiet. It's that particular kind of late where the building settles into itself, and the janitor's cart is a distant rattle somewhere two floors below. Most students have gone home. But I'm not most students, and after tonight, I am going to destroy Logan Maxwell.
We're both prepping for the surgical clerkship honors evaluation, which only one of us can win, and I've been here since six, straight from class, no break, while he strolled in at eight looking like he'd had time to go home, shower, maybe grab dinner with friends, and would still get a full night's sleep before tomorrow.
Not a single crease on him, not a hint of stress.
Just annoyingly handsome and completely unbothered.
I catch the thought and correct myself. Not handsome. That implies I've thought about it, which I haven't. He's just objectively good-looking the same way tall people are tall. It's a fact.
Anyway, that's the thing about Logan. Everything comes to him like it's easy, and he never lets you see the work, which makes me want to beat him even more.
He's across the table from me now, half-buried in a textbook, his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. He pushes them back up without looking, this absent little gesture he does a hundred times a day, and I probably shouldn't notice it, but I do, and that annoys me too.
"You sure you want to challenge me, Maxwell?" I flip my flashcards without looking up. "You know how competitive I get. If there's one thing I hate, it's peas and losing."
"That's two things."
"They're tied for first spot."
He smiles. I hate that smile. It's small and barely there, and it makes girls in our year lose their train of thought mid-sentence. Pathetic. It doesn't work on me. Absolutely not. I flip another card.
I will destroy this human who rations his expressions like they cost money.
A nod here, a raised brow there. Meanwhile, I'm over here with every thought written across my face, which he loves pointing out because it gets a reaction, and getting a reaction out of me is apparently his favorite pastime.
More than studying and more than the six cups of black coffee he drinks every day 'for fun' and not because he needs the caffeine.
We quiz each other for the next hour, and it's brutal.
He fires questions at me, I fire them back, and every time one of us gets something wrong, the other pounces on it like the answer is blood in the water.
He's good—annoyingly so—but so am I, and he knows it, because halfway through he stops leaning back in his chair and actually sits forward, elbows on the table, glasses pushed up properly, fully locked in.
That's how I know I'm pushing him. Logan Maxwell doesn't sit up for just anyone.
"Branches of the external carotid," he says.
I roll my eyes, then rattle off all eight without blinking. "Too easy. Give me something harder."
"You got the last two in the wrong order."
"No, I didn't."
"You did."
"Maxwell, I swear to God—"
"Check the textbook." He slides it across the table, and his fingers brush mine, and neither of us pulls away for a second too long. I grab the book, flip to the page, and I'm right, obviously, so I shove it back at him with a look that says everything my mouth doesn't.
He reads it, adjusts his glasses, then nods once. "Fine. You got lucky."
"Lucky?" I lean forward across the mess of notes between us. "I'm better than you, and it physically pains you to admit it."
"Keep telling yourself that, Portland. I'll let you have the small wins."
I throw a flashcard at his head and he catches it without looking. He smiles that same stupid, annoying smile again, and I hate him a little less.
Whatever.
That was ten years ago. That girl was someone else.
The memory fades the way they always do, quick at the edges and slow at the center, and I'm back in the present—standing in the hallway of a hospital where that same man is now my attending. Where I've spent the last two days making sure he never looks directly at me.
It's not hard. During rounds, I stay at the back of the group and hold my tablet up like I'm reviewing charts.
I keep it angled just high enough to cover my face, which is pathetic and I know it, but it is also working.
He hasn't spoken to me since the trauma activation when I handed him instruments and matched his rhythm and then froze solid when he pulled his mask down.
Two days of this. Two days of sliding behind taller residents, ducking into supply closets when I hear his voice echo off the corridor tiles, timing my coffee runs to miss the routes he takes between the OR and his office.
Yesterday, I heard him coming around the corner near the nurses' station and detoured through the dirty utility room.
I stood between a biohazard bin and a rack of soiled linens for four minutes, staring at the ceiling, listening to his footsteps pass.
A nurse walked in, saw me, opened her mouth to ask, and I said, "Inventory check," with a straight face, then left before she could follow up.
I've memorized his schedule faster than any rotation material I've ever studied, and the irony is not lost on me. I once spent four years trying to outpace this man academically; now I'm using that same focus to avoid being in the same hallway as him.
I keep my answers short when the other attendings ask questions. I stay competent but quiet. I do my job, I help my patients, I write my notes on time, and I treat the head of trauma surgery like a weather system I need to route around.
Because if Logan recognizes me, he'll have questions. I can see them already, clear as a differential. Where have you been? Why is there such a gap in your CV? Why are you a PGY-3 at thirty-five when you graduated the same year I did? What happened to you, Portland?
And the answers to those questions lead to rooms I've boarded shut.
My method works until the third day.
He's running rounds himself. The group of us trails behind him, bed to bed, and there's a different energy when he leads.
The other attendings ask questions to teach, but he asks questions to test. With him, the residents stand a little straighter and a little more still, braced for whatever he throws at them.
He stops at a bedside and asks about the management of a splenic laceration.
Grade three, hemodynamically stable. The question waits in the air while the other residents shuffle through their mental notes.
I already have the answer. I've had it since before he finished the sentence.
It's right there, from start to finish, and ten years ago I would have said it before anyone else had the chance to open their mouth.
I stay behind my tablet.
He waits, then looks right at me. My breath hitches.
"You. At the back. Behind the tablet. What's the answer?"
My stomach drops.
I lower the tablet an inch and answer quietly, barely louder than the monitor beeping at the bedside. If I keep my head down and I'm quick enough, maybe he'll take the answer and move on.
"I can't hear you." His voice isn't harsh, but it's sharp. It fills the hallway the same way it fills an operating room, like he doesn't have to try. "Put the tablet down."
I lower it, and my chin dips because I cannot look at him straight on, not yet.
I repeat the answer. Louder this time. "Non-operative management with serial abdominal exams, hemoglobin monitoring every six hours, and an ICU bed for observation.
CT angiography if there's any contrast blush suggesting active extravasation. "
The silence weighs down just long enough for me to feel every pair of eyes in the group shift toward me.
"Correct." He pauses, then adds, quieter but still loud enough for the group, "Next time, answer like you mean it. You're not doing anyone a favor hiding back there."
He moves on to the next bed, the other residents shuffle forward, and I stand rooted for a second too long before my legs remember how to work, pushing me back into step at the rear of the pack, my tablet at my side now because what's the point.
He didn't recognize me, I don't think. He called me you, not Portland. But he looked at me, and being looked at by Logan Maxwell is like standing in front of an imaging machine. And even if he didn't see me fully today, he caught enough to look harder next time.
After rounds, I try to shake it off. I chart at the nurses' station, keeping my handwriting steady while my pulse takes its time settling. I check on Walter, who takes one look at me and narrows his eyes.
"You look like you've swallowed something that disagreed with you," he says from his bed, arms crossed like a man who has nowhere to be and all day to study the people who do. "And it wasn't the cafeteria food, because even you're not that brave."
"Good morning to you too, Walter."
"Don't 'good morning' me. What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong. How's the hip today?"
"The hip is fine. You're deflecting."
"I'm your doctor. I'm allowed to redirect the conversation toward your health."
"And I'm seventy-three. I'm allowed to ignore you." He watches me check his incision, his expression softening despite himself. "My daughter does the same thing, you know. Comes in all wound up about something and then pretends she's fine until I pull it out of her."
"Maybe she just has a stubborn father."
"No maybe about it."
I finish the check and mark it in his chart, and he is quiet for a minute before he says, "You're a good doctor, Kristen. Whatever's got you looking like that, don't let it eat you."
I smile at him because I don't know what else to do. "I won't. Same time tomorrow for your walk?"
"Like I have a choice."
I make it through the rest of the shift by keeping my head down and my pace up, but it stays with me—this low current running under everything I do.
He called me out. He looked at me, and even if he didn't match the face to the name, he noticed me, and for someone who's spent the last few years perfecting the art of not being noticed, that's enough to make the ground feel less solid under my feet.
I keep catching myself straightening my badge, so my last name faces inward.
But what if he already knows? What if he saw my name on the roster the first day and just doesn't care?
It's been almost ten years. People forget.
Maybe I was four years of his life that didn't stick, and I'm over here hiding in utility closets over someone who wouldn't even remember which side of the library table I sat on.
That's almost worse. I shake my head.
Stop it, Kristen. You are a grown woman spiraling over a man you used to throw flashcards at. Get it together.
My break comes around two, and I'm heading toward the cafeteria when I see him at the far end of the corridor, maybe forty feet away, walking toward me.
His white coat flaps, there's a coffee in one hand, and he's reading something on his phone with the other, his glasses catching the overhead light. He hasn't looked up yet.
My body decides before my brain does. I pivot, drop my eyes, and start walking the other direction like I've suddenly remembered something critical on the opposite side of the building. Casual…normal. Just a busy resident with somewhere to be.
Three steps, then four. And I'm almost at the corner, my pulse just starting to settle, and my brain already mapping which stairwell will get me to the cafeteria on the floor below when his voice comes.
"You. Stop."
I stop. Just like that. He didn't even say my name, and my body obeyed him, feet planted, spine straight, like his voice has some kind of hold on me that bypasses every rational thought in my head.
Two words and I'm frozen in the middle of a hospital corridor like a first-year who got caught running in the halls.
I don't turn around. The ward hums around me, call bells and monitors chime, and someone's shoes squeak on the floor above, but none of that makes me want to break into a run. His footsteps, steady, unhurried, and getting closer, do.
He stops right behind me, close enough that I can smell his coffee and something clean, his soap maybe. I stare straight ahead at the far wall like it's the most interesting thing I've ever seen in my life. Oh, what's that stain? It looks like a work of art—
"My office. Now."
He doesn't wait for a response. He walks past me, and I catch his profile for half a second—jaw set, glasses catching the light, not a single glance in my direction—and then he's ahead of me, moving down the corridor like this conversation is already over and the only thing left is for me to follow.
I stand there. My legs won't move. Smart appendages.
He knows. He has to know. He saw my name on a roster, or he recognized my voice during rounds, or he put it together the second I answered that question about the splenic laceration with the same precision he drilled into me about a decade ago.
And now he's walking toward his office, and I'm supposed to just follow him in there and, what?
Explain myself? Explain the last few years?
Explain why the girl who used to outscore him is hiding behind a tablet and whispering her answers?
Every nerve in my body says to run. Turn around, take the stairs, call in sick tomorrow, transfer rotations, and never stand in the same room as Logan Maxwell again.
But I can't. He's my attending, this is my service, and he just gave me a direct order in the middle of a hospital hallway. If I don't follow it, that's a different kind of problem, one that goes on a record instead of just living in my chest.
I glance down the hall leading to the cafeteria, then sigh and follow him. One foot, then the other, preparing for the worst.