Chapter 23
RIDE OR DIE
Vows are life-changing.
Marriage, especially, is something no mortal should take lightly.
And matching, financially, is the most committed relationship you’ll ever be a part of.
So, will you be buried with your white coat, or your wife?
Clinical pearl #23: Decide now, doctor.
Will you devote yourself to matching, or dying trying,
Or to your once-in-a-lifetime, ride or die?
THANATOS
KANE
“Where did she go?” Jade hisses at me.
The last of drunken hollers are fading, the museum emptying as Jade’s withering glare pins me in place.
I avoid her eyes, staring at the scuffed floor.
“Jade, she doesn’t want me,” I exhale. “She thinks I’m still a surgeon, not some Scramble reject who settled on re-applying family medicine.”
“That’s why you dumped her?” she asks scathingly. “You didn’t tell her you were reapplying to family med?”
“She’s going to be a surgeon, Jade, I’m not in her league anymore—”
When I glance up, her face breaks, then trembles.
“You fucking insecure ass imbecile—”
“Language.”
“Don’t language me,” she growls. “Why are men like this?” she asks the sky, as if she’s begging God himself to explain.
She turns around and stomps in a circle, muttering out a slew of increasingly profane insults in Korean. She sounds like our mom, though I’d never admit that.
“??! ??!”1
“She deserves someone who will match her—”
“???!”2
She whirls around, back to her blistering English.
“You’re a doctor, Kane!” she screams. “A doctor who’s obsessed with her!”
“Most people are obsessed with her—”
“I’m not,” she growls, snatching me by my ear. “Let’s go.”
“Go where?” I ask, nearly tripping over her dress.
She yanks me so hard down the stairs that we almost topple.
“Jade!”
Cold air blasts us, a blizzard matching Jade’s ongoing tempest of fury.
My ear stings, Jade’s grip pinching.
“We,” she hisses, “are going to Percy’s apartment. And you are going to explain to her, in grave detail, how stupid you are. And how much you want her back. And how you would follow her anywhere.”
“Jade,” I plead. “I can’t. I can’t impact her rank list…”
“They were due yesterday, dumbass. Why do you think Med Prom was today?”
“But—I—Jade—”
I’m spiraling, fumbling for excuses that don’t even make any sense anymore.
When my grandfather died, we gathered on a day just like this one, hollow and devoid of hope, while I wore another scratchy outfit and watched the bearers lower him into the ground.
I didn’t even get to see him again. The lid was already sealed, the unthinkable, true, and I was handed the shovel with the rest of the Goodyears to bury him.
Plunk.
The first mound of dirt hit him.
Plunk.
Now, the second, as grandma’s sobs shake the air.
Plunk.
His coffin’s covered, but there’s still more work to do, because he won’t be fully buried until the earth’s piled so high above him, we can’t tell where he ends, and the ground begins.
That’s how I feel now, piling on excuses, keeping my feelings shoveled down while Jade assaults me with a machine-grade plow to try and force me to rise from the dead.
Because I would follow her anywhere, she argues. I already applied to residencies where I thought she would be.
But I can’t jinx her. I’d never survive feeling like I put her through what I went through when I didn’t match.
The cloud cover eclipses the moon, submerging us in darkness.
“You,” she pokes a finger at my chest.
The stars break free, and exhaustion wears her out, eyes red.
“You weren’t there when our house got a phone call from some family med residency program 30 minutes from The Hub, saying they received your letter of intent. Dad almost cried! He thought you were couples matching! Why didn’t you just tell her you ranked all of her top choices as your tops, too?”
“Because… I…”
My stomach churns, more nauseated by the second.
Jade is worse than my father. Merciless. Pitiless. Accusatory.
But she’s also tired.
Tired of dealing with me most of the time, I imagine.
Can’t she let me tuck my emotions away, never to be seen again?
When Haraboji died, we never saw his cremation, only the beautiful urn he was placed in, displayed proudly next to our long line of ancestors in the columbarium.
My emotions want to be contained like those ashes, dignified with my demise, earning my honor on the shelf, encased in a museum within my indestructible shell.
And yet the women in my life are always showing up with a fucking sledgehammer to break me out.
“The weaker sex,” Jade continues, nails piercing into my arm.
“Jade, don’t make me fight you,” I say, but she wrenches me too hard, and we nearly skitter on ice.
“Jade!”
“I’d rather you be concussed and bleeding out again than deal with your self-sabotage any longer,” she growls, fighting the blast.
“She might not take me back,” I warn. “I dumped her. She has every right to live her life without me. She might even hate me.”
Jade doesn’t even look back. “You are so, so much stupider than even I believe you to be, if you think Percy doesn’t love you.”
But does she love me? The real me? The one who’s too afraid to tell her the truth?
After all, she was the one who suggested we date “fake,” when I was much more interested when I thought she was serious.
Could someone who suggested a “fake dating” scheme in the first place be interested in something real?
Do I even know Percy?
“She wore a ring you gave her. She talks about you to everyone who will listen. God, Kane, she even puts up with Bianca! She’s spent hours letting her plan this fictional wedding just to make our family happy!”
Benson is already waiting, car door extended, when we crunch through the last of the snow to reach him.
I debate whether I could ever tell Jade the truth when I couldn’t even tell Percy I’m going into primary care.
“I’ll shove you in,” Jade says, indignant as ever. “Don’t think I won’t.”
“Some help?” I ask Benson.
He inclines his head, eyes crinkling. “I hope she forgives you,” he says, and his quiet dismissal shatters me like glass.
“Et tu, Benson?” I ask, sliding into the leather seats. Jade waits just long enough to make sure I’m confined, then drops into the front, Benson speeding us off. He’s an expert at avoiding the black ice that litters the roads, which also means the drive to Percy is an eternity on the asphalt.
“Start rehearsing your speech,” Jade says. She sounds like an attending, one before the era of accountability. Vicious. “I am not dragging you to do this twice.”
“Jade—”
“If I hear my name from your lips one more time—”
“It was fake,” I finally admit. The confession doesn’t feel freeing; actually, it feels like the final shovel of dirt over my coffin, the very last ominous mound when it’s impossible to recognize what I used to be.
“The whole thing. She asked me to ‘fake-date’ her so that David would leave her alone. And I agreed because she said she would make me look nicer so that I could match. The whole thing was fake.”
The words spew out in a jumbled rush. “It was never real. None of it. Not even her feelings. We were just faking the whole time.”
For once, Jade is stunned into silence.
I laugh hollowly.
Whatever she expected me to say, it wasn’t that.
And then she sighs.
“How could both of them have the same fucked up commitment issues?” she asks. “Benson, what’s wrong with them?”
“That’s your generation,” he says, sparing me a remorseless look. “My wisdom can’t even penetrate the innumerable issues of the digital nomads.”
“You don’t believe me,” I accuse.
Both Benson and Jade scoff this time.
Jade’s weary expression spins around. “She only did that because she had a crush on you this whole time and didn’t think you felt the same way. Did you ever tell her directly that you love her? You know, communicate?”
Now I’m the one struck dumb.
“You can’t read emotions for shit. That’s why you interview terribly. You never know how people perceive you. Why would you trust your own perceptions of how much Percy likes you?”
Jade’s words hit the chinks in my urn, fissuring cracks in my heart.
I’d convinced myself it was all physical, not emotional. Or was it? Or wasn’t it? The memories come crashing back like the blizzard raging outside, each one hitting me with the force of hail.
All the shared moments. Lingering looks. Early-morning conversations.
Even when she’s not in front of me, she’s constantly in my mind, invading my space, preemptively influencing my behavior with the maddening, nagging thoughts of how I can manipulate my life to make things better for her.
When you worry about someone, even without them asking you to, is that… love?
Because if that’s true—
I think back to every time she insisted I eat.
Every text she initiated, even when I was grumpy.
Every mood swing she not only tolerated, responding with the utmost kindness, but also masterfully wrung me out of.
No.
Impossible.
My head throbs.
Was I that much of a coward? A shameless, self-absorbed taker? Because I refused to consider that the way I felt was mutual, blocking out any hints, because I’d never believe them.
And worse—Jade’s right. I never did tell her.
I’m horrible at basic human communication. It’s a miracle I survived this long.
Oh my God.
What have I done?
This whole time?
Benson slowly pulls into her apartment driveway, narrowly sliding away from the potholes and shiny black ice of her frail, unsalted complex. “What your parents had was rare,” he says, turning around to face me. “This is rarer.”
His gentle, damning commentary makes the guilt feel like a vortex, swallowing me alive.
I face the faded brick of Percy’s apartment with despair.
Middle children tend to be the smartest in the family, balancing the hopeful naivety of the youngest with the bitter realism of the oldest.
And she knew before I did I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.
Benson pulls something out of his pocket.
“Forgive me for snooping in your room,” he says, brandishing a velvet green box. “But I knew you’d need this. I was hoping you’d do it at Med Prom—you two do so love a spectacle—but this will have to do.”
Shuddering, I take it from him, touched that after all these years, he really does know me best.
But does Percy?
Is she ever going to forgive me?
I run inside, shoving all doubt behind as hail whips my face.
I’m telling her how I feel, and ripping out the last of my broken heart for her, or dying trying.
“Percy!”
1 Narrator’s notes: The fuck! Idiot!
2 Narrator’s notes: Crazy bastard!