Andrew did the barbecuing, the Mozart following us onto the deck. I cooked the accompanying rice on the stove top conveniently (of course, the rich never lack for conveniences) located next to the grill.

It was cooling down as the sun chose a blue-grey palette for tonight’s show, nothing in the lurid orange-purple department tonight. Long-fingered clouds were criss-crossed by fat vapor trails, left behind by jets headed across the ocean.

We ate on the deck, our meal accompanied by a bottle of wine that I knew wasn’t cheap, if only because its label wasn’t any brand name I’d ever seen. Because it was French, I could tell that. Oh, and because it was fucking amazing.

“How’s the wine?” Andrew asked.

I fumbled for fancy words but quickly gave up. “Like a flavor parade in my mouth.”

Andrew laughed. “Now that’s real connoisseur talk.”

After we finished dinner, and the bottle of wine, Andrew produced a bottle of cognac and a pair of snifters. If we’d been real gentlemen, we’d have smoked cigars, too, but…once you’d seen a couple instances of advanced throat cancer, you wouldn’t smoke anything ever again, either.

“Now this I know,” I said, looking at the label on the Courvoisier. “If only from listening to a lot of rap songs.”

The sun went down, and Andrew retrieved some beanies and coats from the house. It was too beautiful to go inside, and I think he knew as well as I did that what we’d talk about was better aired under clear skies than under closed roofs.

“So,” he said, swigging his cognac and pouring another dose to steel himself. “My family.”

The two words dripped with irony, as if a family was something that only blood held together.

“They had it all mapped out for me, my whole life. Just like dear old dad, I was going to go to Boston Latin, then Boston U, then Boston U Medical School.”

“Boston Latin?”

“Prep school.”

“Like, Dead Poets Society prep school?” The picture of Andrew in a tie and blazer instead of his form fitting medic shirt was almost too bizarre to imagine. Especially when I thought of him on a skateboard, said tie and blazer flapping in the wind as he did his kicks and ollies, the very modern model of the upscale delinquent.

“Yep. Of course, if I met expectations,” he said bitterly, “I’d have been in the accelerated program at Boston U, combining the bachelor’s with med school and graduating a year early.”

“So what happened?”

He shrugged. “I rebelled. I told you, from the time I was in that skate crash, I had this medic fantasy, this dream of being in the real shit, on the streets and not… in a classroom, in an office, in a climate controlled building. And it wasn’t till I was a freshman in college that it really started to be more than just a… Not just an ‘If only I wasn’t from this family and doomed to do this’ kind of mentality. When I realized I wasn’t fucking doomed to do anything.

“I started taking humanities classes instead of all the extra STEM classes I was supposed to add on to all the premed shit I was already taking. I started reading novels, and I realized I wasn’t the only rich kid who’d burned out on the whole fucking parade. I stopped hanging out with study group people, overachievers who never got an A minus in their lives. I started going to cafés and reading Sartre, the whole stereotypical rich rebel kid shtick, I guess. I managed to get my bachelor’s, and still ended up with a 4.0 GPA, but… That was the end of school for me. I was done.”

I waited a few seconds, puzzled. “I’m confused. So why are you applying to med school now?”

Andrew sighed. “I do want to be a doctor. But…” He shook his head. “It’s hard to describe how I felt then. I wanted to feel real, and none of what I’d seen growing up felt real to me. It all felt like just a process, a routine, I mean… My dad is an asshole in a white coat, and I used to go with him on rounds. And he would just float over his patients, you know? They were calls, not people.”

I nodded. He’d always taught me to treat patients on scene just the opposite way from that.

“And from that viewpoint, medicine didn’t look like it was about people at all. But like it was about… meetings, and competitiveness, and politics, and research grants, and letting a patient fucking die if saving them meant using a procedure dreamed up by your mortal enemy.

“His office was a five minute mill. Twelve patients an hour, and he never fell behind schedule. If you had a complicated problem? Off you go to a specialist, don’t hold me up. Anyone who came in with a list, any patient who was taking charge of their own care, and had lots of good questions about potential treatment options? He’d ‘refer’ them elsewhere, get them off the appointment books. And you know what narrative medicine is?”

“Yeah. You let the patient talk, because sooner or later they’ll probably tell you what you need to know to diagnose what’s really going on.”

“Well, he fucking hated that shit. Because narrative medicine requires a lot more than five minutes a patient.”

He shook his head. “And me, I didn’t want to just touch charts and barely touch the patient. I wanted to literally get my hands dirty, you know? I wanted to see people in their worst shape, before anyone’s even stuck a Band-aid on them. I wanted my hands pressing their slashed arteries to keep the blood in there, I wanted to see bones sticking out of skin, I wanted… something that wasn’t all clean and safe and sterile, the way my whole life had been so far.”

He waved a hand around the house and its grounds. “This, you know? This is fucking great to come to, to escape, to cocoon into for a break, but it’s not…it’s no way to live your whole life.”

“So you became a medic, to feel real, to get dirty.”

“Yeah.” He winked at me. “Being a first responder fucking does the trick on that, doesn’t it?”

I laughed. “It sure does.”

“Dad was pissed, mom was disappointed, but… The day after I graduated with my bachelor’s, my grandfather died. He was a doctor, but he was a rebel, in his time, and he knew I was too. He left me a metric fuckton of money. Not so that I’d never have to work again, but so that whenever I decided what I was going to do, I could just fucking do it.”

“And now, you’re ready.”

“Yeah. Now I’ve been down there, hands deep in the world’s guts. And I’ve proved myself, you know? Being a medic, if you’re really a great medic, fuck.” He shook his head. “You’re better than most of the doctors who get admitted to school on a family name, and skate through on half ass work, and choke under pressure. The AMA is full of the George W. Bushes of medicine. And I’m a great medic.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“Thanks. I’ve… I don’t know. I’ve proved what I need to prove, as a medic. And I’m,” he grinned, “I’m fucking brilliant and rich and talented, and the world needs my enormous gifts.”

I put my fingers into my snifter, then flicked some cognac at him. He ducked playfully, accepting the takedown.

“So have you told your dad that you’re going now?”

Andrew’s face darkened. “No.”

“Are you going to?”

He sighed. “Well, he and my mom semi-retired to LA. He’s still got his fingers in the medical world pie down there. So it’s not like I could go and not have him find out. But, you know, I haven’t even been accepted yet. I’ll cross that bridge et cetera.”

Even I could do that math on that. Andrew, a graduate of Boston U, on the fast track to the medical professional stratosphere, steps out of the stream for a couple of years to be a paramedic in an intense urban environment, then becomes the best in the business, and then decides he’s ready for med school? What fucking school would say no to that?

And then it came out of me, that irked angry part of me, the resentment I felt pretty much…well, pretty much every time I heard a story like that.

“You’re lucky. You have a family. So it’s not that bad, your lot.”

We were both surprised by that.

Andrew flushed, fiddled with his glass. “It’s hard to feel lucky about that sometimes. It’s not all Norman Rockwell, man. I mean… it’s the people who know you best and longest, who can really fucking hurt you.”

I couldn’t disagree with that.

He opened his mouth, shut it again. I waited.

“Did you…did you get that scar in foster care?”

“Yeah. In a group home. I was sixteen, it was right after they took me away from Susan, when she got really sick. I was way too old to get adopted, still legally young enough to be stuck in the system.”

“Could you have filed for emancipation?”

“Yeah, technically. But it costs like two hundred bucks to file, even without a lawyer. It might as well have been two million. And they’re not letting you out into the world at sixteen without a legal guardian, unless you can prove that you can support yourself. And Susan,” I laughed. “Well, she was great. She homeschooled me, and I learned a lot about literature and art and history, but…not how to type or file or run a cash register.”

“Shit.”

I shrugged. “They were the happiest three years of my childhood since the time my parents died. If you asked me if I could do it all over again, and make a trade? Skip those last two years of hell in group homes and give up my time with Matt and Susan? Fuck it. I’d do the hell all over again.”

I hit the cognac again. “The place was a nuthouse. A lot of those kids should have been in specialized care facilities. Junior fucking Dexters and Lecters, practicing their psycho skills. There was this one kid. Lionel. He was a monster. Six foot four at sixteen. They tried to get him to play football, even rigged some shit to get him into the powerhouse high school in town, though the home wasn’t zoned for it. But he was too brutal. He’d just keep hitting after the plays. So that was the end of that.

“There was this new kid, Max. Thirteen but looked ten, probably from malnutrition. And Lionel… He bullied him, tripped him, hit him when nobody was looking, all kinds of cruel pranks. I think Lionel was trying to molest Max, too. Not out of lust but… just because it was the ultimate humiliation he could think of. Just to crush him.”

I tipped my cognac glass towards him, and he quickly refilled it with much more than the gentlemanly slosh. I drank deep, letting the cognac warm my throat, coating the barbs of the words to come.

“I tried to protect the kid. But I wasn’t athletic back then. Matt and Susan were stay-at-homes, and after my internment on that fucking farm, doing slave labor for those holy rollers, I was glad to be in a house where I could sit and read all day, you know?

“But… all the same, one day I just… had to step in. We were in the cafeteria for lunch, and Lionel had a switchblade, and he was playing the knife game, you know, like in Aliens? Where you have to spread your fingers and the other guy stabs the table faster and faster between them?

“And I just knew, that sooner or later, Lionel was going to ‘miss.’ And I just fucking shouted at him to stop, and he wouldn’t. So I got a cafeteria tray, just some cheap plastic piece of shit, and I hit him on the back of the head with it, as hard as I could. Like that would do anything other than piss him off.

“And he came at me with the knife. He just lost it. He was slashing and stabbing, and I was just stumbling backwards, trying not to get murdered, and all these other kids were just screaming ‘fight, fight!’ Then he got me good, right across the ribs. Fuck, that hurt. Right along the bones.

“But I knew what to do. By that time, I knew that the counselor on duty wouldn’t even come out of her cave for your basic fist fight. That fat bitch would waddle into the TV room at night, and whatever we were watching, she’d grab the remote and she’d say, ‘Now we’re gonna watch DOG!’ And she’d put on a fucking Dog the Bounty Hunter marathon or some other horrible reality show piece of shit.

“So I screamed bloody murder. ‘He stabbed me! He stabbed me!’ Because the one fucking thing she’d get in trouble for would be a dead body on her shift. They had to take me to the hospital, and let me tell you. I snitched. I tattled. I ratted. To anyone who’d listen. To the medics who took me in, to the nurse in the ER, the ER doctor, the lady who made me fill out the paperwork. ‘Lionel Straits stabbed me.’

“Because I was sure, so sure, that nobody would believe me. Because I was just a lying little system brat. I had to tell everyone, just in case someone believed me, just one of them, any of them.”

“Jesus Christ,” Andrew whispered, looking at me, his eyes wet.

“The important thing was, Lionel went to juvie. Last I heard, he was doing 10 to 20 for armed robbery. After that, I got into the Boys and Girls Club. And I learned to box. And from the other kids in the club, the other survivors, I learned to fight. Like, really fight, street fight. We’d box like the gentlemen we were supposed to learn to be, and afterwards, we’d meet in the alley and I got schooled in how a real ungentlemanly disagreement goes down.”

I laughed. “I put on some weight. The boxing club, shit, they fed us better than the group home did. Protein bars and protein shakes and I know the coach was paying for it all out of his own pocket. I got fucking ripped, too. Of course, all that went to hell when I started EMS, though. Too much sitting around, you know. Till I met you and you started making me work again.”

Andrew smiled. “You’re still fit,” he said casually. “Your cardio sucked when we went hiking, but then I guess you’re not used to altitude.”

“No,” was all I could manage. He’d called me fit! What a fucking schoolgirl I was turning into, when my mind tried to turn a basic observation into a compliment loaded with secret meanings.

“So, why don’t you have a boyfriend? Or do you have one, that you’re hiding from me?”

I laughed. “Right. Because I have so much free time on Saturday nights.”

He chuckled. “Right. But seriously. You could be dating someone, you’re good looking, you’re employed, you wear a uniform.”

I don’t have a boyfriend because I’m waiting for you. I’m waiting for you to turn to me and look at me and say I’m what you want.

The words were right there. They wanted out. The alcohol had loosened my tongue, but also my head. It was true.

Well. Partially true. And the story I told Andrew was the other part of the truth.