"Is that so?" Tim raised his scalpel in challenge. "Race you to the greater occipital nerve?"
"You're on."
*
Quinn won.
In fact, she had to stop her own dissection a couple of times to help Tim with his.
Finally she told him, "I would venture to say that your manual dexterity is inversely proportional to the accuracy of your memory."
"Am I to take it then that you don't think neurosurgery is the field for me?"
"Only if you keep the world's finest malpractice defense attorney on permanent retainer."
"Who knows? I may decide to be the world's finest defense attorney."
"You have to go to law school for that. This is a med school, in case you forgot."
"Didn't I tell you? I'm going to law school as soon as I graduate from The Ingraham."
Quinn was about to ask Tim if he was joking when one of the second-year student teaching assistants strolled up to the table. The name tag on his labcoat read "Harrison." He was thin, with longish blond hair, and pale, pock-marked skin that glistened under the fluorescents. His attitude was condescending, bordering on imperious. Quinn disliked him almost immediately.
"Not bad," he said as he inspected their dissection.
He smiled as he pulled a pen-like instrument from the breast pocket of his labcoat, telescoped it into a pointer, and began quizzing Quinn on the local anatomy. She did all right on the tissues they'd already covered in class, but then he began to move into unknown territory.
"We haven't got there yet," Tim said, coming to her aid.
"Oh, really?" Harrison said, his gaze flicking back and forth between the two of them. "Well, maybe you ought to consider showing some initiative. One way to get ahead at The Ingraham is to work ahead."
"Thank you for that advice," Tim said softly. "Now, if you don't mind, what was the origin and insertion of that last muscle you pointed to?"
Harrison smirked. "Look it up," he said, then turned and almost walked into the man standing directly behind him.
"Oh," Harrison said. "Excuse me, Dr. Emerson."
Dr. Emerson's expression was not pleased.
Quinn wondered how long he'd been standing there. Long enough to hear Harrison's last remark, apparently. Quinn hadn't noticed him come up. But Tim obviously had. His lopsided smile told her he'd bushwhacked the second-year student. He cocked his head toward Harrison as he mouthed the words, Dumb ass.
"I'd like to speak to you a moment, Mr. Harrison," Dr. Emerson said.
He took the younger man aside and did most of the talking. Quinn couldn't hear much of what was being said but caught brief snatches such as, "—if you wish to keep your stipend—" and "—no place for one-upmanship—"
Finally Harrison nodded and turned away, moving toward the far side of the lab. Dr. Emerson, too, moved on, not bothering to stop at their table.
"You set that up, didn't you," Quinn said.
"'Hoist with his own petard.'"
"Easy," Quinn said. "Hamlet. But does this mean I have two guardian angels here?"
Tim smiled. "Could be."
*
"I don't know if I can handle this."
Judy Trachtenberg was speaking, holding a forkful of prime rib over her plate and staring at it. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, she wore no make-up, and looked very pale. She and her roomie Karen Evers occupied the room next to Quinn's. She'd hooked up with them on the way to the caf. Tim and his roommate Kevin Sanders, a big black guy, a quiet type who didn't say much, had joined their table.
"If it's too rare for you," Tim said, "I'll take it."
Judy rolled her eyes and returned to fork to her plate.
"I'm not talking about the food. I'm talking about this... this whole medical school thing."
"This is only the first day," Quinn said. "It'll get better. It has to."
She said it to encourage herself as much as Judy. She knew exactly how she was feeling. Like Judy she'd found today almost overwhelming.
"I can handle the courses easily enough," Judy said. "I mean, give me a textbook, put me in a class, and I can learn anything. But these labs. Have you seen the lab schedule? Every afternoon! And Anatomy Lab has got to be the worst! Am I right?"
A chorus of agreement from the table.
She went on. "I mean, I've washed my hands half a dozen times since we got out of lab and they still smell like formaldehyde—and I was wearing gloves! My God, I still smell it. It must have gotten into my nose. I mean, even the food tastes like formaldehyde. I don't know if I can handle a whole year of this."
Quinn sniffed her own fingers. Yes, there was a hint of formaldehyde there. She'd thought she'd tasted it for a while, but that was gone now. Maybe Judy was more sensitive to it—or more dramatic. Either way, she was not a happy camper.
"Does that mean you're not going to eat your meat?" Tim said, eying Judy's plate.
Judy shoved it toward him. "Here. Be my guest. Eat till you burst. Doesn't any of this bother you?"
Tim speared the prime rib from Judy's plate and placed it on his own.
"Sure," he said. "It's sickening. But I don't dwell on it. It's something you've got to get through. And if you can't handle it, maybe you shouldn't be a doctor."
Judy reddened. "I don't intend to practice on preserved corpses. I plan to have living patients."
"Right. But you've got to have a certain amount of intestinal fortitude, got to walk through some fires along the way to get to those living patients. If you can't handle this, how are you going to handle spurting blood and spilling guts when people are calling you doctor and looking to you for an answer?"
Quinn watched fascinated as Tim somehow managed to cut his meat, poke it into his mouth, chew a couple of times, and swallow, without breaking the rhythm of his speech. His expression was intent—on his food—but his words struck a resonant chord within Quinn: You do what you have to do.
Maybe she and Tim weren't so different after all.
"Looking at the way you eat that red meat," Judy said, "I can see you've got no fear of blood and guts."
Amid the laughter, Tim grinned and held up his knife.
"Okay. How about this? We've all met the estimable Mr. Harrison, haven't we?"
Nods and groans all about the table.
"A dork of the first water," Judy said.
"Indisputably. But consider the fact that he's a second-year student. That means he took whatever The Ingraham threw at him in his first year and came through. In your moments of self-doubt, gird yourself with this little thought: I will not be less than Harrison."
Judy stared into Tim's sunglasses for a few seconds, nodding slowly, then she reached across the table and retrieved the remainder of her prime rib.
"I will not be less than Harrison," she said.
Amid the applause, Quinn looked at Tim and made a startling discovery.
I like you, Tim Brown. I like you a lot.
But she'd never tell him that.
CHAPTER NINE
Tim's head was killing him as he pulled into The Ingraham's student parking lot. He leaned forward and gently rested his forehead on the steering wheel.
Jack Daniel's...too much Jack Daniel's. It happened every time someone talked him into trying some sour mash.
He shook himself and straightened. He'd made it from Baltimore in forty minutes—record time—but he hadn't raced all that distance just to take a nap in the parking lot. He glanced at his watch. Two minutes to get to Alston's lecture. He jumped out of the car and hurried toward the class complex. He eyed the security cameras high on the corners of the buildings, wondering if they were eying him.