After the sirens, p.26
After the Sirens, page 26
The obvious solution would have been to put the skill sheets down, rip the spine out of the cat with her bare hands, and go to bed. But the thought of not studying made her even more anxious.
Suddenly she realized Ayad was scraping something that looked suspiciously like nerves away from the vertebrae. She barked at him to stop. Cate frowned and looked closer, getting a sharp, mind-clearing rush of formaldehyde as her nose hovered an inch above the flayed-open neck. Maybe she should stick a little cat in a ziplock for when she needed a pick-me-up.
Great. Now she was huffing cat.
It was Cate’s fault they were doing this thing at 0800 on a Saturday morning. They could take the written test whenever, and human nature being what it is, every other person in their class opted to take it later. Most of them hadn’t even signed up for a slot yet, which blew Cate’s mind. She was so done. Plus, they weren’t going to magically get any smarter in a week or two. If anything, she was sure she’d start actively forgetting things by then. So she’d convinced the rest of the St. D’s group to sign up with her. She wanted to be able to gloat while everyone else was still studying, and she wanted to gloat with her friends.
So, at 0745 on Saturday morning, the St. D’s group waited outside the testing center with a few other tense, overly caffeinated–looking people. This place did all kinds of tests—school entrance exams, professional exams, union stuff, all that—and Cate wondered what these other people, all of whom were older, were doing with their lives. Or, well, what they hoped to be doing with their lives. Because apparently there was a test.
When it was their turn, the four of them checked in at the front desk and got the spiel from a stern woman Cate immediately named the Matron. They were given a pencil and notepaper. They were being watched. They were being filmed. Raise your hand when you’re done. Do not get up from the terminal for any reason without first raising your hand. She checked their IDs and that they were taking the correct test. Cate considered asking what else was on offer, spinning the roulette wheel of life choices, but in the end, she stuck with EMT.
They spread out around the circular room of computer terminals and buckled in. Some of the other people from the parking lot were already intently clicking away. Cate sat down and tried to beam rays of calmness to Roof one last time before the first question appeared on the screen.
She made herself slow down and read even though she knew almost every answer immediately. It would not pay to be cocky. Not today.
It was all over much faster than she expected.
The test was adaptive, so it judged what you got right or wrong in different areas and gave you more or fewer questions accordingly. No one knew how it really worked or what the secret threshold was to pass. There was no set number of questions, and it was great psychological torture to wonder how many questions you would get and whether it meant you were doing well or not. If the test ended quickly, it could mean you did amazingly well and the computer was happy for you. Or it could mean you did so badly it thought you should just go home. On the other hand, for some cursed souls it dragged on forever. Until they were inwardly screaming, What do you want from me?!, and imagining hurling the entire monitor, cord and all, through the nearest window. Cate would be terrified for Roof if his test just kept going and going . . . but she kept that thought to herself.
She did run into a few really goofy, really off-the-wall questions, but overall, only a very few of them really made her stop and think. Weighing the merits of two similar answers. The dreaded “What would you do first?” questions. What could you do but make your best guess and move on with your life? Deep into the test, everything else fell away. Her three friends in the room with her. The practical test later. Adrian. College. Everything.
Then the screen blinked and went black.
A message appeared: “Your test is finished.”
Cate clicked the mouse. Which did nothing. She stared at the screen. How many questions was that? She hadn’t been looking. Seventy something? Was it even seventy? What was the minimum? Had something gone wrong? How would she know?
The spell was broken. Cate felt like she’d just gotten off a carnival ride.
It took hours, sometimes longer, to get the results.
Until then, limbo.
She was afraid to leave. She didn’t want to distract the others. Put pressure on them. But the black screen and its ominous message were starting to freak her out. Reluctantly, she put her hand up and the Matron was by in a flash. She collected the unused pencil and paper and pointed Cate to the door. Cate moved slowly, trying to remember questions from the test. She’d finished two minutes ago and already almost all of it was gone. She wasn’t really worried, she was actually sure it had gone well, but having it ripped away like that was a little sickening. She liked looking things over one more time. Walking to the front of the class to turn it in or at least having reassuring boxes to click that said submit, or even, “Are you sure?”
This test was rude.
Outside, Cate sat in her car, keeping an eye on the door. She texted her mom that the test was over and that it went fine. After the SATs, she owed her that. Her mom sent her a GIF of a dancing ostrich. Her mother had recently discovered GIFs. Cate shook her head.
She was too fried to even put on the radio. She sat there in silence. For the first time in weeks. Doing and thinking absolutely nothing.
Sara came out about ten minutes after she did. Tony was right behind her. They both said more or less what Cate did. They thought it went fine. The ending was brutal.
Together they waited for Roof.
And waited.
After another half hour passed, Cate was genuinely worried something had happened. Would someone come get them? She pictured Roof having a full-blown anxiety attack, unable to breathe. She pictured him getting thrown out for being unable to sit still during the test. She pictured him blowing up and never attempting another test ever again. Because she’d let him down.
To take their minds off Roof, the other three talked about the left field questions they’d gotten. Cate’s favorite had to do with identifying snakes by their bite patterns. Cate had no intention of identifying a snake. Ever. And it was something that had never once been mentioned in class. Why would you even need to know? For EMTs, or paramedics even, she was pretty sure, a snake bite was a snake bite, and Cate knew her one and only priority from the moment she heard the word “snake” would be getting off that scene as fast as possible.
“There are always questions they’re testing,” Sara said. “Pilot questions.”
“I’m taking a test. I don’t need to be the test. Jesus.”
And then out came Roof. Zero cool. Shooting across the parking lot like a horizontal firework. His smile leading the way.
“It went well?” Cate laughed as Roof bounced her up and down.
“It went. It’s over. I lived.” He turned to the street and screamed, “I lived!” Someone tooted a horn. Fists waved out windows.
Roof had no idea how many questions he’d gotten. He’d gone slow. He imagined the questions were his questions. That he was asking them to his class, his pre-test study group. He taught his way through the test. Anticipating the answers so all he had to do was search out the one he wanted. For the first time ever, he got into a rhythm. And as soon as that happened, he knew he could crush it.
They went for pancakes. They prepared for Round Two.
They wasted no time texting the rest of their class and rubbing it in hard that they’d finished the written. Lazy, lazy people. Who still had so much studying in front of them. Roof was a new man. He had no fear of the practical test. The instructors would probably end up asking him for help. His relief and joy were contagious.
Cate’s natural caution said they didn’t know yet if they passed the written test. But she kept that thought to herself.
One thing was sure, they were heading into the skills test in a very different mental place than everybody else in the class. Which was exactly what they wanted. Claiming their natural place as the leaders. The fearless badasses of the medical world.
Their buzz died the moment they walked into the classroom.
There were state people everywhere. Some of the St. D’s medics were there too—to help run testing stations or play patients. Neil was up front, dwarfed by whiteboards and piles of paperwork, preparing for a long campaign.
When it started, it started. Testing stations were set up in classrooms throughout the health sciences building. Neil ran the batting order, sending people to different rooms and keeping track of the rotation on his whiteboards. Every station was awkward as hell, there was just no way they wouldn’t be, but Cate felt prepared. She immobilized an ankle. Assessed an overdose and a fall from construction scaffolding. Immobilized a person from a jet ski accident with neck pain. Bagged a patient who wasn’t breathing. Did some airway stuff, some suctioning. Her final station was the inevitable cardiac arrest. Each station took about ten minutes, some less than that. Wocka was her broken ankle. He shrieked and threatened to sue her every time she touched him, which made even the state guy laugh out loud. He was awesome.
It took a few hours, all told. They were individually free to go whenever they finished so it was all very anticlimactic. A handshake from Neil. And that was it.
The St. D’s group met outside at Roof’s truck. Tony had to redo the spinal immobilization station and had no idea why. They didn’t tell you what you missed. He sailed through on the second try so it was undoubtedly something stupid. Tony claimed not knowing would haunt him but judging by the look of relief on his face, he’d get over it. They had all passed. They were all free.
Tradition at St. D’s said EMT and medic students stayed at the building and picked up calls until they got their test results back. Usually that meant within twenty-four hours, but sometimes it didn’t. Sara’s FTO, Joe Montague, swore that back in the day of pencils and Scantron sheets, he’d been on the ambulance for nine days waiting on his medic results. And no doubt he had to walk uphill in the snow to Tallahassee to get them.
It was slow for a Saturday night. They were all too wound up to sit and watch screens (except to obsessively refresh the test results page on their phones) so they took a couple of the ambulances out and washed them while they joked and laughed and generally adapted to the idea of being done. As the sun set, and they were squeegeeing off the last of the trucks, Adrian came walking up the driveway, turnout gear bag on one shoulder and school backpack on the other. Roof ran up and hugged him and Cate heard Adrian laugh.
A new laugh.
They told Adrian about the test. He said he also had no idea what types of snakes made what types of bites and he didn’t care. He’d treated a snake bite though—a guy who knew exactly what kind of snake it was since its name was Olly and it lived in an, as it turned out, insecure terrarium in his bedroom. He’d spent the better part of a morning looking for the snake inside the house before sitting on the toilet and finding it.
Adrian shrugged. “He lived.”
Adrian pointed over to the ER. “By the way, Dr. Anderson is on. He said to stop by.” They put the truck wash supplies away and backed the ambulances, carefully, into the building.12 They headed over to the ER, the big bay doors rumbling down behind them. Adrian lingered and pulled Cate back inside before the doors closed all the way. When the doors whomped heavily to the cement and the motor stopped, it was suddenly very quiet. And dark. He was still holding on to her arm.
She smiled until she saw the look on his face.
“I typed you like forty-five versions of this . . . I just didn’t know how to tell you.”
Instantly, Cate froze from the inside out.
Adrian let go of her arm. “I lied. To my mom. About Yale.”
Cate was afraid to react. What was happening?
“I had to. To get her off my back. Off everybody’s back. She was . . .”
Cate nodded.
“But I lied to you too.” Adrian brushed at some cobwebs around the tracks of the bay doors. “I wasn’t ready to tell anyone the truth—or what I wanted, hoped would be the truth—and you heard about Yale and . . . I just wasn’t ready. But they called last Friday. And I got it. I got a commission to the Naval Academy. To fly helicopters. With the Marines. Rescue stuff. Getting guys in and out of hot zones. Off sinking ships. Humanitarian stuff sometimes, maybe.” He looked at her.
What was happening?
They’d never once had a conversation about the military or war or politics even.
Helicopters?
He was still talking about how he hadn’t wanted to tell her before her test or distract her. “But I wanted to. I wanted to tell you. I wanted to tell you when I applied. I think I just needed it to be real first. It’s real. I’m going.”
They stood there. Cate looked at the buttons on the wall that controlled the bay doors. Open. Close. Stop. And then Adrian kissed her. She shouldn’t have been surprised but she was. She would not have made the first move. It hadn’t even crossed her mind. The weekend they spent together was perfect because they’d both been using each other. Gloriously. Unapologetically. Silently. She loved the feeling she got when she was around Adrian. He made her want things she couldn’t even put into words and that made her believe in things she couldn’t imagine.
Which wasn’t the same thing as loving him.
EMT school was over. Her life had just gotten easier by a huge margin. Adrian was a lot of work.
She stepped back. “You’re a lot of work.”
“I don’t mean to be.” He bit his lip. The way he always did when he was choosing his words. “I want to be myself. With you. With everyone but, you know, starting with you.”
“Does your mom know yet, or . . . ?”
“Just you.” Adrian still had his hands on her back, on her waist. He pulled her a little closer. “You made me feel like such an asshole.” Cate started to say something but he stopped her. “I bitched about my parents and the way they didn’t deal with my sister’s death, but I didn’t deal with them. I hated that when she started using, when she died, you know, they didn’t fight, they didn’t get angry, they didn’t do anything. But what was I doing? Staying out of everybody’s way and pretending to be . . . whoever they thought I was.” He kicked at the door with his boot. “But then I saw that guy through your eyes and I realized . . .”
“That guy was an asshole?”
Adrian was struggling and she felt bad for making a joke, but he didn’t seem to notice. “I realized I, me, the me in my head, wasn’t real. I always thought it was the other way around. That that guy, the one they saw, he wasn’t real. When I met you, there wasn’t a single person who had any idea . . . You thought I didn’t think about the future. Because I wouldn’t talk about it. When really everything . . . I lived in the future. There wasn’t anything for me here. And I didn’t care no one else knew because . . .”
“You were already done with this place.” Cate flashed through the moments her frustrations with Adrian had boiled over. Moments he had seemed unfixed, elusive. “You’re going to fly helicopters?”
“Big ones.” His face lit up. Cate looked at this new person. “It’s all the things I’m good at, Cate. Figuring things out. Making decisions under pressure. Training hard for whatever comes. Not knowing what will come. I wanted something to fight for, that’s all I knew, when I started trying to figure it out, and this somehow . . . I don’t know. It probably sounds . . .”
“It sounds perfect. And you look really happy.”
“I am.” He kissed her again.
“Wait. I don’t know if—”
He kissed her again and then waited. “You don’t know if you want me to kiss you?”
“No, I definitely do. I just don’t know if I should. Want you to do that.”
Adrian squinted at her. “Um, I’m not sure what to do now.” He leaned his forehead against hers. “So, nothing, I think. Is what I’ll do. I think.” He stayed very still.
She rubbed the back of his head, against the grain of his hair. He shivered and laughed a little. But he didn’t move again until she tilted her head up and kissed him.
He was just moving his hands up her back to pull her closer when the station tones dropped. Heart-stoppingly loud in the bay, as always. She jumped. Startled. Then she pulled him back behind the spare ambulances as the doors to the station opened and the crew got themselves together, the doors opened, the engine started, and finally they drifted slowly out the door. As the truck pulled away, they heard the siren crack on and then fade in the distance. Then the bay door thumped to the ground, putting them back in darkness and silence.
Adrian led her through a side door to the back hallway where the bedrooms were. They could hear the other duty crew in the kitchen, talking and laughing, the television blaring away unnoticed.
They walked to a room at the end of the hall, a spare bedroom the thirds used when they rode overnight. Cate was astonished at how badly she wanted him. When she’d gotten used to thinking of him as a feeling. A chemical reaction.
An electrical current.
Something that was a thrill to be around. But dangerous to hold on to.
It was so tempting to stay in there all night.
They waited as long as they dared, then nonchalantly rejoined the group out in the crew room, hoping to blend in.
They didn’t.
Roof gave them the “watching you” sign as they strolled around opposite sides of the room. Hannah had arrived and she and Sara were sitting on the couch not-so-subtly giggling at their entrance. Well Hannah was giggling, but Sara was smiling and that was, proportionally, worse.
