sliding in alongside a fire hydrant. “Guess what major has the lowest percentage of female students?”
I didn’t answer right away. He snapped his fingers.
“Pre-med?”
“Engineering. But you get the drift. And then they wonder why women don’t make as much money as men. Well there you go. These girls do it to themselves. Why? Why choose to be poor? You and Elise are being smart. You’re looking out for yourselves.”
He put the car in park and smiled, his eyes full of affection and pride. I smiled back. It took me a moment to realize he was waiting.
“Honey,” he said gently. “The suits.”
I went to my first pre-med advisory session the fall semester of my sophomore year. It was held in an auditorium—they must have known about two thousand of us would show up. Gretchen and I got there ten minutes early, but the only seats left were in the far balcony. I worried we wouldn’t be able to hear, but when the advisor came onto the stage, his face also appeared, like the Wizard of Oz, on a giant screen that hung from the ceiling. Another screen listed the course requirements and the kinds of grades and MCAT scores medical schools would expect. “Look to your left,” the advisor told us, and two thousand or so of us looked to our lefts. “Look to your right,” he said, and so, good pre-med students that we were, we followed that direction as well. “Don’t get too friendly with either one of your neighbors,” he said. “Because only one of you is going to make it.”
Even at the time, when I was still innocent of organic chemistry and just how miserable it would soon make me, it seemed a very bad omen that at that first pre-med meeting, my friend Gretchen had been sitting on my right.
“It doesn’t really matter who you were sitting by,” she assured me. “He just meant it as a statistic.”
Gretchen sometimes didn’t understand when I was joking. But on the whole, she was freakishly smart. If life were fair, if hard work and discipline really could trump pure aptitude, I would have easily been the one to succeed out of almost any group of three in that auditorium. Gretchen, on the other hand, went out a lot. She had three different fake IDs. Sophomore year, we had inorganic lab together at seven in the morning, and Gretchen would show up with mascara tracks down her cheeks, her blond hair tangled and reeking of smoke. But she never seemed particularly pained after she put on her lab coat and goggles. She worked through the most complicated titrations and equations as if she were just stumbling around the dining hall, getting herself coffee and cereal—nothing a girl with a little hangover couldn’t manage. She usually finished early.
I did okay that year. I put in the time. I memorized the formulas, the periodic table, the thermodynamic laws. I stayed in and studied when Gretchen went out. And though it seemed a little unfair that I should have to work so much harder than she did, I was happy I could at least keep up. The future seemed bright and certain. My father started saying, “What’s up, Doc?” when he left messages on my phone.
This year, however, was different. First semester was almost over, and I was already sinking. Organic chemistry was everything I had struggled with and barely understood in inorganic the year before—only now all the diagrams had gone 3-D. For the first time, it didn’t matter how much I studied. As early as September, I went into my TA’s office hours for extra help. But when I tried to explain what I didn’t understand, he used the word “obviously” a lot, squinting at me as if I were playing some joke on him, as if I were a small child pretending to be a chemistry student—no actual twenty-year-old could possibly be so dense.
“You just have to get past organic,” Gretchen said. “It’s a hurdle, that’s all. Don’t let it psych you out.”
I slid my box of Chicken Satay across the table, offering her a piece. We were studying in the ninth-floor lobby, the door to the women’s wing propped open so Gretchen could see the door to her room. She was the ninth-floor RA, and she had told a freshman from Malaysia that she would be available until ten o’clock that night to help her study for her first driving exam. Gretchen was nice like that. She wasn’t even