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May is sorting through the box of linen closet stuff she brought home from her apartment to see what she needs for her dorm – cotton balls yes, extra bottles of micellar water no – when there’s a knock on her open bedroom door and Hen sticks her head in.
“How’s it going?”
May frowns. “Maybe less well than I thought if Mom called in reinforcements?”
The suggestion to text Hen had come almost immediately after their conversation about her roommates, but May had taken it as just that and let it go. Apparently it had been one of those ‘you can do what you want, but you should want what I want you to do’ kinds of suggestions. It’s not like May didn’t think Hen wasn’t someone with relevant experience who could offer good advice, but... Hen is her Mom’s friend and it’s kind of hard to gripe about feeling too old for your college roommates to someone who knew you before you needed a training bra and probably suggested where to buy it when the time came.
“I wouldn’t call it reinforcement,” Hen says, gesturing with her hand for permission to come in and May nods. Hen appears in full and in full uniform, hoodie and jeans and bangle earrings. “Maybe more... empathy?”
May rolls her eyes because they both know Athena Grant.
“It’s completely natural to wonder what the hell you just signed up to do,” Hen says, leaning up against the closet door. “You had a good thing going. You were doing meaningful work that was easy to identify as meaningful work. And you got to do it with people who understand you and respect your intelligence and your experience and how hard you had to fight to be taken seriously.”
“I’m waiting for the ‘but’ here...”
“There is no ‘but,’” Hen replies with a shrug. “Not really. These are all completely legitimate facts and saying ‘but you have to follow your dreams’ doesn’t make them not-legitimate. It makes the choice to do it harder because of what you’d be giving up. The first step to living with that choice is acknowledging that it’s not an easy choice.”
Which is maybe not what she was expecting when Hen turned up. Everyone’s been acting like her time at Dispatch was a detour, something she would do for a short time before she went back to being the May Grant she was supposed to be. Like it was a gap year, some kind of rumspringa before she accepted her proper role. But it hadn’t felt like that to her, at least not entirely. It had been real and it had been important and if starting there had been more of a ‘need’ than a ‘want,’ leaving was not the same thing. The choice to not make it a career, to not see it as a vocation... it wasn’t obvious or inevitable to her. Leaving Dispatch hadn’t been easy. It had felt like giving up something. And it’s been hard to mourn what nobody else seems to realize she’d lost.
“I knew that when I started med school that I would be sacrificing not only all of my free time, but also a lot of my time with Karen and Denny,” Hen continues. “I would be sacrificing my time with Chim and with your mom and all of my other friends. And I don’t know how my clinical rotations are going to work with my schedule next year, whether I'll be able to stay as a full-time paramedic. And even if I can, when I finish medical school and start my residency, I’m going to have to give up the 118 entirely and between you and me and those five bottles of Miss Jessie’s, I am not ready to face that part yet.”
May looks over her shoulder at the hair products on her desk and then back at Hen, who might need a second. They’ve all known that the end result of Hen going to medical school was going to be Doctor Wilson, but May doesn’t think anyone’s really processed the idea of what Doctor Wilson would mean. She certainly hasn’t and maybe Hen hasn’t really, either if saying it out loud causes this kind of reaction.
“They were on sale,” is what May says instead of any of that. “Mom’ll come in here once I’m at school and commit petty larceny.”
“You might have a bottle or two left by Thanksgiving,” Hen offers with a wry smile that says she knows exactly what May was doing.
“So here’s the actual advice part,” she goes on after taking a deep breath. “Take it or leave it. Not everyone has to sacrifice to grow. Not everyone has to suffer. You’ve done both and it makes sense that you’d be wary of those who have done neither. It can be hard to be patient with people who have... a much less complicated understanding of the world. Who can seem very young because they haven’t experienced any of the things that age a soul.
“But you won’t be the only one in your freshman class who will have to bite your tongue. You are not going to be the only one who isn’t coming straight from high school and has seen a bit of the world. And you are going to meet people who are coming out of high school but have seen some shit that no kid should. And it’s not always going to be obvious who those people are, so don’t judge anyone from a picture in the freshman directory or what they’re like on the first day of classes. My first day, I got partnered up with a girl your age I thought was gonna be like you think your roommates are gonna be. And she seemed determined to prove me right... right up until she didn’t. And a semester later she helped me save my mom’s life and a couple of semesters after that we’re still study buddies.
“You will find your people at school. It may take a little time and a little effort to find the folks you will jive with, but they’re there. They might even turn out to be your roommates.”
May makes a face because Hen is right about everything but she did not see those pictures and those bios...
Hen waves off her frown. “I’m pretty sure Staff Sergeant Eddie Diaz didn’t turn up at the 118 and think Buck was going to wind up being his BFF with the way he was clowning, but there they are. Weirder things have happened than you becoming besties with Amberlynn or McKynna or whoever those girls are.”
Whatever Buck did when Eddie joined the 118 is kind of folded into all of the other stories about Stupid Buck Tricks in May’s head, so while she doesn’t know the specifics, she can kind of get the gist.
“My baby girl’s got another ten years before she’s old enough for any Buck 1.0 stories,” Mom says like she wasn’t at the door listening for however long. She comes into the room and goes straight to the desk and picks up one of the bottles of Miss Jessie’s.
“Petty larceny,” May says.
“Is a misdemeanor often not prosecuted,” Mom replies. “Lunch is ready.”
May is two days into trying not to rush to judgment about her roommates at USC when she gets a text from Eddie asking how things are going. May’s still in contact with a few people from Dispatch and she’s gotten texts from Josh and Sue wishing her well and asking for updates and more frequently from Linda and Terry passing on gossip and ten thousand pictures of the new call center. Eddie left Dispatch before she did and got a better cake than she did (it had a tiny firefighter running toward flame being chased by blue Twitter birds; hers had a college theme and USC colors), but she also knows that he gets all the news from Bobby now and she doesn’t care to place odds on whether this is just him checking in or because someone said something at family meal at the 118.
She tells him the truth regardless, which is that it’s really weird living in a dorm with roommates and an RA monitoring her behavior and having nothing more important than classes to think about.
“It’s hard to shut out the real world once you know it’s out there,” he texts back a couple of hours later, late enough that he’s probably at the station on a 24. “But you’re not failing anyone by turning down the volume for a while.”
There’s a chance that he’s reporting what she says to Bobby, but she doesn’t think he is. After Eddie got back from his emergency medical leave, May was one of the only people who’d known what had really happened and hadn’t said anything to anyone and he’d thanked her for that. (Office gossip had ranged from something happening to Christopher to some mystery condition that was the reason he’d left the 118 for LAFD PR in the first place.) They’re not friends, but they’re kind of family and she’s not much younger than his baby sister and after seeing each other at Dispatch every day for a few months, they exist to each other differently now than they did before.
“I apparently have to be patient and find my people,” she sends him the next morning as she waits the minute for the coffee from the fancy Keurig her Dad and David sent directly to the dorm so Mom wouldn’t see it. She’s the only one in her suite who is taking 9am classes because getting up at 8:30 is a luxury after her routine at Dispatch.
“You’ll find your people,” she gets back right away. “When I went into the Army, my training platoon was two dozen boys who didn’t need to shave yet and half of them were virgins pretending they weren’t and I was married with a kid on the way. Second week, guy from another platoon transfers in and he was 32 with 4 kids and enlisted to pay alimony and we were the oddest couple, but we got each other through it.”
Which was not the Buck story she’d been expecting, but maybe that’s better.
“You still keep in touch?” she asks as she carefully fits the lid of her insulated mug. One accident was enough.
“Never saw him again after that, but that’s okay. Your people now don’t have to be your forever people. There will be a lot of people who will always be important to you but won’t wind up being forever people.”
Which is something May’s heard before, especially in the context of her roommates – they don’t have to be her BFFs, they can just be friends for right now. But that’s not something she can really wrap her head around. She can understand important people in her life not being ‘forever people’ in terms of, say, Eddie talking about his wife or Bobby talking about the family he lost or Mom talking about Emmett. It’s the way she thinks Claudette is going to matter to her for a long time. But the idea of just losing contact with friends, with people who mean something to her, and it being okay, being normal , that part doesn’t seem real. She’s still tight with her friends from high school. She can’t imagine a time when they – or people like Linda or even Eddie – are like strangers to her, people she is okay not knowing anything about beyond what they post on social media. It makes her feel like Future May is going to be a bad friend, a bad person. It’s not the version of herself she left Dispatch to discover.
On Tuesday morning she’s sitting The American Experience and a girl with purple hair takes the seat next to her and May notices the scars across her wrists and something inside her shivers.
“Yeah, I know, I should’ve gone vertically instead of horizontally,” the other girl says with a tired sigh, like the joke is her pre-emptive strike against either sympathy or questions.
If there’s anything May’s grateful for beyond the fact that she survived her own suicide attempt, it’s that nobody can tell just by looking at her that she tried. Everyone in her high school knew and everyone at Dispatch knew and the weight of that knowledge was sometime more than she wanted to bear. But here and going forward nobody has to know unless she tells them. She’s the master of her own story again and this is why she decided to go back to school, to find the version of herself hiding behind Failed Suicide May Grant because she’d lost the ability to see her the same way everyone else had.
“No, you really shouldn’t have.”