Page 6 of After the Snap

I set the tape on top of the box and walk toward the laptop, aware that somewhere between the living room and the dining table, my entire future may become a little clearer. The distance can’t be more than twenty feet, but it feels impossibly longer today. Every step carries the weight of years that have been building toward the same moment. Somewhere behind me, moving boxes stand in neat rows, waiting to be loaded into my car in a few days. Each one is packed with the certainty that I knew exactly what came next.

Until thirty seconds ago, I would’ve told anyone who asked that the hardest part was already over. I’d graduated and survived organic chemistry. I’d crossed the finish line of four years that demanded more from me than I thought I had to give. This score was supposed to be confirmation, not judgment.

The laptop sits exactly where I left it after breakfast, open beside a color-coded spreadsheet that has consumed more hours of my life than I care to admit. Every medical school I’ve considered since high school occupies its own row, complete with admissions statistics, application deadlines, average MCAT scores, and far too many late-night internet rabbit holes. Dad likes to tease me that I could probably run the admissions office better than half the people already working there. I always tell him that’s only because someone has to keep the future organized.

My fingers find the back of the dining chair before I pull it away from the table, but I don’t sit down. Sitting feels too permanent, as though lowering myself into the chair means accepting that whatever waits behind the login screen is real.

“Okay, Mom,” I murmur with a nervous smile that never quite reaches my eyes. “Let’s see if all that worrying you told me not to do was actually a waste of time.”

I was only seven when she slipped the ring from her finger onto mine in a hospital room that smelled too clean to belong to a place where people said goodbye forever. It was so big at the time that Dad kept it tucked safely away until I was old enough to wear it without losing it. I can still remember how warm her hands felt wrapped around mine and the way she smiled as though giving me a birthday present a few weeks early was the most ordinary thing in the world. Instead, it was her last chance to make sure I always carried a piece of her with me.

The memory steadies me enough to lower myself into the chair, leaving behind the familiar ache of reaching for someone who hasn’t been there in fourteen years. The AAMC login page appears after only a few keystrokes. My username fills automatically, followed by the password I saved to my browser months ago when I convinced myself confidence looked like planning.

The screen loads exactly the way it always has, reducing years of sacrifice to menus and hyperlinks that don’t care how many birthdays were missed because I had an exam the next morning or how many Friday nights ended with flashcards scattered across my coffee table instead of dinner with friends.

I click the score report before I have time to second-guess myself.

The page loads from the top down, revealing each section one at a time. My eyes move instinctively across the individual scores, and something inside me loosens almost immediately because they’re better than the first time. Not dramatically better, but enough that relief slips quietly into the spaces fear occupied only moments before.

A smile tugs at the corner of my mouth before I can stop it; maybe this time, I’ve finally done enough.

My gaze drops to the composite score, already imagining the phone call waiting on the other side of this moment. Dad will answer before the first ring finishes because he always does on score release days. He’ll probably ask if I’ve already started looking for apartments near whichever medical school I’ll choose, and I’ll remind him for the hundredth time that I have another year before any of that matters. He’ll tell me he’s proud of me anyway, then insist on taking me to dinner the minute I get home because every major milestone deserves a good steak and a terrible dessert. Before the evening is over, he’ll start making jokes about finally having a doctor in the family, and for the first time since Mom died, I’ll believe the future we’ve both been reaching toward is finally close enough to touch.

But then I see the number. It doesn’t register at first. My mind rejects the number on the screen, insisting I must have misread something. I scroll back to the top and read every section again, slower this time, but each score is exactly where I remember seeing it only seconds ago.

The composite score hasn’t changed. The arithmetic I trusted throughout college refuses to produce a different answer simply because I need one. I did everything differently this time, and the only thing staring back at me from the screen is another number standing between me and the little girl who once believed doctors could perform miracles if they simply refused to give up.

For several long moments, I can do nothing except stare at the screen, waiting for the panic to pass and reason to take its place. It doesn’t matter how many times I blink or how carefully I read each section score; the total remains where it was the first time I saw it. My brain keeps searching for mistakes because they can be fixed. But this isn’t an error. It’s a result, and results don’t care how badly the person reading them needs them to be different.

I click over to the spreadsheet I’ve updated for years. I don’t need a calculator because I already know what the number on my screen means. I only open the spreadsheet because some stubborn part of me is still hoping I’ve forgotten something.

My eyes move down the list anyway, and by the fifth school, I stop reading the names altogether because the pattern has already become impossible to ignore. Programs that felt comfortably within reach this morning now belong to students whose applications won’t carry two attempts ending with the same disappointment. The schools themselves haven’t changed. The only thing that’s different is me.

My hand drifts back to the ring on my finger, twisting the smooth amethyst until the stone presses against the inside of my palm. I haven’t taken it off since Dad finally decided I was old enough to wear it without losing it, and sometimes I forget it’s even there until moments like this, when the familiar weight grounds me before I completely lose myself to whatever is unraveling around me.

Mom never got to see me graduate high school or walk across the stage to get my college diploma. She never sat beside Dad at orientation or laughed when I called after surviving my first cadaver lab without passing out. Everything I’ve accomplished since I was seven years old has existed in a strange space where I celebrate with the parent I still have while quietly wondering what the other one would’ve said if she’d been there to see it.

My choice to become a medical doctor was never about proving I was smart enough to wear a white coat. It was about becoming the doctor who walked into impossible rooms and fought anyway.

I don’t remember every face from her last weeks in the hospital, but I remember enough. I remember physicians who looked exhausted yet still took the time to explain to Dad and me why Mom needed another procedure. I remember nurses who somehow knew exactly when to sneak me extra pudding cups because eating felt like the only thing I had control over. Most of all, I remember watching people fight for my mother with everything they had, even after I was old enough to realize that fighting and winning weren’t always the same thing. No one promised me they could save her, but they did promise they wouldn’t stop trying. And that promise became the standard I’ve measured every dream against ever since.

My phone lights up beside the laptop, and Dad’s name stretches across the screen before I even have the chance to guess who it is.

Scores release ‌today. Call me whenever you’re ready.

A laugh almost escapes before it catches somewhere behind my ribs because, of course, he remembers. Dad remembers everything that matters to me, even when he has a hundred other things demanding his attention. Training camp is only weeks away. The Valor facility is probably buzzing with roster discussions and coaches trying to solve problems no one outside those walls even knows exist, yet he still knows exactly when my score is supposed to arrive. He doesn’t call, giving me an out, because he knows waiting is hard enough without hearing the concern in his voice before I’m ready.

My thumb hovers over the screen while a dozen different replies fight for space in my head, but none of them make it past my fingertips as I place my phone face down beside the laptop.

Telling Dad means watching his heart break right alongside mine, and I can’t bear the thought of putting him through that pain. He’s spent the last fourteen years making sure I never questioned whether I was loved, giving me every opportunity he could afford and more than a few he probably couldn’t. I know he’d spend his last dollar helping me chase this dream if I asked him to, and that’s exactly why I can’t let him see this yet.

The apartment suddenly feels different than it did an hour ago. The moving boxes no longer look like evidence of a plan coming together, but questions I don’t know how to answer. The anatomy textbooks stacked neatly against the wall are no longer reminders of how far I’ve come. They’re proof that determination doesn’t always carry you across the finish line. Even the word Future scrawled on some boxes in thick black marker feels almost cruel now, as if the woman who wrote it belonged to someone who still believed she knew what came next.

I can’t look at the score anymore, so I close my laptop, but the number follows me anyway. Staying here means sitting in the middle of a life I packed with complete confidence this morning and no longer recognize this afternoon. For the first time since the email arrived, I don’t need answers. I just need to breathe somewhere this apartment can’t remind me of who I was supposed to become.

I grab my keys from the ceramic bowl by the front door without bothering to think about where I'm going. It doesn’t matter as long as it isn’t here. Every box I pass on my way to the door feels like another version of myself asking, what happens now.

My phone vibrates again before I make it halfway down the stairs. I ignore it at first, assuming Dad decided that waiting for me to call wasn’t an option, but a steady round of vibrations follow almost immediately. I wait until I reach my car before unlocking the screen and seeing it filled with messages from the group chat that's been silent since everyone started cramming for the exam.