Page 67 of After the Snap

Easton pauses with the pretzel halfway to his mouth. “Did you want a speech?”

“No.”

“Good, because I don’t have one.” He eats the pretzel while I stare at him, then shrugs. “You either take the test or you don’t.”

“That’s incredibly helpful.”

“I wasn’t trying to be helpful.” He watches me for another second before he continues speaking, the joking tone disappearing altogether. “You’ve been looking at that screen like somebody’s making you choose.”

I open my mouth but then shut it immediately. If someone pushed me to choose one or the other, I could get angry and argue with them. But no one has asked me once what my plans are. Even the players who’ve decided my study table is now communal property seem perfectly content to let me sit here every day without asking what comes next. They interrupt me, steal my chargers, and apparently monitor my blood sugar now, but not one of them has asked what I'm doing with my life.

“I know I can take it.” I look at the registration button again, my throat tightening as I force myself to keep going. “I just don’t know if wanting to take it again is the same thing as wanting what comes after.”

Easton lowers his phone to the table, but for once, he doesn’t rush to tell me that I’ve wanted to be a doctor forever or that I’m too smart to let one test stop me. He just waits, leaving me with the question I’ve spent the better part of a week avoiding by focusing on whether I could survive failing the MCAT again.

I stare at the blue button beneath my cursor and force myself past everything I might still be trying to prove. If none of that existed, would I still choose to become a doctor? I push my glasses higher on my nose, searching the page like the answer might be hidden somewhere between my name and the testing information. I’ve spent so long knowing exactly what comes next that I don’t know how to want medicine without immediately attaching requirements to it.

Wanting medicine had always come with something I needed to do next: prerequisites, the MCAT, and then medical school. There was always another thing I could accomplish to prove I was getting closer, but none of those things were why I wanted it in the first place. Even as a kid, I understood there were things medicine couldn’t fix. I watched people with more knowledge than I could comprehend walk into Mom’s room, unable to give us the ending Dad and I wanted, but what stayed with me were the moments before we knew what that ending would be, when someone could walk into the room while Dad and I didn’t understand what was happening and give us one thing we could do next. That was what I wanted to know how to do—to be useful when someone else’s world stopped making sense.

For the first time since I opened my score, I let myself picture becoming a doctor without immediately wondering whether I’ll ever get into medical school, imagining myself walking into one of those rooms and giving a family the one thing they can do when everything else is beyond their control. The MCAT can decide whether I get the chance to do those things, but it can’t change the fact that I still want to.

Easton’s chair creaks across from me, and I look up to find him watching me. “You look less like you want to murder your computer now.”

“I haven’t ruled it out.”

“That’s reassuring. I was worried you’d gone soft.”

I laugh softly, which loosens something in my chest just enough that I can breathe around what I’ve admitted to myself. Easton smiles like that’s all he was after and goes back to his phone, not making me explain that everything suddenly feels different than it did five minutes ago.

Knowing that I still want to become a doctor doesn’t make the blue button any easier to press. If anything, it makes it worse, because when I wasn’t sure what I wanted, I had somewhere to hide. I could call the last score a crossroads instead of a failure and tell myself I was taking time to decide whether another path might fit me better, because there was nothing cowardly about reconsidering a future that wasn’t right for me. Except I’ve just stripped that excuse away. Taking the MCAT again isn’t about whether I want what might come after it anymore. It’s about whether I’m willing to reach for that future when wanting it gives me no control over whether I get it.

My stomach pulls tight again as I scroll farther down the page, stopping when the testing dates come back into view. I’ve already done the math. I know which date gives me the most study time without pushing another application cycle too far because I’ve been planning to take this test for almost a week while insisting I haven’t decided whether I'm taking it.

“Those better not be my pretzels.”

I hear Jubal before he reaches the doorway, his voice carrying in from the hall, and my attention abandons the registration page before he even steps into the room. Apparently, seeing him around the facility almost every day hasn’t done a damn thing to stop that.

Easton and I reach for the bowl at the same time Jubal walks in, his gaze dropping to our hands before landing on mine.

“How do I know these were yours?” Easton asks, looking at the pretzel pinched between his fingers.

“I put them there.”

“Were they labeled? You really should label your food if you don’t plan on sharing.”

“What I need is for you to stop eating everything you see.”

Jubal crosses toward the cabinet along the wall while Easton launches into whatever defense he thinks stealing someone else’s food deserves, but I lose track of it when Jubal passes my side of the table. He doesn’t touch me, yet I know exactly when he’s close enough that I could reach for him. That’s considerably more awareness than any person needs to have about someone they’re supposed to be staying away from.

“If you didn’t want me eating them,” Easton tosses the pretzel into his mouth, “you shouldn’t have abandoned them in a communal space.”

“Pretty sure this became Pea’s space over a week ago.”

“That’s fair,” he decides. “I got yelled at for moving her bag yesterday.”

“You put it on the floor.”

“It was beside the chair.”