Today I focused like a pro. I had three consultations and got caught up on our team surgery patient's entire medical history. I'm back. I'm going to head out, buy a bottle of wine, order a pizza, and watch bad movies with my sister. I'm hoping if I get her drunk enough she will explain to me the searching-for-herself self-help book I caught her reading.
As I turn to leave, I see Grace greet her husband at the hospital's main entrance. Kyle Manning is the first baseman for the New York Yankees, spokesman for underwear, sports drinks and hair gel, and husband to my own personal Mean Girl, Dr. Grace Meadows. Since I don't feel like having my ass handed to me for no reason, I will find something to pretend to read until the coast is clear.
I pick up an elderly patients urination chart and watch Grace and Kyle get into their pimped-up Hummer. Inside the beast of a vehicle are her two beautiful teenagers, fiddling with their cell phones. No doubt they are posting selfies of themselves on Instagram and Twitter. Because when you have that much money, go to the best schools, and look that good, why would you do anything else?
"I see the vampire has left the building," Mark says, as he pulls off his comfy shoes and slides on a pair of two-dollar flip-flops.
"I thought she was a witch," I say trying to keep up.
"That was last week's theory. I'm thinking the undead now. She never seems to age. After giving birth to two kids and raising them while working full-time her body is in top physical shape, but I've never seen her or heard her talk about working out, nor have I ever seen her break a sweat. Her husband is a handsome professional athlete who seems genuinely happy to see her when he is in town. And she is at the top of a medical field that is dominated by men."
"She does seem to have it all. Vampire she is. And I am a mere mortal, thus I am destined to live a life void of maternal and marital bliss in exchange for work, work, work," I say, trying to be funny.
"Like a zombie," Mark quips.
I should have known he'd use my humor against me.
"Not like a zombie. Like a human being avoiding biting off more than she can chew," I explain.
"Yes, like a zombie. They bite and chew."
"You read too many comic books."
"You read too many medical journals."
"Whatever, nerd," I snap, grabbing my bag and turning to leave.
"Whatever, nerd zombie," I hear Mark yell, as I push through the revolving doors.
I take in a deep breath of New York City air hoping it will release some of the anxiety Mark just raised in me. A zombie? Really? Grace gets to be a sexy vampire and I'm rotting flesh? As I turn the corner and pass the bus stop my fears are reaffirmed. On one side of the partition is a movie poster for a vampire movie. On the other side is a poster for a zombie television show. Which one do you think is more attractive?
I shake it off and hurry across the street, just as the blinking hand on the other side warns me to stop. I should have listened to it, because in my panic to get across I nearly get hit by a delivery truck. My only escape is a leap onto the sidewalk where I land solidly between two well-dressed professionals about to kiss. I'm about to apologize when I realize they didn't even notice me. They are so into each other that my body bounding out of nowhere toward them was meaningless. God, they look happy. I feel happy for them. Well, some of us get a career and some of us get love. It's just a toss up.
I can't help myself and eavesdrop on their quick exchange, as they enter my favorite Italian restaurant.
"How was the big meeting?"
"They signed on. They're in for three point five!"
"Oh babe, that's terrific! See, I told you a month vacation in Italy wouldn't deter them from working with you."
I stop and watch them sit at my favorite table. A bottle of champagne is opened immediately. They are celebrating. They are living life. I don't want to be a zombie. I want to be a vampire, damn it!
I dial my cell phone. Lacy picks up.
"OK, let's celebrate," I say.
"Are you serious?" she asks.
"Dead serious."
So I jump into a cab and head uptown to a new hot club that has no name and no sign (and no dress code, apparently). I walk past the long line and up to the bouncer who is chatting with a young lady wearing a tube dress the size of a sock. I am not going to wait in a line to buy a twenty-dollar cocktail.
"Excuse, me sir," I say politely over the young lady's shoulder.
She whips around so fast that I get her hair in my mouth. Gross.
"Kate," Lacy says, pulling her long strands of hair from my teeth, "great you're here! Let's go!"
My sister drags me down a dark hallway. Nothing about this looks safe. The walls are pulsing and random people are offering me drugs. She pulls me from the darkness and into an enormous space that must have been used in the forties for building airplanes or boats or something large. There must be a couple thousand people in here. The lights are spinning and a scantily-clad eighteen-year-old DJ is spinning gangster rap in a large cage suspended fifteen feet above a writhing crowd of dancing New Yorkers.
Lacy approaches the bar and the cute bartender slides her two shots. She turns and hands me one.
"Congratulations, Kate! Your hard work is paying off!"
I think that's what she said. It was really hard to hear over, well, everything.
I raise my shot, "To seeing what the future brings!"
"Oh, I like that," Lacy yells, throwing the drink back into her mouth and swallowing it like a ball of fire.
I take my shot.
"Wow! What is this stuff?" I scream back at her.
"Vodka!" she yells at me with a look of disbelief on her face.
So that's what vodka tastes like. I think I've used this on my patients. Blech.
"You ladies want to go to our place?"
I get rid of my empty shot glass and turn to see who the voice screaming into my ear belongs to.
Standing behind me is a very hot guy who may or may not be related to Bruce Springsteen. At the very least he's from New Jersey. Next to him is another very hot guy, who may or may not be related to a member of a boy band. Pick one. He's wearing a bandana on his head and he thinks it's cool.
"I'm not sure," I say, smiling like I'm actually considering the option. I pull aside Lacy, who has already made some sort of promise to the boy-band dude with just one look.
"Pretty sure their place is a bad idea," I tell her, laughing at the absurdity of it. "Right? Like we're going to go home with two strangers from a club."
Do I have "victim" written across my forehead? I've seen Dateline. I am not going to be that poor woman who had it all going for her, but instead winds up chopped up and tossed into the woods in a Febreeze scented garbage bag. Not my story, no thank you.
"It's a great idea," Lacy says, smiling with excitement.
"What? What if they want to . . . you know," I say, oddly unable to find the words "have sex".
"I'm totally up for it. Are you?"
She didn't even hear what "you know" meant. I could have said, "you know" use us for target practice. Or, "you know" braid our hair and dye it green. Whatever "you know" is, she's up for it. How are we sisters?
"I just think it's a little dangerous to leave with strangers," I say with that older sister tone.
"No, it's perfectly fine," she says, pulling out her cell phone. "I've already updated my status that tracks where we are and I'll update it again when we get to their place. If they're murderers, the cops will be able to locate us."
"OK, but that means most likely we are already dead."
"No, because I have this," she says with glee, while pulling out a huge can of bear mace.
"That is not comforting, Lacy," I say. "I'm tired. Let's just go home."
"But I'm not tired. Listen, you go home and I'll see you in the morning."
There are a few things I'm willing to do for my sister, and attempting to thwart off her getting murdered is one of them. If I were bigger and stronger, perhaps I could have picked her up and dragged her out of this dark cave and into a cab. But I'm not, and she's a biter. At least she was when she was five. I have the scars to prove it. So I really only have one choice.
Rick and Mike's apartment was exactly what you'd think it would be. It is tiny, filthy, and smells like feet and beer, which is why I thought Lacy would turn and run the moment we entered. But she didn't. She walked in, grabbed an already opened beer on the table, jumped into Rick's arms and let him carry her to the closet that is his room. I'm not one hundred percent sure it's his room, because all I saw was a hammock hanging near the doorway, but looking around the two hundred-square-foot equivalent of a lean-to, I think I could safely say it is where he sleeps.
So, I'm left in the living room on a pulled-out futon making small talk with a hairy octopus from Ocean City named Mike. Mike is hot, yes, but he doesn't know I'm a virgin and so he doesn't know that he and I aren't making it past first base. There is no way in hell I'm losing my virginity at twenty-nine to a guy in a studio apartment decorated in car air fresheners.
Mike has worked his way to my neck and is groping my left breast. He's actually quite good at this, and if I were someone other than me, I'd have no trouble getting into what he is dishing out. But I'm me and there's just no getting around that. For a moment, I welcome his saliva soaked tongue as he inserts it deep into my ear, because it seems to be the only way for me to block out my sister's screams of passion coming from the closet. Dear Lord, I hope they are screams of passion and I'm not just waiting idly by while she is murdered five feet away from me. Mike reaches for my crotch. Alright, I need to slow him down, before his reality and my reality converge and someone gets their feelings hurtâor worse.
"If the hammock is a-rocking," I say, laughing out loud while trying to wiggle out from under him.
It worked. Mike sits back and slaps his hands onto his unzipped jeans.
"Are you not into this?" he asks, seeming a little exhausted with the whole ordeal.
I want to let him off the hook, tell him I too am over this "wing man" crap. But something in me won't give in. Something inside of me is pushing me to keep going. What am I waiting for? This guy is willing. If not tonight, when?
"No, I am so into this," I say, testing the waters in case I decide to do something crazy tonight.
"Are you sure? Because you keep pulling your shirt back down and your legs are crossed really tight."
I look down. Sure enough, my legs are in a pretzel twist.
"Oh this," I say, trying to untangle myself. "I do yoga." No, I don't, and he's not stupid, even if he looks it. He is clearly looking for more than I can give. Let him down easy. Make it about you, not him.
"You know, Mike, it's just I have an early surgery in the morning," I toss at him, trying to get a conversation going so we aren't stuck sitting here listening to Lacy and Rick finish up.
"You're a surgeon? Awesome," he says, eyes bright and curious.
This is great. I had no idea he would be interested in me and what I do. But then, before I know it, his pants are hanging near his knees, his shirt is off, and he's bent over showing me a disgusting mole of abnormal proportions located just above his butt crack.
"I've got this thing, on my lower back."
"I'm a neurosurgeon, not a dermatologist," I say, pushing his back end away from my face.
"Right, my bad," he apologizes, pulling up his pants and flopping back onto the futon.
And that is where his enthusiasm for my company started and ended. Had I gone into dermatology, who knows where our love could have gone?
It's official; I have got to get out of here. I look around the fifteen-foot space.
"Do you have a bathroom?"
He does, sort of. As I step into the small room, I wonder if either of these two gentlemen have jobs. There is a tiny toilet in the corner covered in feces stains and urine drips. The shower looks like it was ripped out of someone's abandoned RV. The shower head is hanging from a hole that I'm pretty sure has a mouse nest in it, and the vanity is not quite attached to the wall. OK, it's not attached at all. But there is a large mirror that covers one entire wall and right now that mirror is my only friend.
"You're a big deal surgeon," I say to my reflection, somewhere behind the soap scum, toothpaste, and beard trimmings embedded onto it. "What are you even doing here? You've got to believe that the right guy is going to come along. Not just give it to any guy with a hot body who happens to want to have sex with you. If that were your standard, you would have lost it a long time ago. Focus up! You've got plenty of time. So what? You're twenty-nine and still a virgin. What's the big deal?"
I'm not sure if there is an echo or my reflection has come to life, but when I hear, "You're still a virgin?" I know that I've either lost my mind or someone's in the room. I am hoping for the former. It isn't.
Lacy is standing in the open doorway, hair tousled, wearing Rick's shirt, with a look of utter and complete disbelief on her now beard-burned face.
"Oh my god, I had no idea," she mutters, the way someone does when they've been told their neighbor has a secret drug operation.
"What are you doing in here?" I ask, trying to redirect but failing.
"Mike was worried about you. Thought you might beâ"
"A virgin! Yes, it all makes sense now," Mike yells from five feet away in the living room.
I grab Lacy by the shoulder and pull her into the bathroom. I close the door and turn to her, ready to face her judgment. "Well? Say something," I demand.
"Ummm, I don't know what to say."
"Great. I've rendered you speechless? I could really use some help here."
"I should say so," she says, rolling her eyes and looking uncomfortable. "But I'm pretty sure that guy out there is your man, not me."
"So you think I should lose my virginity to that guy," I challenge her. "Is that what I should do?"
I reach for the doorknob, as if I'm going to rip off my clothes and do it with Mike the second I step into the living room. God, I hope she stops me. I'm being a little too dramatic to back down now. I fling open the door. Mike is standing in front of me. Any moment now, Lacy is going to yell, "Stop!" I just know it.
But instead, it's Mike who halts my insanity and holds up his hand like a traffic cop, "Just for the record, I don't do that."
"What?" I ask, sounding offended.
"Virgins," Mikes says, with a very somber tone. "That is precious, and you should give that to a man you love. Not me."
Who knew Mike would turn out to be one of the good guys?
"But I'll take a blow job if you have it in you," he continues.
Scratch that. "I'm out of here," I bark at Lacy.
"Fine, but let me get my dress," she says, hurrying to catch up.
I have just made it to the door when I hear Rick yell out from his closet, "Hey, what's this?" That is quickly followed by what can only be described as a wounded animal screaming.
Rick found Lacy's bear mace.
Once the paramedics calmed Rick down and he stopped screaming, Lacy and I felt it was alright to leave. We walked a few blocks before Lacy decided we had enough distance from the situation to talk about it.
"So, what's the deal?" she asked. "Are you waiting until you get married, because I gotta say that may never happen with your schedule."
"No. I don't know. They say the first time is supposed to be special."
"What are you, eighteen? Oh, that's right, you're twenty-nine! Get real, sis. Special came and went with prom."
I grab her arm and stop her in her sassy little tracks. "I didn't go to prom! You're forgetting, my life hasn't exactly been textbook."
She's tired of hearing me say I didn't get to go to prom or homecoming. She doesn't want the guilt of having had a normal adolescence.
"No, but you've lived it in a text book. When are you going to actually live?"
She rips her arm from my grip and keeps walking.
"I've been living, thank you," I growl. I watch her walking away and feel a wave of exhaustion come over me. I sit on a stoop and let my head rest in my hands.
She must have looked back, because within a minute she is sitting next to me rubbing my back.
"What happened?" she asks.
"I just got busy," I say not looking up. "I woke up one morning and I was still a virgin. I freaked out a little and then I got back to work."
"And now?"
"Honestly, I'm embarrassed. Isn't that weird?"
"Because you're going to be thirty in two weeks and it feels like it's now or never. I get it."
"I hadn't thought of it like that," I say, gulping down my sister's rather bleak summation of my situation. "But I guess that pretty much sums it up." I feel myself tearing up. "I thought I could save lives," I explain, "be a good human being. I thought I could be the best surgeon and that would be enough."
"What? And give all those other people a chance to find love, while you toil away in a sanitized room wearing the equivalent to pajamas and a mask over your pretty face?" she says, wiping tears from my cheek. "You are your own worst enemy."
"You're right. Help me?"
"Help you with what?"
The words flew from my lips, like I'd been waiting for years to ask for this but had no one to go to.
"Help me find someone to lose my virginity to before I turn thirty," I say, turning to look at my sister whose face is now frozen in shock.
"That's in two weeks," she says, her eyes wide.
"And you said that at thirty the possibilities for change are endless! Or did you just make that up?"
"I read it on some supermodel's blog, but I'm hoping it's true."
"Look," I tell her, "like you said, my twenties have been all work. OK, my teens and my twenties."
"Yes, I said that, but that doesn't mean . . . "
My body can't take it anymore. I stand up and yell at the top of my lungs, "Damn it, Lacy, I want to be a vampire, not a zombie!"
Lacy stares at me for a split second confused and then, "Oh my god, I totally just got that."
"You have to help me. You're an expert at this stuff. All you ever talk about is love, sex, and relationships."
"Yes, I'm a bit of a romantic."
"And you lost your virginity when you were in junior high," I point out.
"Rude. It was high school."
"I wasn't judging," I say, trying to recover.
"High school," she repeats.
"Fine. My point is, you've been at this a long time. Teach me," I plead.
I think I see a tear forming in one of her eyes.
"So, what you're saying is, you think I'm your key to attaining true happiness?"
Here we go. This is the part where Lacy makes it about her, when really it's not.
"I think you can help me re-prioritize my goals so I just might find someone appropriate to lose my virginity to," I say, trying to be very clear on her role in my hopefully-soon-to-be sex life.
"In two weeks," she asks again.
I nod.
"And you don't date co-workers, but all you do is work," she says, laying out the obstacles she has to overcome.
"I'm desperately trying to stay positive here, Lacy."
"I don't know," she says, getting up and pacing. "I'd hate to let you down. But you're not getting any younger," she turns to me with a big grin. "And so my answer is, yes. I'm going to help you get laid in the span of two weeks by someone you don't work with. Which, by the way, would take most women less than two hours, but I get it, you are special, and very picky, and did I say special?"
This time I jump up and give her a full body hug. "Thank you. So, what do we do first?"
Lacy pulls away from me like a woman who has been scorned. "Oh my god, you are such an over achiever. Can I have a minute or a day even? I need time to think, put together a plan."
"Sorry," I say, tapping my foot and staring down at my watch. "Should we brain storm?"
"I'm going to kill you," she threatens, as she smiles and slides her arm through mine. "Don't worry about a thing. Your little sister is a sex expert."
She tugs on my arm and we walk.
"Hmmm," she ponders, "maybe I should be a sex therapist?"
I nod my head in some kind of non-committal agreement. I must remember to talk to her about finding herself. But right now, I'm just happy to be talking about me and the real possibility of being a sexy vampire that somehow manages to have it all.