Nobody told me that medical school had a dress code.
Not an official one. Nothing written in the welcome packet or the orientation email or any of the seventeen documents I had read three times each before my first day. But I walked into that building on a Monday morning in my nicest blouse and my flats and I understood within four minutes that I had gotten it wrong.
Everyone else was in gym clothes.
Not scrubs yet, that came later, apparently, when you had earned the right to look like you belonged in a hospital. For now it was leggings and clean trainers and the kind of effortless appearance that takes a surprising amount of effort. I stood in the corridor with my tote bag and my flats and I looked like I was there to apply for a job at a bank.
I found a seat near the middle. Not the front, the front row on the first day is a statement, and I was not ready to make statements. Not the back either, because the back is where people sit when they have already decided they do not care, and I cared enormously, possibly too much.
The middle. Safe. Invisible.
I was invisible for approximately three minutes.
"Is this seat taken?"
I looked up. The girl was tall, with big earrings and the kind of energy that enters a room slightly before she does. She was already sitting down before I answered, which told me everything I needed to know about her.
"Zara," she said, holding out her hand like we were at a networking event.
"Marcelin," I said.
She looked at my blouse. Then at my flats. Then back at my face.
"First day?" she said.
"Is it that obvious?"
"The shoes," she said, not unkindly. "But also the blouse. But mostly the shoes."
I liked her immediately. I did not want to, but I did.
The professor walked in at exactly nine o'clock and the room went quiet in the way rooms do when someone with authority enters and everyone pretends they were not just talking. He was a tall man with glasses and the kind of voice that did not need to be loud to fill a space. He wrote one sentence on the board and then turned around and looked at us.
Half of you will not finish.
He let that sit for a moment.
I looked around the room. Everyone was doing the same thing, looking around, doing the quiet math, trying to figure out which half they were in. I caught myself doing it and stopped. Then I did it again.
"Welcome to medical school," he said. "Let's begin."
By lunch I had learned three things.
One, the reading list was not a suggestion. It was a promise of suffering, printed on paper and handed to me with a smile.
Two, everyone in this building was either very confident or very good at pretending. I could not always tell which.
Three, there was a girl in the third row who had already colour coded her notes in four different highlighters before the first lecture was twenty minutes old. She had perfect posture. Perfect handwriting. She raised her hand exactly twice and both times she was right.
I did not know her name yet.
I already did not like her.
Zara found me in the corridor after the afternoon session with the expression of someone who had survived something and needed to talk about it immediately.
"Did you do the reading?" she said.
"Which reading?"
"Exactly," she said. "Come on. I need food and I need to complain and I need someone to tell me that was as hard as I think it was."
"It was as hard as you think it was," I said.
"Thank you." She linked her arm through mine like we had known each other for years. "I already know we are going to be best friends."
I opened my mouth to say something measured and sensible about how we had only just met.
"Okay," I said instead.
We found a diner two blocks from campus that smelled like coffee and fried eggs at four in the afternoon, which should have been wrong but was somehow exactly right. We sat across from each other in a booth with sticky menus and Zara talked about everything, where she was from, why she chose medicine, what she thought of the professors, what she thought of the students, what she thought of the girl in the third row with the four highlighters.
"Stephanie Ryan," Zara said, like she was reading a verdict. "I asked someone. Top of her class.
Parents are both surgeons. She has been preparing for this specific room her entire life."
I thought about my colour coded notes. My single pen. My flats.
"Great," I said.
"Don't worry about her," Zara said, stealing a chip from my plate without asking. "Worry about the reading list."
"I am worrying about both."
"Efficient," she said. "I like that about you."
Outside the diner window, New York kept moving. Buses and people and the particular energy of a city that has somewhere to be. I wrapped both hands around my coffee cup and I thought, this is it. This is the beginning.
I had no idea what was coming.
But I had Zara, and I had coffee, and for one evening at least, that felt like enough.
I got home at eight, changed out of my flats, and put them at the back of the wardrobe.
I did not wear them again for the rest of the year.