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“Lookto your left and look to your right.”

It’s a ridiculous exercise, but I do it anyway. I’ve been waiting for an excuse to check out my classmates, and now I’ve got one. I look around and scope out the competition.

I’m underwhelmed.

Everyone talks about how talented and brilliant med students are. Nobody in this room looks particularly talented or brilliant, though. For the most part, they look like a bunch of kids. Most of them are dressed in jeans and T-shirts with dumb slogans on them. One girl has the word “sweet” written entirely in glitter across her chest. I’m sure she’s going to be a stellar physician.

People ask me all the time if I’m still in high school, but I’m actually twenty-six years old—older than most of my classmates. In college, I worked as a waitress to help pay my tuition and then took on a second job as a nanny (for a spoiled three-year-old brat) when Dad got sick and needed help paying bills. Do you think it’s easy to be premed while working two part-time jobs? It isn’t. I ended up having to take a bunch of postbacc classes just to finish my premed requirements.

I also took care of my father. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when I was in high school and declined pretty fast. Lots of people live for decades with Parkinson’s, but my father wasn’t so lucky. By the time I was in college, he had to give up his job, and I moved back home to help my mother take care of him. It all fell on my shoulders.

Dad hated how much I had to give up for him. I’m his youngest daughter, and he came to this country from Russia in his twenties and worked hard his whole life at minimum-wage jobs so I could have every opportunity available to me. He kept saying to me, “Sasha, don’t worry about me. Go become a doctor. I’ll be fine.”

But he wasn’t fine. Soon after I graduated from college, he started having difficulty swallowing. Shortly after, he developed pneumonia and was admitted to the local hospital. He never came out.

For a long time after he died, I was angry. At pretty much everyone. I was angry at the doctors that took far too long to diagnose him, even though in retrospect, his tremors were a dead giveaway. I was angry at the hospital that gave him the wrong antibiotics for his aspiration pneumonia and then talked my mother into withdrawing care while he lay in the ICU.

And my mother—I don’t even want to get into how angry I was at her.

But I got over it. My father wanted me to be a great doctor. That was his dream for me. And wherever he is right now, I want him to see me achieve my dream and graduate from medical school. And not just graduate. I intend to be at the very top of my class.

And honestly, as I look around at my classmates, that goal doesn’t seem too unreasonable.

Anatomy isthe central class of the first year. If you ace anatomy, you ace the year.

One of the key components to acing anatomy is Dr. Conlon’s book, Anatomy: Inside Secrets. That’s what all the upperclassmen told me. So early on the morning of orientation, I travel to the hospital bookstore to buy myself a copy.

A lot of people had the same idea as me. There’s an entire shelf dedicated to Dr. Conlon’s book, and now, about half of those copies have been sold. I pick up a fresh copy of the book, flipping through diagrams of the human body, mnemonics, and something called “Conlon’s Law of Finger Flexion,” whatever that is.

Our professor is a bit of a dork, what with the bowtie and all.

There are at least a dozen copies left on the shelf, and I’m suddenly seized by the urge to buy them all so that nobody else can have them. The bookstore would order more copies, but at least this way, I’d have a head start for the first lab.

Of course, I don’t do it. Mostly because this book isn’t cheap, and I can’t afford twelve copies. I can barely afford the books I need.

Instead, I pull out the stack of paperback texts and load them into my arms. Conlon’s book isn’t that thick, but the stack is fairly heavy. I glance around to make sure nobody’s watching then relocate the stack to a little nook behind a life-sized skeleton. For good measure, I toss a DeWitt Med sweatshirt on top of them.

I check once more to make sure nobody saw me before I get in line to purchase my copy of Anatomy: Inside Secrets. As I hand over my credit card, another student I vaguely recognize enters the store. He sees my purchase and smiles.

“I’m about to buy the same thing,” he comments.

“Oh, sorry,” I say regretfully. “I just bought the last copy.”