Sam tried to be understanding. “Oh yeah, I know. Bathing suit season sucks. I’m a big fan of board shorts because they offer more coverage.”

“I hadn’t thought about board shorts,” Lou said. “They’re probably not my style.”

Sam kept the patient stable until she wheeled her to the OR, about an hour later. Sam was pleased that she had kept her cool during a relatively shocking case for a new nurse on her first day when the PA had been no help at all.

Sam had started volunteering as an EMT when she was 16. Every Friday night during her junior and senior years of high school, she slept at the firehouse, on call for the overnight shift. She always did more than was expected of her, always stayed later than her shift. The girls at her private Catholic school didn’t know what to do with her; she wasn’t “popular,” but neither was she an “I’m-going-to-eat-my-hair-in-a-corner person.” After college, Sam volunteered at a local rescue squad while she considered her career options. One night during a stop at Pines, she asked an ER nurse with whom she’d become friendly, “What am I going to do with my life?”

“This is what you’re going to do,” the nurse told her. “You’re going to get your second degree in nursing and some experience under your belt. Then you’re going to get your NP and be able to call your own shots. That’s what I’m doing.” Sam liked the idea of becoming a nurse practitioner, which required a master’s degree. So she followed her friend’s advice. She went right into nursing school, graduated, and interned. She hoped to apply to master’s programs after working in the field for a couple of years.

As a nursing intern at Citycenter, Sam had learned that being an introvert would not help her quest. Sam wasn’t much of a talker. She preferred to observe her surroundings quietly so that she could soak up as much information as possible. Her goal in most situations was to learn; there was always a way to improve her knowledge base. When she did speak, she was blunt, with a dry wit, and she spoke succinctly, which could unintentionally come across as curt or stiff. To her continued puzzlement, men had somehow interpreted this mannerism as mysteriousness, as if she were being coy. But Sam saw herself as just plain awkward.

During the first month of her internship, she had a patient who couldn’t stop vomiting. Sam needed an order for antinausea medication, but was intimidated by Dr. Spiros, the 35-year-old senior resident on duty. He was a tall, exceedingly good-looking man with tousled hair as dark as Sam’s ponytail. Sam had heard him speaking with other nurses in the halls about his interest in teaching medicine to doctors in developing countries. The other nurses swooned over Dr. Spiros, who was smart, sexy, and obviously smooth. Sam was not a swooner, but she could be painfully shy around suave men.

Instead, Sam approached Renée, the charge nurse: “My patient’s puking his brains out. Can I give him Zofran?”

“Go ask Dr. Spiros,” Renée said.

Sam pursed her lips and approached Dr. Spiros, who was looking over the board. She nudged her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Um, can I get some Zofran for Mr. Nathan?”

“I don’t even know who that patient is,” he grumbled. “Ask someone else.”

Geez, it’s only Zofran, Sam thought, her face growing hot. It had a tendency to do that at inopportune moments. She returned to Renée, a Citycenter veteran. “That pompous guy wouldn’t give me Zofran!” Sam said.

Renée looked incredulous. “What are you talking about? Dimitri’s so nice!”

“That’s what you think,” Sam said.

Renée approached Dr. Spiros. “Hey, Dimitri, I need Zofran for Mr. Nathan.”

Dr. Spiros smiled at her. “Sure, anything you want,” he purred. “How’s it going?”

Sam’s gray eyes widened. Jerk, she thought. It’s a shame that such an attractive guy has to be such a douchebag. She managed to avoid Dr. Spiros for the rest of her internship and hoped she wouldn’t run into him again.

There were other annoying carryovers from her internship whom she now wouldn’t be able to avoid. On the interns’ first day, someone had asked if there were any questions. An intern named CeeCee asked, “You guys! Where do we get highlights done in this town?” Of all the questions. If Sam had been outgoing enough to ask a question, she would have chosen, “Where’s the bathroom?”

CeeCee was an overly peppy 22-year-old with meticulously crimped hair. She was a former cheerleader prone to doing celebratory high kicks. Her relentless chatter had a passive-aggressive edge. She and two of her sexy nurse friends made backhanded remarks with toothy smiles.

During the internship, Sam happened to mutter to a tech that CeeCee drove her crazy. She didn’t usually talk about people behind their backs, but CeeCee’s insincere perkiness, fringed with entitlement, was grating. Within days, CeeCee texted Sam. “Someone told me you talked trash about me and said I’m dumb.”

Ugh, drama. Sam tried to avoid drama. She didn’t have the time or the personality to deal with it. She hadn’t told anyone other than the tech that CeeCee drove her crazy, and she hadn’t said anything more. Sam had never insulted CeeCee’s intelligence, nursing skills, or work ethic. “Those matter more to me than whether I like someone or they like me,” Sam explained. “And, if I put myself in her shoes, I’d say there’s no connection between whether you like me and whether I’m a good nurse. Either she somehow equates ‘she drives me crazy’ with being dumb, or someone exaggerated what I said.”

Sam replied with as upbeat a message as she could muster: “I’m sorry anyone said that because it’s just not true! I think you’re smarter than some of the more experienced nurses here!”

Not everyone at Citycenter was annoying. Sam’s preceptor as an intern was gorgeous—a chiseled, 30-year-old African American man with kind, hazel eyes. Intelligent and calm, William was just her type. But she had made the mistake of dating someone at her last hospital, and that had not ended well. In any case, William had a long-distance girlfriend, a nurse many Citycenter nurses had met and spoke of with admiration.

William was one of only two full-time murses (nurse-speak for male nurses) in the ER. He often went out of his way to help his coworkers. Sam knew she could go to William with questions and he’d answer without making her feel uncomfortable or naïve for asking. That was, if she could get to him. He always seemed busy at the nurses station with any number of nurses, engrossed in private conversations that Sam was hesitant to interrupt even with valid medical questions. Women flocked to him for advice, safe flirtation, and to squeeze his impressively sculpted biceps.

By the end of her internship, Sam was comfortable enough with William to barge in on his nurse station conversations. He listened to Sam, as if the few times she spoke up meant that she was saying something particularly important. He was too friendly to intimidate her, and remained unflappable no matter how dire the situation. “Plenty of people in medicine get worked up and freak out over things, so it’s nice when someone is reliably even-tempered,” Sam said. But just as she got comfortable with her favorite coworker, she was assigned the day shift, while he worked only nights.

The rest of the patients on Sam’s first day as a nurse weren’t nearly as complicated as the guy who cut off his own balls, but Kathleen made them seem just as bad. She refused to communicate in person, instead writing bitchy comments on the board. Sam wouldn’t hear from Kathleen for hours, and the PA would walk silently by her in the halls, but then Sam would go to the computer and see Kathleen’s latest comments, directed at her. “Labs drawn????” Kathleen wrote next to one patient’s name, though she hadn’t told Sam which labs she wanted. In Zone 3, the PA was supposed to act like a physician, but the physicians Sam had known, even the unfriendly ones, would at least tell the nurses what was needed. Kathleen was making Sam feel incompetent.