Dr. Carter

 

 

POV: Americus Bentley 

---

I have exactly one rule about using my dad's professional connections.

Do not abuse them.

I have been bending this rule since approximately the moment I met Silver Preston.

It is not my fault. Silver is the kind of person who makes bending rules feel like the responsible choice. She limps across campus every day pretending she does not limp. She winces on stairs and pretends she is not wincing. She carries this enormous, obvious pain around like it is invisible and seems genuinely confused when people notice it anyway.

I notice everything.

It is both my greatest strength and the reason my roommate is about to have a very important medical appointment she did not agree to.

Dad texted three days ago that he would be in New Haven for a conference at Yale School of Medicine.

I texted back immediately.

I may have a situation.

His response: Does this situation involve you or someone else?

Me: Someone else. She needs a consultation. ACL reconstruction, figure skating level athlete, probably not doing her physical therapy as consistently as she claims.

His response took four minutes, which for my father means he was actually thinking about it.

Bring her Thursday at two.

I have been planning the ambush ever since.

---

Silver is at her desk when I come back from my morning class, staring at her American Literature notebook like it personally wronged her.

I throw open the door with appropriate dramatic energy.

"Surprise."

She looks up.

"What did you do."

It is not a question. She already knows something is happening. Silver reads rooms the way I read sheet music, instinctively and ahead of the beat.

"My dad is in town," I say, unwinding my scarf with one hand. "He is a sports therapist. Olympic level. He has worked with half the national teams in the country and he is going to look at your knee today."

The color drains from her face.

Not dramatically. Silver does not do anything dramatically. It is more like watching a light source dim slightly, the warmth pulling back behind something controlled and carefully maintained.

"Americus."

"Before you say no—"

"No."

"You did not let me finish."

"The answer is still no."

I sit on the edge of her bed and look at her directly, which she hates, because Silver Preston is deeply uncomfortable with being looked at by anyone who is not judging her on technical merit.

"You limp every morning," I say. "You have not been to the rink since you snuck into Ingalls three weeks ago. You deflect every time anyone mentions skating with the specific energy of someone who is terrified of the answer they might get."

She opens her mouth.

"I am not finished." I hold up one ringed hand. "You came to Yale carrying a box of medals under your bed and a knee that is not healed and a mother who apparently has the emotional warmth of a Zamboni. My dad is one of the best sports medicine specialists in the country and he is two blocks away and he owes me for the time I did not tell Mom about the incident at the Boston conference."

Silver stares at me.

"What incident."

"Irrelevant. The point is you are going."

She closes her notebook.

She does not say yes.

But she does not say no again either, which with Silver is basically the same thing.

---

The walk to Dr. Carter's office takes eleven minutes.

I know because I time everything. Old habit from years of musical theater, where knowing how long something takes is the difference between a clean entrance and a disaster.

Silver walks beside me with her hands in her hoodie pocket and her jaw set in that particular way that means she is performing composure for an audience of two.

I talk the whole way there.

Not about the appointment. About the karaoke night I am planning, about the costume design elective and the professor who has very strong opinions about the color orange, about whether Riley is secretly the most competitive person either of us has ever met or whether she just hides it extremely well.

Silver listens. Responds in the small, precise way she has.

I watch her shoulders drop by about half an inch somewhere around the corner of Whitney and Trumbull.

That is enough.

---

My dad's office is on the second floor of a building that smells like lemon disinfectant and careful conversations.

I push through his office door without knocking, which is our established dynamic going back approximately twenty years.

"Dad."

He looks up from his desk.

He is tall, broad-shouldered, the kind of person whose whole professional life is written in his posture. Kind eyes. Wire-rimmed glasses. The specific calm of someone who has delivered difficult news often enough to have gotten very good at it.

"Americus." He stands and hugs me properly, which I allow even though Silver is watching and I have an image to maintain.

Then his eyes move to Silver.

I watch them land on her and do the thing professional eyes do, the quick, thorough assessment that is not rude but is also completely impossible to hide if you know what you are looking at.

He knows what he is looking at.

"You must be the roommate," he says.

"Silver Preston," she says.

Something moves across his expression for half a second. Recognition, I think. The kind that comes from following sports seriously.

"I see," he says.

Silver flinches slightly at that, which I do not think she means to do.

I claim the chair across from his desk and settle in.

This is going to be harder than I told myself it would be.

I can already feel it.