While I'm Falling Read Online Free PDF Page B

with test tubes that would help save, or at least improve, many lives. I didn’t care about money so much, at least not the way my father did. (“You will,” he told me gravely.) But I cared very much about how excited he got when I told him I was pre-med.
    “You’re being very smart,” he said, pointing at me, though we were alone in his car, on our way to pick up two of his suits at the dry cleaner. Apparently, he told me, it was a two-person job, because why in the hell would you expect a dry cleaner to provide adequate parking for customers? Why not just assume a paying customer could bring along his daughter during the only time he got to see her in over a month so he could wait in the car while she ran up to the store to get his suits back? He went on like this for a good three minutes, and I didn’t say anything. Until very recently, my mother had picked up his dry cleaning. I didn’t know where or how she parked.
    “Medical school. Good.” He opened the ashtray on his dash and fished out the ticket stubs for the cleaner. “I worry sometimes, having daughters. I read an article just the other day. You know what college majors have the highest percentage of female students?”
    I shook my head. He handed me the stubs and held up bent fingers to count.
    “Education. Social work. English. And the one about taking care of children, I forget what it’s called. Guess what they all have in common?”
    I winced as we came within a foot of a cyclist. “They won’t make money?”
    “Bingo.” He nodded at the glove compartment. “There’s a twenty in there. You can pay from that. Make sure you get a receipt.” He turned suddenly, sliding in alongside a fire hydrant. “Guess what major has the lowest percentage of female students?”
    I didn’t answer right away. He snapped his fingers.
    “Pre-med?”
    “Engineering. But you get the drift. And then they wonder why women don’t make as much money as men. Well there you go. These girls do it to themselves. Why? Why choose to be poor? You and Elise are being smart. You’re looking out for yourselves.”
    He put the car in park and smiled, his eyes full of affection and pride. I smiled back. It took me a moment to realize he was waiting.
    “Honey,” he said gently. “The suits.”
    I went to my first pre-med advisory session the fall semester of my sophomore year. It was held in an auditorium—they must have known about two thousand of us would show up. Gretchen and I got there ten minutes early, but the only seats left were in the far balcony. I worried we wouldn’t be able to hear, but when the advisor came onto the stage, his face also appeared, like the Wizard of Oz, on a giant screen that hung from the ceiling. Another screen listed the course requirements and the kinds of grades and MCAT scores medical schools would expect. “Look to your left,” the advisor told us, and two thousand or so of us looked to our lefts. “Look to your right,” he said, and so, good pre-med students that we were, we followed that direction as well. “Don’t get too friendly with either one of your neighbors,” he said. “Because only one of you is going to make it.”
    Even at the time, when I was still innocent of organic chemistry and just how miserable it would soon make me, it seemed a very bad omen that at that first pre-med meeting, my friend Gretchen had been sitting on my right.
    “It doesn’t really matter who you were sitting by,” she assured me. “He just meant it as a statistic.”
    Gretchen sometimes didn’t understand when I was joking. But on the whole, she was freakishly smart. If life were fair, if hard work and discipline really could trump pure aptitude, I would have easily been the one to succeed out of almost any group of three in that auditorium. Gretchen, on the other hand, went out a lot. She had three different fake IDs. Sophomore year, we had inorganic lab together at seven in the morning, and Gretchen would show up with mascara