Thanks, Carol!
From Chapter 13
“So what's your topic?”
“Sexism at the med school,” I told her.
“There's sexism at the med school?” she asked me, so I handed her my topic paper. She read it quickly, paling a bit as she did. I hoped that was because she was impressed, not because she was horrified that this piece of drivel had gotten the same grade as her paper. “This is really good, Clark,” she said to me, her voice soft. “Really good.”
“On par with yours?” I asked her, although I knew I was pushing her.
“Maybe better,” she said quietly.
“Hey,” I said, feeling badly now. “That's not true. You know it's not.”
“It's really good,” Lois said. “I mean, if you could substantiate that, I could see it being picked up by a paper outside of campus. Maybe not front page, but I could see it running in the Planet. But Perry White is not going to care that our student body president dropped out of school for the semester.”
“You can always get the recommendation next semester,” I echoed her words from last week, smiling at her.
“Very funny,” she said, but she was smiling back at me, so I knew she wasn't upset.
“So you're not mad I changed my topic?” I asked her. I mean, not that I would have stuck with the new track even if she was.
“No,” Lois said as she handed my paper back to me and we made our way to the dorms. “This just means I need to step up my game.”
I smiled at her. Only Lois would be able to recover that quickly from thinking she wasn't good enough.
Chapter 14
It was unbelievable. I mean, I wrote it as a topic paper as it was a good story, but I hadn't realized it would be this blatant. I thought the girls were sort of whining, and maybe I would be able to spin what they were saying into a reasonable story, but that was before I decided to take the assignment seriously and really investigate.
I went to the head of the medical school and told him I was considering medicine as a career. A quick call to Chad gave me enough information to pass as a freshman who actually had that interest. I asked if I could sit in on a couple of med school classes and maybe follow some of the older students around as they did their rounds. I wasn't sure it would actually work, but it did. So now I was sitting in a med school course – way too science-y for me to follow in reality - and watching the dynamic. There were about forty people in this class, and just as that girl had said, only about ten of them were female. So, I guess that could be part of the reason why they seemed so quiet. Still, the truth was that two of the girls raised their hands to answer nearly every question, but were never called on.
It took me close to half the class to realize this, though. At that point it was so obvious, it was almost laughable. The professor, a middle aged man wearing round glasses that gave him an owlish appearance, asked a question and one of the girls was the only one in the room to raise her hand. The professor looked around and finally cold called one of the male students. This really got my attention since he hadn't cold called anyone yet. When the boy didn't know, he cold called on a second boy. It was only after this boy also got it wrong that he decided to call on the girl.
I was still feeling amazed as I knocked on Maddie's door that evening.
“So?” she asked as I came inside.
“Promise me that if you make some sort of about-face and decide to go to med school, you won't go here,” I said to her.
“That bad?”
I shrugged. “I haven't even done the rotation thing yet. But the class was just like that girl said. And I spent the morning in the admissions office looking up records on past instructors at the hospital. I found the professor she talked about who was let go.”
“And?” she prodded me on.
“And the reviews ranged from ones that said things like "Finally a class where female students are allowed to talk' to some that were harder to tell like "Dr. Wilmont plays favorites'. The most damning, though were ones that said, "Someone needs to tell Dr. Wilmont how things are played here.'”
“Someone actually said that?” Maddie asked me.
“More than one person,” I said.
Maddie shook her head. “I guess I'm glad the undergrad courses aren't like that.”
I laughed. “With students like Lois and Alicia around, it's hard to imagine that would last anyway.”
“What are you saying?” Maddie asked me, her hands on her hips. “That I would just take it?”
I leaned over to kiss her on the nose. “Not really, but you are a little less of a vigilante than they are.”
“I guess I can live with that,” Maddie said as she snuggled up to my side.
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Lois put her tray down next to me before she sat down. “I did some digging, and it looks like it's true,” she said.
“What's true?” I asked her.
“My story!” she said, sounding annoyed, as if I should have known what she was talking about.
“What are you writing about?” Josh asked as he sat down across from us.
Lois looked at him skeptically. She didn't really think Josh was going to steal her story, did she? I nudged her in an effort to remind her to speak.
“I'm writing about the new student president,” she finally said.
“The smart guy?” Josh asked.
“That's the one,” I answered when Lois didn't respond.
“You're allowed to write stories that are already written?” Josh asked.
“My story hasn't been written!” Lois said. Apparently Josh's words, which she seemed to take as an insult, made it easier for her to overcome her reticence to share her topic. “I'm not writing about his GPA. I'm writing about how he isn't even a student here this semester since he withdrew from all his classes.”
“He did?” Josh asked, dropping his spoon. “Get out! And he's still eligible to be president?”
“Apparently so,” Maddie said. “Makes you really proud of our student government, doesn't it?”
Josh laughed. “That's a great topic, Lois,” he finally said. “Way better than mine. I'm just writing about the new track.”
“Wasn't that your old topic?” Lois asked me.
“It was,” I said.
“You found something better, too?” Josh asked.
Lois laughed. “Better than the track? Think better than mine.”
“Your topic is better than Lois'?” Josh asked. “Not that I really thought I stood a chance at that recommendation anyway, but I guess it's good to know now. So, what are you writing about?”
“Sexism at the med school,” I answered quietly.
“Have you found any proof yet?” Lois asked me and I was surprised. Her words were curious rather than combative. I had expected Lois to want me to fail, but she was being somewhat supportive.
I nodded. “I found some of the reviews of a teacher that was let go for not favoring the male students. And I spent yesterday attending two lectures at the med school. In both of them, the professors only let the female students answer questions if no one else had raised their hands – in one of them, even then he only let the girl who raised her hand answer after he had cold-called two of the guys and they got it wrong.”
“Wow!” Josh said. “That's major, Clark.”
Maddie put her arm around my waist to squeeze my side briefly. “Yup. He's done pretty well.”
Lois made a quiet gagging sound next to me, but I wasn't sure I would have been able to hear it without my super-hearing. I gave her a small smile.
“You okay?” I asked her.
She flushed bright red. “I'm fine,” she said, staring into her salad bowl. Nope, I definitely wasn't supposed to hear that.
************************
“Thanks, Lois,” I said to her as we walked to class.
“For what?” she asked me.
I smiled. “I guess for this. I was…” I struggled with how to word what I wanted to say. “Um… remember the tryout for the Titan?” I asked her.
She flushed. “You mean where I yelled at you for applying?”
I nodded, afraid to say anything else.
“I'm trying to be better,” Lois said. “I know that's not the way to make friends or keep them,” she said. “I guess I haven't had many friends before.”
“Well, you do now,” I said softly. “And I don't just mean me. I know Maddie genuinely likes you and Josh does, too.”
Lois smiled. “You know, I thought of living at home during college. It's not that far and I'm pretty close to my younger sister.”
“Why didn't you?”
Lois flushed again. “The guidance counselor in high school said it would be good for me to live on campus. She suggested I had some immaturity when it came to people skills.”
“Ouch,” I said.
“Yeah, I didn't take it well,” Lois laughed. “And I dismissed it at the time. But Dad didn't. He doesn't live with us, but he is paying for college and basically told me he wouldn't pay if I didn't agree to live on campus.”
“Wow!” I said, surprised. “I can't imagine.”
Lois laughed a little hollowly, “Well, Dad has some people skills problems, too, so I guess he saw this as a way to make sure I'd overcome them. Something he hasn't really done.”
“So?” I asked her. “Are you glad you decided to live here?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I mean, not at first. But now… I do think I like it here. I mean, if I was living at home, I probably wouldn't know you as well and I'd probably still be thinking I stood a chance at that recommendation,” she said with a smile.
I laughed. “The topic is only twenty-percent of the grade. And it's not exactly like you have a bad topic, Lois.”
She shrugged, “It's okay. There's two recommendations. I'm playing nice now, but I wouldn't count on the same behavior next time. And when it comes time to apply for the internship, all bets are off,” she smiled at me.
I laughed. “I can definitely agree with that. I like you, Lois, but not enough to give up the internship for.”
“Aw, shucks,” she said as we took our seats.
************************
I tried to control my gait as I jogged to Maddie's room. The afternoon spent at the hospital had been everything I could have hoped it would be. Not only were the girls all standing in the back, but the doctor suggested I move forward to see better, so even I was standing in front of the girls – even though they were the actual med students. It would be good to give Chad a call tonight to make sure that you'd normally rotate students or something to make sure all of them could see what was going on, but I just sensed that this wasn't normal behavior.
Those girls I'd overheard hadn't just been whining. Rather, one of the best med schools in the country, outside of the Ivy Leagues anyway, was focusing pretty much exclusively on turning out top notch male doctors.
I stopped at that thought. There were probably a couple of other things I could check – what were the placement rates for students in the med school, how did they differ by gender, and in particular how did the differences compare to national averages. Did Metropolis U have a reputation for training excellent male doctors and poor female students? What were the ratings like for these physicians after they left school? Even if perhaps it wasn't well known, were patients in danger because the female doctors didn't have the same type of hands-on experience the male doctors did?
Lastly, and perhaps most telling, would be to see what the placement rates were by gender for students applying to Met General. Even if the sexism here wasn't well known outside of the med school, the hospital certainly knew. It would be pretty good evidence that they knew they were short-changing the female students if they were less likely to accept them in the hospital where they were trained.
Feeling nearly high with all the research I still had ahead of me and my sense that I was the track of something big – I tried not to let myself get carried away with thinking Lois was right and this story could get picked up by the Daily Planet – I knocked on Maddie's door a little harder than I should have.
There was no answer which was weird as we were supposed to meet here for dinner at six and it was only ten after now. Given my harder than needed knock, it didn't seem possible that she hadn't heard me, but I knocked again anyway, but still was greeted with silence.
I started to turn away when my hearing picked up on a noise inside the room. “Maddie?” I called out. My mom would box my ears if she knew what I did next, but I couldn't help it. It was just plain weird that Maddie wasn't here, and given that I could hear noise in her room… I used my special vision to look through her door. What I saw made my heart break.
She was in there, curled up on her bed, tears streaming down her cheeks.
I knocked again, gently this time, calling once again, “Maddie?” I tried to keep my voice as soft and disarming as possible. What would I do if she continued not to answer? I wouldn't break in to her room, of course, but I couldn't leave her in there crying alone.
I sighed as another moment passed by in silence. “I know you're in there, Mad,” I said as softly as I could and still be sure she could hear me through the closed door. “So, I'm just going to sit out here until you're ready to talk.”
I took a seat on the floor across from her room, sitting there for a half hour or so. Every once in awhile, I'd glance inside again. Each time, I'd see the same thing. She was awake and crying, looking more miserable than I'd ever seen her. What was wrong? Had I done something? It didn't seem possible – I hadn't been around since lunch, but then she knew what I was doing. On the other hand, I was not exactly the most experienced guy at being a boyfriend. Maybe I had done something.
Could I have missed some sort of anniversary? It seemed hard to believe – we'd been together over two months now, but Maddie had told me after the first month that she thought it was silly the way people celebrated monthly anniversaries. It wasn't her birthday, either, since that wasn't until next semester.
Finally the door opened, and Maddie appeared in the doorway looking both adorable and miserable in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms. “Sorry,” she said nasally, as she swiped ineffectively at the light brown hair that was swinging into her face.
“Do you want company?” I asked quietly. She nodded, and stepped back to let me in.
I stood in the middle of her room feeling awkward, not knowing quite what to do. Maddie closed the door and moved back over to the bed, sitting awkwardly on the edge. I watched her for a moment, before deciding what to do. Finally, I took a seat next to her, moving my arms out to pick her up and place her in my lap.
I sighed slightly when she came willingly. At least whatever was wrong didn't have anything to do with me. I scooted back on her bed so my back could rest against the wall, taking her with me.
“Want to talk about it?” I asked her in a whisper.
She shook her head. “It was just a fight with my dad,” she said quietly. “It was so typical, it's not even worth discussing.”
“If it made you this upset, maybe it is,” I suggested knowing those would be the words my mother would use.
Maddie sniffled before shaking her head again. “I don't really want to talk about it right now. It's not like anyone can do anything to help anyway.”
I nodded, not sure I should push more. Mom was pushy, but she was often pushy by being quiet and waiting until I was ready to come to her.
So, instead, we stayed there in silence. I brushed her hair back from her forehead, feeling at least a little better since I knew I wasn't the cause of her crying.
A half hour later, while I still had no idea what was wrong, I realized Maddie had stopped sniffling. It was hard to see her in the dim light of the room, but using my enhanced abilities – both sight and sound to hear her heartbeat - I realized she had fallen asleep.
I decided not to move – I didn't want to wake her. So, I sat there, staring at her tear stained cheeks and wondering what was wrong.
