For a moment it felt like I might’ve gone too far, pushed too eagerly into a topic that was not yet - might never be - open to me.Then Kai made a face.
“There are spoken expectations, and unspoken ones, right?”He waited for my nod.“And I think the latter are the most potent.They’re the ones which really shape us.”
“Go on,” I prompted.
He frowned, reaching for his wineglass.“Like, someone telling you, ‘you must do this!’you can argue with.Or debate it, if you’re feeling measured and reasonable, or something in-between.Whatever.You can talk it through, yeah?”
I nodded again.
“But unspoken expectations are sneaky.You project all your own stuff on top of them, give them twice the weight.My parents want me to be a doctor, and I don’t want to disappoint my parents, or let down ‘the family legacy’ - whatever the hell that is, really - and if I don’t go to medical school, well, what the hell else am I planning to do?”
“We’re our own worst enemies, sometimes,” I suggested.
Kai grunted agreement.“Growing up, it felt like everything was touched, somehow, by my dad’s job.Mealtimes organized around his shifts at the hospital, vacations squeezed into the gaps in treatment schedules.My mom was ‘the doctor’s wife’ and I was ‘the doctor’s son,’ and that was something honorable, something to be admired.”
“He did something important.”I wasn’t sure if I was agreeing, or playing Devil’s advocate.
Kai’s expression twisted, unhappily.Something closer to disgust.“Oh, sure.Always important; always life-and-death, even if I bet half his days were just full of paperwork and insurance bullshit.You can’t argue with that sort of important, y’know?”
I nodded.
“And everything else feels so...”He gestured, with the hand holding the wine, searching for the words.“So very bland, in comparison.”
“Milquetoast.”
A beaming grin, like I’d passed him an unexpected gift.“Milquetoast.Yes.So, the doctor’s son isn’t sure he wants to go to med school, boo-hoo.There are people out there dying of throat cancer, stop being so damn precious.”
“But he didn’t say that.”
Kai shook his head.“Like I said, the unspoken expectations and criticisms are the most powerful ones.”
Reaching over, I topped up his glass.Sneaking glances at the morose, preoccupied look on his face as he watched the wine flow.
“But you don’t hate the idea, now,” I prompted.Unclear, still, if I was trying to rescue the mood of the evening, or cheer him up, or save myself from the sudden sense of awkwardness.“Med school, I mean.”
“I enjoy it.Or, bits of it, really.That’s the galling thing.”
“How dare your dad be correct.”
“Exactly.”Kai laughed.“There was a part of me that wanted to hate it, to resent every minute of classes, lectures, all of it.Even though I knew that was ridiculously self-defeating, because it wasn’t like I’d be upsetting anybody bar myself.”
I grinned at him.“I’m picturing your utter dismay, at realizing it wasn’t actually as terrible as you wanted it to be.”
“Something like that,” he agreed, still sounding amused.“I came to what must sound to you like a hopelessly naive realization, that just because someone wants you to do something so intensely that they pressure you into it, doesn’t mean that thing is automatically bad.”
“The version of Tate you have in your head is a lot more wise than the version you’re having dinner with.”
Kai flashed me a ‘don’t start that’ look.“What about your parents?Did they have gallingly reasonable expectations for you to rebel against?”
“They only really expected me to leave.”
He frowned.“They threw you out?”
I shook my head.“Nothing so dramatic.I grew up in a tiny town, barely dot-on-the-map level: the sort of place where ‘anything, just not here’ counts as reasonable ambition.Neither of them ever said it, not in so many words, but I always knew resented each other for the fact that they were there all their lives.My mom blamed my dad for trapping her, and my dad blamed my mom for the same thing, and neither of them ever got around to asking whether they could’ve left together.”
“Co-dependence, they’d call that, in my psych class.”
“Look at you, learning all the big medicine words,” I teased, with a smile.“But yeah, when I told them I was leaving for college, it didn’t really matter what I was studying, or where.”
