“You do not choose your destiny; it chooses you, and those who knew you before fate took you by the hand can not understand the depth of the changes inside. They cannot fathom how much you stand to lose in failure. That you are the instrument of a flawless design, and all of life may hang in the balance.” – Mohinder Suresh, Nothing to Hide

Chapter 5: Bellevue Hospital

OCTOBER 6, 2006

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

“Could there be a mistake?” a young teenaged girl squeaked, staring at Sam in shock. Sam’s face was grim.

“There’s no mistake, Rebecca. You’re pregnant,” she answered, staring down at her chart. The test was clear and positive. God, this girl was only thirteen!

“Oh my God,” Rebecca – probably Becky to her friends and apparent boyfriend, Sam guessed – gasped. “What do I do?” Sam had to keep herself from rolling her eyes. Here came the waterworks. What do you do? You keep your legs closed and, if you can’t, get on birth control!

“Well, is there anyone you can talk to? Your mother maybe?” she asked instead. This girl had enough on her plate without Sam lecturing her.

“No way, she’ll kill me.” Duh, Sam wanted to scream in the child’s face.

“How about your Dad?”

“He’s not around. I had to sneak out even to come here.” Sam just nodded and hummed in the affirmative. Rebecca looked panicked and squealed, “Are you gonna tell her?”

“Not if you don’t want me to,” was the neutral reply. “That doctor/patient confidentiality. The law states that I can’t tell your parents anything you don’t want me to, even though you’re underage and I should…” She let it hang for a moment, watching as Rebecca weighed her options.

“Don’t,” came the firm reply. Sam nodded and held her chart, resisting the urge to take the child by her arms and shake some sense into her.

“Well, you have some choices. You can have the baby and keep it,” Rebecca paled and Sam knew that wasn’t an option so continued, “have the baby give it up for adoption,” the girl paled again, “or you can have an abortion.”

“I can’t have a baby. There’s no way.” Rebecca shook her head, trying to appear calm before covering her face in her hands. Sam saw her shoulders shake and knew that she was crying. “Can you help me?” she whimpered, sobbing. It was the pathetic, desperate look on her face that killed Sam.

“Yes, I can,” she assured her, rubbing her shoulder as the girl collapsed into more tears. “I’ll be right back.”

Taking the chart, Sam headed out the door with a sigh. Rubbing her head, she discreetly pulled out the pills Adrian prescribed and popped one, dry swallowing it. It was disgusting but they were helping, a little bit at least. As she headed towards the ambulance bay, she passed the head nurse, Shirley. She had started off only working part-time, but the other nurses trusted her so much that they began to go to the fifty-something mother of three, grandmother of two, for anything and everything.

“Hey, Shirley,” Sam greeted with a pained smile. “I’ve got a pregnant thirteen year old in Exam 4, wants to have an abortion before the holidays,” she explained.

“God, thirteen?” Shirley exclaimed with a mixture of shock and pity.

“Do you think you can arrange that?”

“Happy Halloween,” she replied sarcastically. “Yeah.”

“You’ll take it from there?” Sam double-checked.

“Sure. No problem,” she assured with a grin.

“Thanks. If anyone needs me, I’ll be outside,” she called over her shoulder, heading towards the door.

Sam sat on the bench outside the ambulance bay. Adrian was alternating between eating a sandwich and drinking cheap black coffee from the cafeteria. Sam was just having tea and a cigarette. She was so tired and stressed, the tea and nicotine were the only things keeping her from ripping her hair out.

“I thought you quit,” Adrian commented, nodding to the cancer stick.

“I did. I took it up again recently for my health,” she retorted. Adrian laughed under his breath and shook his head.

“You should know better than to smoke those things,” he chided. Sam just agreed and took a drag. “I heard about the Petrelli thing. Nicely done, by the way. Very…discreet.”

“Somebody had to say something,” she argued defensively. “He’s just like all the other politicians, pricks and gold-diggers to their frozen hearted core.”

“Rough day?” Adrian asked, looking at her both shocked and amused. “You seem more bitter today that usual.”

“Not really. It’s been pretty quiet.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s what I love about this place: all the downtime,” he replied sarcastically. Sam smiled and shook her head. “Quite a day, huh?

“Yeah. That one guy with the knife in his eye – that was a treat,” she answered, shivering as she remembered that particular trauma patient.

“Something wrong? You’re not your usual snippy-sarcastic self,” he stated concernedly. “In fact, you haven’t really been yourself for awhile now.”

“Adrian,” she sighed, taking another drag and looking at him, “there’s stuff going on with me right now, stuff that really has me scared.” Turning to him, she whispered fearfully, “I think there might be something wrong with me.” And the fact that, while she was chain smoking and waving her lit lighter to scare off some overly chatty pigeons was testament to that.

“Not this again,” he groaned. Sam knew she was starting to annoy Adrian with her constant worrying, but she knew that there was something wrong with her and not knowing what scared her. “I thought I already told you there was nothing wrong with you.”

“I know, but things have just gotten a hell of a lot weirder now. I think maybe my biological parents weren’t…normal,” she replied, looking as though she wanted to bury her head in her coffee.

“I used to think that, too,” he told her, making her look at him in surprise. “Of course, my father’s an accountant and my mother’s a housewife and they enjoy that, so they are weird.” Sam couldn’t help but smile at the little joke, momentarily forgetting that Adrian was comparing her WWII size problem to peanuts. “I thought I’d end up the same way, like I didn’t have a choice. But I was just a victim of my own fear. Understand?” Sam nodded.

“Yeah, but—”

“But then I started to see that I was taking the easy way, blaming them and anyone else I could for how my life was going. But the only person in charge of my life was me, and I had a choice,” he lectured, effectively killing her moment to correct him. “You know, you can be angry and resentful, or you can work and build a life that you’re proud of.”

“But I think there’s something wrong with me!” she exclaimed seriously. “I was reading this book, Activating Evolution, and it said that, genetically, certain people can—”

“There’s nothing wrong with you, Sammy!” he shouted, exasperated. “You’re as human as the rest of us! You’re a good woman and a damn good doctor. I’m proud that you were my student. And I’m proud to work beside you every day.”

Sam looked away, angry that her best friend wasn’t really listening to her or taking her concerns seriously. Seeing that he was getting nowhere, Adrian just told her he’d see her back inside and left her to thoughts. Looking out at the traffic, Sam took another long drag of the cigarette. She knew now that she could never tell Adrian just what she could do. He was far too logical to comprehend it. Hell, he didn’t even like comic books of any kind because of the “numerous fallacies concerning the human genome” they contained!

No, she couldn’t trust her mentor with this. Not at all.

P.S.: Four pages total.