Outlaws - An American Youth - [Charles Smith x OC]

Chapter 36 - Third Year

The medical school was also located on the University of Chicago campus. Like the rest of the university, the facilities were not ten years old, so they were at the forefront of what was done at the time. Many medical schools have sprung up in Chicago in recent years, taking advantage of the dire shortage of doctors across the country. But most were only charlatans, knowing very little about medicine and only wanting to pocket the money of the poor students who had the misfortune to enroll. I had been lucky, Arthur and Charles had chosen well.

Anatomy, histology, biology, physiology... This is what awaited us for the years to come. There were just over a hundred of us. Again, I was relieved to see that I was not the only woman. I recognized a few faces of my college years but discovered many others.

Long ago, when we were still at Clemens Point, I told Charles that I felt like I had never been alone. So far, Chicago had been the opposite for me. Even though I was surrounded by more than a million people, swarming around like ants, I often felt alone in this crowd. My spare time was lonely. But this new year was about to see a change.

Among my classmates, I got on particularly well with Flora Elliott. She was a kind and lively girl from the good society of the city. Her parents, resolutely modern, had accepted and supported her desire to study medicine. They knew it would have no bearing on her future. She was a very good party, and in no way rejected the idea of one day getting married and perpetuating the values of her rank. She just wanted to do a little more.

She had been influenced by her mother's charities. This one often visited the city hospices, accompanied by her daughter. Since she was very young, Flora had encounter less fortunate people, made sick by their work. She wanted to treat them, while continuing her mother's charitable works, such as giving lavish social evenings to raise money. To be on both sides of the board, in a way.

At the pension too, I made a friend. Hazel Jones arrived in September. Daughter of factory workers, she had managed to rise to the position of secretary. It was an increasingly frequent job, as the offices grew. We got along very well. Behind her modest girl appearance, she actually hid a surprising life.

She was dating an errand boy from a nearby neighborhood. She spent all her weekends with him, living in his small apartment. It was not luxury, but they were perfectly happy with it. When I asked her if they were engaged, she answered me most naturally that they weren't, and that it was not really in their projects. They were content to live day by day.

The customs were not really freer here, but the anonymity of the big cities allowed this kind of freedom. If the rumors became too strong, it was easy to change districts to regain complete anonymity.

I found her incredibly modern. Of course, I had laid down with men, but I would never have put words on it so clearly, and I would never have spoken of them so openly. In cities, what we lost in wild space, we gained in social freedom. But this freedom was accompanied by a certain solitude. And that's how, if I saw her every night, I still spent a lot of my weekends alone.

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The months passed and I got closer and closer to Flora. She paid absolutely no attention to the difference in our radically opposite conditions. For her, a person was a person, what interested her was only the affinity that she felt for this one.

She ends up welcoming me into her weekend activities. We went for a walk in parks, then, when the weather became too harsh, we went to the movies. In December, she took me to Lincoln Park to teach me to skate on frozen ponds. At first terrified, I ended up enjoying it, and we went there almost every week until sunny days. After that, she always invited me to a small cafe, where we drank hot chocolate to warm us up. It was often she who paid, which annoyed me enormously. But she had such warmth, such sweetness, that she could make anyone feel comfortable in a few moments. I then relaxed, enjoying the joy of having a friend again.