The Doctor's Little Girl (3 page)

* * *

Andrew was sitting on the couch the next morning drinking a cup of coffee before he left for work when his cell phone rang. Looking at it, he was surprised to see that it was Molly. It wasn’t even six in the morning yet. He didn’t take Molly for an early riser, given all of her problems with tardiness at her previous jobs.
Maybe she’s ready to turn over a new leaf,
he thought as he answered the phone.

“Good morning!” he said, sounding bright and awake. “How are you doing on your drive?”

“Well,” she said. “I’m actually already here now. I hope that’s alright.” Andrew was confused.

“How can you already be here? You’re not supposed to get in until this evening. Are you sure?” He peeked out his front window to see a beat-up white Toyota parked on the street in front of his house. It was definitely Molly.

“I ended up only taking a nap at a rest area instead of spending the night in a hotel,” she told him. “It wasn’t that long of a drive, really!”

Andrew felt a surge of that protective, disappointed feeling come over him again. He didn’t think it was safe to drive all night without someone else in the car to keep her awake.

“If you’re here, you might as well come on in and we can continue this conversation face to face,” Andrew suggested. He hung up the phone. He heard the car door slam and then, a moment later, a knock at his front door.

He opened it to see Molly standing there. She was wearing a battered pair of jeans and a t-shirt with a picture of a cartoon panda on it. He couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t wearing a bra, and that her breasts were about the maximum size that they could be while letting her get away with that. He imagined what they looked like outside of the shirt before literally shaking his head to clear the thought away. Molly’s face looked exhausted. Her dark hair was in a messy bun on top of her head, and she had dark, puffy circles under her eyes, which were red and bloodshot.

“Hi!” She sounded surprisingly perky. “Nice to see you again!”

“Very much so,” Andrew responded. He extended his hand for a handshake, and Molly gave him a noticeably weak one. Something to work on in the future, he thought. “Come on in, let’s worry about your stuff later,” he suggested.

Molly followed Andrew into his house, looking at everything with great curiosity. “Is it okay that I’m here early?” she asked. “You look like you’re about to leave.”

Andrew sighed. “I would have preferred it if you had done what we had originally agreed on, Molly. Yes, I am about to leave for work in a minute now, and I would have rather had you arrive after I finished work for the day like we had planned since that’s what I prepared for, but what I’m more concerned about is the fact that you didn’t get any rest last night. I thought we had decided that you would stop somewhere in Ohio for the night.”

Molly stared at her shoes (this time, she was wearing a pair of tennis shoes that were once white but had long ago taken on the color of ‘old sneaker gray’) and didn’t say anything. Andrew realized his tone probably sounded very stern, and that Molly was used to people who were scolding her ending the conversation by telling her that she was fired.

He used his pointer finger to gently lift her chin and force her to make eye contact with him, softening his tone a little.

“Look, Molly, I’m not mad at you. I just want you to take care of yourself. If I tell you that something is the best plan and you don’t agree, I’d hope that you’d let me know your opinion. Don’t just agree to whatever I’ve told you and then do your own thing in the future, understood?”

Molly looked seriously contrite, her big eyes looking like they might be about to fill with tears. “Okay. I’m sorry. I just wanted to save money, and I had too much coffee to be able to sleep anyway,” she told him.

Andrew had figured that it would come down to money. “In the future,” he said, keeping his voice serious but with an undercurrent of affection, “if you have the choice between what’s cheapest and what’s safest, you should always choose the safer option. I’ll cover you if I need to. I don’t want you putting yourself at risk, okay?”

Molly nodded.

Andrew felt the desire to give her a kiss on the forehead, but decided against it. “Good girl,” he said.

Molly’s face bloomed with a shy grin.

“Let me show you to your room now,” he suggested.

Molly followed Andrew up the stairs and into his guest bedroom. Wanting everything to be nice for Molly, he had asked Rebecca to come over and help him freshen it up and make it inviting for the young girl, since the room had been pretty sterile before. Rebecca had done an amazing job at it, adding some cozy pillows, a painting here and there, and even bringing some fresh-cut flowers from her garden. Among the pillows she had placed a teddy bear. Andrew had disagreed with this choice.

He certainly, in a way, saw Molly like a child, but he didn’t want her to feel like he didn’t appreciate her as a grown woman. Rebecca had explained that almost every girl loved stuffed animals, and it sounded, from what she’d heard, like it wouldn’t be too hard to appeal to Molly’s ‘little girl side.’

Molly bounced on her toes when she saw the room. “Thanks so much. I love it,” she told him. Andrew was happy to see her smiling so much.

“Good. I’m so glad to hear that,” he said. “I have to go to work now, though. I’m still planning on bringing you to the office and training you for your new job tomorrow, when the office is closed. You got here earlier than we had planned by sacrificing sleep, so that’s what I want you to do now. I want you to get whatever essential things you’ll need in order to get ready for bed out of the car and then get some rest. I’ll wake you up when I get home from the office this evening. Do you understand me?”

“Okay,” Molly agreed.

“Good,” Andrew said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

Molly smiled and waved. “Have a good day!” she said as he walked down the stairs.

Andrew felt a rush of happiness at her words. It took a toll on him to always come home to an empty house. He’d been living alone ever since he had graduated from medical school. He remembered how full of life the apartment that he had shared with Dave and Lisa had been, and how reassuring it was to know that one of them was going to be there when he got home. The memory was immediately followed by the image of Lisa standing in their kitchen, packing boxes as tears streamed down her face. It was only his good mood at the moment that made the memory bearable, but it still bit into him.

Sure, he had dated girls since then, but nothing had been the real thing. He felt like he worked too much to make having a serious relationship possible. Most of the ones that had been the closest to successful had failed because he couldn’t dedicate the time and energy that his lovers had needed. He knew that Molly was really just a roommate, but the idea that he’d come home and find her there made his life feel less empty.

* * *

After Andrew left for work, Molly was surging with excitement. The drive had been long and incredibly boring. There wasn’t much of anything interesting to see, but a steady stream of energy shots and coffee had left her overly energetic. So she had just kept driving on, singing along to the songs on the radio until she started to feel like she was losing her voice. Once it got dark, she did start to get sleepy but the idea of stopping to spend the night stressed her out.

The thought of staying in a hotel all alone felt creepy to her. Besides, she wasn’t sure if her debit card would be accepted at the desk; she only had forty dollars on it after her last tank of gas, and if it came down to it, she’d rather be able to buy the gas she needed to arrive than spend the night somewhere. So, when her eyelids started to get too heavy for her to focus on the freeway in front of her, she had pulled off at a rest area, pushed her seat back as far as her boxes and bags in the back allowed her to, and dozed.

She had only slept for a few hours before giving up on it and driving the rest of the way to Illinois. The driving had gotten more interesting as she got closer to the city of Chicago, and she was growing both excited and anxious as she approached her destination.

Molly had been happy to see the neighborhood where Andrew lived. Of course she had known that since he was a doctor, he had to live in a nice place, but Molly had grown up living in small, cramped places without much to look at. The sun was rising as she drove down his street, and she thought of it as a place where other people lived, the kind of place where her mother would have gone to clean houses before she got too unwell to work anymore. When the GPS told her that she had arrived at her destination, she pulled off in front of the house and verified the number. Andrew’s house wasn’t huge by any means, but it was cute, and certainly looked nice and comfortable.

Now that she was inside, she decided that it was time to take a better look around. Andrew had just showed her to her room instead of giving her a proper tour, probably because he had to leave for work. So Molly gave herself one, peeking into each of the rooms with voyeuristic curiosity.

After a few minutes of poking around, Molly started to realize just how tired she was. She stifled a yawn, then, remembering there was no one there, let it out, stretching dramatically with it. She wandered back upstairs and into her room, not bothering to get anything out of the car. She stripped her jeans off and climbed into the bed in her t-shirt and panties and found that she was surprised with how quickly she felt sleep overtaking her.

* * *

Once he arrived at work, Andrew checked his schedule to see what he had going on that day. Besides his usual scattering of appointments, today he was being visited by the drug rep that Samantha had noted had called the other day.

His day started smoothly, and after his first appointment, Andrew returned to his office. The Questru rep was already seated, and he got up to greet the doctor as he entered. The rep was about the same age as Andrew, and his starched white shirt contrasted with his tawny olive-colored skin. His dark hair was carefully slicked back. He smiled a huge saccharin smile at the doctor, extending his hand.

“Andrew! Nice to meet you! I’m Marcel.”

Andrew shook his hand. “Welcome, have a seat,” he said, forcing himself to smile back. Marcel sat back down and Andrew walked around to his desk and took a seat, too. Marcel leaned forward, his face a perfect, overly friendly mask.

“Andrew, I visited some of the pharmacies in your neighborhood before coming over here this morning to talk about what’s been being prescribed around here and I was really surprised to find out that almost no one in your area is getting any Mialis, so I decided to come talk to a few docs and let you guys know just how great a drug it is.”

Andrew slumped in his seat, feeling uncomfortable. A meeting with a pharmaceutical representative was always about trying to get Andrew and other local doctors to prescribe a particular product, usually one brand over a competitor’s, and it was always a sales pitch. Andrew did his prescribing based on what was best for his patients’ needs, would show the fewest side effects, and was as affordable to his patients as possible. But Marcel was right: Andrew didn’t prescribe Mialis.

It wasn’t just that he didn’t do it often, he didn’t do it at all. It was a new drug that had just come onto the market. It wasn’t available in a generic form at all, but it also was an entirely unnecessary drug, in Andrew’s opinion. It was a stimulant that was created for the purposes of helping to promote proper sleep cycles in people who did shift work or suffered from chronic fatigue, but it was becoming very popular to prescribe off-label for weight loss, at which it was very effective.

At the last conference Andrew had attended a few months ago, he had learned about the problems with the drug: it had been rushed to market without enough testing, and had a high risk of cardiovascular side effects, plus it was highly habit-forming. As such, Andrew hadn’t written a single prescription for it.

He cleared his throat, feeling a little awkward. “I’m actually fairly familiar with Mialis already,” he told Marcel. Marcel’s expression didn’t change at all. It remained plastered on.

“Excellent! So you know about its two uses, both of which are very helpful to the modern patient, right?”

“Yes,” Andrew told him. “I know that it’s designed to promote wakefulness and alertness and that it is used off-label as a diet pill.” Andrew couldn’t help but have contempt in his voice as he said that. He didn’t want his patients taking unnecessary medicine to begin with, and really encouraged those who were at unhealthy weights to change their eating habits and start exercising more. When a case was serious enough, he had recommended a patient for gastric bypass, but he had never written a prescription for weight-loss drugs. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but it just didn’t seem worth the risks.

Marcel’s face changed, looking disappointed by Andrew’s tone. “You say that like it’s a bad thing! Since you’re a doctor, you must know how much of a problem obesity is for the modern American. It’s not just a cosmetic problem, it’s a serious health issue. We have a medication here that can help to treat this in patients; what’s not to love about that?”

Andrew tried to be as careful with his wording as possible. “I’d consider prescribing Mialis in a few years, after it’s had more research and documentation on the long-term effects. I personally prefer not to write scripts for drugs that are brand new and haven’t gone through as rigorous of testing yet.”

Marcel looked like he was trying to put his smiling face back on, but was having trouble doing so. “Mialis is well-tested, Andrew! It’s fully FDA approved. You don’t get that approval without doing all the proper testing.”

Andrew had no comment that wasn’t sarcastic. Of course he fully supported the FDA, but Marcel’s wording implied that their seal of approval meant that nothing could go wrong, and the stats that he had seen at his conference suggested otherwise to him.

“It’s been FDA approved to promote wakefulness in patients. Its use as a weight-loss drug is currently untested, as far as I understand.”