Chapter Text
When Dennis lost Mr. Milton, his mind went back to the summer he was twelve, when he couldn’t save the calf. The ache in his chest was the same. Helpless, holy, and unbearable. Betty, the family cow, had four sturdy calves and one runt. His oldest brother, Daniel, had nudged him and said, “That’s the runt, Dennis. That’s you.” Dennis laughed because it was true. He’d always been the youngest, smallest, weakest Whittaker.
He felt so connected to that tiny creature, as though some deep part of himself lived inside it. He spent weeks nursing it, whispering prayers, trying to coax it toward life. Then one night, his father came rushing into his room, yelling for him to get up. Dennis obeyed, like he was supposed to. He was a good kid, is a good kid. He even went to church every Sunday, prayed morning and night. He wasn’t sure anymore whether he did it out of belief or fear, or because part of him already sensed he needed to be saved.
The barn air was thick; Dennis’s fear and horror were palpable. The runt lay on the ground, struggling for breath. Dennis dropped down to his knees, praying to Jesus with the desperation of a child who didn’t yet know how unfair the world could and would be. He held the calf as it went still, tears spilling before his father’s hand smacked against the back of his head.
“Man up,” his father said, a phrase that would follow Dennis through his entire life.
By the time of Dennis’s graduation from high school, the Whittaker family filled nearly half the auditorium seats. Fifty-five students in his class, though it should’ve been fifty-six, if Sam hadn’t had to go. Sam had been his best friend once. They’d grown quiet after sophomore year, after one night, a night like every night they hung out, in Sam’s empty house, when the air between them had turned thick with anxiety, it was heavy.
“Hey, Denny,” Sam had asked, his voice shaking. “Can I, uhm, ask you something?”
Dennis had nodded.
“Do you... like girls?”
For a moment, Dennis couldn’t breathe. It felt like God Himself was watching, waiting. Every possibility of loss flickered inside him. The farm, his family, Sam, and his faith itself. He said nothing; it felt like it had been 20 minutes, but it was more like 2. Then Sam whispered.
“It’s okay if you don’t. I don’t think I do.”
Dennis looked up, eyes wide. For the first time, the unbearable weight shifted, just a little.
“Yeah,” he said. “Me neither.”
They thought that small truth might set them free, but in their world, it only caged them tighter. To everyone else, their connection wasn’t love; it was sin. So they did what they must, and kept it secret.
That Easter Sunday, like every year, the Whittakers hosted the town’s egg hunt. Dennis did what he always did and hid the eggs. He thought it strange how his devout family celebrated resurrection with candy and colored shells.
Around 1 pm, it was as if the entire town showed, Dennis knew it probably was the whole town. And as always, Sam showed, as he always had, but something was different. His normally calm auburn eyes were dark, as if Sam was afraid. But afraid of what? Dennis could not fathom why Sam would be afraid to be somewhere he had been hundreds, if not thousands, of times before.
Sam did not approach Dennis, like he normally did; he seemed to dodge Dennis at every point. He wouldn’t even look at Dennis, as if he had some disease. The day went on like it always did, the kids found eggs, and they had Easter dinner together. Sam attended as he always did; he was basically family. But he did not sit near or talk to Dennis.
Dennis did not talk to Sam for 2 days, until, whilst walking to his 3rd period, Ms.Warner’s class, Sam grabbed his arm with a vice-like grip, he glanced around with pure anxiety in his eyes, and his posture.
“Sam? What’s wrong? Where are we going? Are you mad at-”
Before Dennis could even finish his string of questions, Sam covered his mouth with his hand as he pulled them into an empty classroom, locking the door behind them. Only then did he release Dennis.
“Sam, what’s going on?”
As Sam took a breath, Dennis could see how his chest filled with air before he spoke.
“I’m leaving,” he spoke quietly as if it was a sin to even say.
“...What? Why?” As Dennis spoke, he rushed to Sam’s side, grabbing onto his arms as he had so many times, concern filling his eyes.
Sam let out an exasperated sigh, and as their eyes met, they both knew why Sam was leaving.
“But, Sam, how did they find out?”
“I don’t know, my Dad sat me down with the pastor and told me I’m going to a camp for kids like me, those who can’t resist sin.”
He spoke so carefully as if the words would break him. Dennis immediately thought back to that night, to when they so carefully spoke out their plan in hushed tones, the way where nobody had to know. And in a moment, everything hit him, the farm, his family, and god, he couldn’t lose that, that alone would kill his mother.
Without another word, Dennis, with wide eyes and a fearful expression, slowly backed to the door, unlocking it, and before walking out, said, “Don’t talk to me.” The expression on Sam’s face would haunt him for years, but before Sam could speak, Dennis ran out, out of the room, and out of the school. This was too much for him; no 16-year-old could deal with this.
He ran to the place he always ran to, the church. It was the one place he knew Sam would not follow. He slowly shuffled into the confession booth,
The wooden partition creaks as a man shifts in the dim booth. The faint smell of incense clings to the air.
Dennis quietly spoke, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”
“Go on, my son.”
“It’s not just something I did. It’s... something I didn’t. My friend needed me, I’m all he has, and I left him.” Dennis spoke with venom in his voice, like he was disgusted with himself.
For a moment, neither spoke,
“The truth is, I was scared. I walked away.”
“Scared of what?”
Silence filled the cramped booth. Dennis knew he couldn’t tell his Priest this; he couldn’t tell anyone.
“Uhm.. of seeing more than I could fix. Of failing him.”
The Priest leans forward. Dennis can hear his voice more clearly than before, gentle yet firm.
“Sometimes we mistake fear for humility. We think, “I’m not strong enough,” when all we needed was to show up. You think being a savior means performing miracles, but it doesn’t. It means standing in the fire with someone, even when you can’t pull them out.”
Dennis whispers the fear in his voice palpably, “I wanted to save him... I still do.”
“Then be a savior, save who you can, when you can, even if all you offer is presence. That’s what Christ did, and it’s what we’re all called to do in smaller ways. Have you considered becoming a Priest or a missionary?”
This sentence alone changed Dennis’s life; he was now dead set on studying theology. If he couldn’t save Sam, he could at least try to save himself while he still could. Dennis did not hear even a whisper about Sam; it was as if he had been erased, that was, until the beginning of Dennis’s senior year, when he found out that Sam had killed himself.
That night, the night he heard about Sam, he prayed for Sam’s family, for Sam’s soul, but mostly, for himself. Part of him felt selfish for it. After that night, as if it had been silently decided, nobody spoke of Sam again. Nobody prayed for him in Church that Sunday, and nobody said anything about a funeral. He knew his friend was gone; friend wasn’t even the right word for what they were. But they never got to have that conversation, and they never would. Sam would never get to live in the sun, to be himself.
Dennis would always blame himself a little bit for this, but as he walked across the stage diploma in hand, all he could think about was getting out, he had told his family he was going to be a priest, and the way his mother for the first time, told him she was proud of him, proud of the godly man he was becoming. His father, however, did not like this. Dennis always thought deep down that his Dad knew what he was, what he and Sam were.
Through the church, he secured a scholarship, but only for the first 2 years; he didn’t know what he was gonna do.
Soon, he left for college, only a few hours from home; it was cheaper that way. He learned more about the bible and Jesus than he even thought he could learn. His roommate was a pre-med student; they didn’t speak much, both were much too busy for that. And besides, after Sam Dennis did not have friends, none that lasted, he was too afraid he would hurt them, like he hurt Sam.
Soon enough, it was Winter break, and part of him did not want to go back, back to the shame, back to his family, but he knew the farm needed him; he wasn’t as scrawny as he had been growing up, and he could help more.
That Winter was hard. Something in his family changed, an unspoken change; everyone looked at him weirdly, and they were quieter. But soon, he found out why.
While he was in the barn laying in the hay at the top of their barn, he had always spent a lot of time here with Sam, where nobody would find them, but... that was then, this is now. His brother Georgie came in. Georgie was only a few years older than Dennis. He had been dating this lovely girl from town, but Dennis couldn’t quite recall her name. Georgie called out for Dennis.
“Hey Dennis?” The tone of his voice didn’t speak of a good conversation; something about it put Dennis on edge.
“..Yeah, Georgie? You alright’?” As he spoke, Dennis clambered down from the top of the barn
“Did uh, did you know Grace was friends with Sam’s sister?”
Dennis did not know this; he didn’t even know Grace’s name, he hardly even knew Sam’s sister, and he knew they weren't close.
“Uhm.. no, I didn’t.” Dennis didn’t know why he would bring Sam up, and it scared him.
Georgie took a deep breath before he spoke, “Did you uh ever see his suicide letter?”
Dennis did not even know he wrote one; nobody told him anything, and he silently knew he was not supposed to ask any questions.
Dennis stayed quiet. “He mentioned you,” Georgie spoke carefully, as if this were rehearsed.
Dennis slid his tongue over his teeth before speaking. “Oh… did he?” He attempted to speak aloofly in the hope Georgie did not know what Dennis knew he knew. Slowly, Dennis watched as his brother, whom he would refer to as his closest brother, pulled out a paper that was folded, but from here he could see the ripped edges, and the blood on one corner.
“Georgie.. Is that it?”
Neither spoke; they both knew the answer. Georgie handed the paper to Dennis, and Dennis took the page with trembling hands. Dennis unfolded the paper with care, very carefully not to rip the last thing of his best friend. Before he even began to read, his eyes were already glossed over. He began to read.
I’ve gone back and forth on whether to write this, back and forth on whether you deserve an explanation, but some of you deserve to hear it from me, not from silence or rumor. The truth is, I left because I wasn’t supposed to stay, not in that place, not in any place. Despite how hard my family worked to save me, I knew they would be better off. I spent so long trying to fit in, trying to act like everything about me could be hidden away, but it couldn’t.
If you haven’t already heard the rumours. I’m gay. I think everyone probably always knew, or at least felt it somewhere beneath all the noise. I didn’t leave because I stopped caring. I left because I had to stop pretending, and maybe because I couldn’t bear to keep doing this, to lie to myself.
If Dennis is reading this, I love you. I still do, I always have, in the kind of quiet, permanent way that doesn’t go away even when time and distance stretch between us. You were the one person who made me feel seen, even when I was doing everything not to be. Even when I left, I knew you weren’t able to save me; I didn’t want you to. I didn’t want to make you endure that.
More than anything, I hope one day you dare to be yourself too, whatever that looks like, whoever that means you love. Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not supposed to be who you are. You belong somewhere but not here, Dennis. Always. I know you will do amazing things. Please get out of here before it kills you. Like it did to me.
-Sam
It was as if the breath was taken out of him. Tears welled up in his eyes; he willed them not to fall. Dennis wasnt even sure if he was crying for Sam or for himself. All he could feel was grief. For Sam and the future he could’ve had. Dennis finally lifted his head, wiping the unfallen tears away, but once his eyes met Georgie's, it hit him like a truck; he knew.
“Georgie, who read this?”
All that comes from Georgie is a sigh and silence. Dennis suddenly feels his heart racing as the tears he willed not to fall start to.
“Georgie, please tell me they didn’t.”
Georgie just stares. And suddenly, Dennis begins to cry, harder than before. Georgie takes a deep inhale before he finally speaks.
“Everyone read it. Once Matt found it in my drawer, he read it to everyone.” he speaks quietly, and it sounds as if the words are forced out of him.
Dennis stays silent, other than his quiet sobs.
“Den I’m sorry, but I’m supposed to tell you.”
Something appeared to snap in him, the way he realized that this was planned. His entire family was too cowardly to just ask if he was gay. They had to send Georgie. But worse? George went. He did this to him.
“Dennis.. Matt and Dad have your stuff on the porch, we got you a ride back.”
It takes Dennis a moment to process, and before he responds,s his voicis e laced with venom.
“God, Georgie people like you are exactly why Sam killed himself.”
Dennis can tell that it made Georgie feel something, the way he lurched back with a hurt expression on his face. But part of Dennis liked that, even though he knew Jesus would judge him. He knew he was judging him. Suddenly, Georgie turns and leaves, walking away, and part of Dennis knew. He knew we wouldn’t see him again, at least not for years.
Dennis collects his things off the porch, no bye from his family, nothing. Soon, he returns to college, forcing himself into his studies. On a random Monday in February, his roommate, whose name he had learned in Jimmy has invited him to join him to audit one of his classes, specifically biochemistry, and that day they were having a speaker who was a doctor.
Dennis slipped into a middle row seat beside Jimmy, trying not to draw attention. The lecture hall smelled faintly of dry-erase marker and coffee.
The woman at the front was a short, sharp-eyed, white coat over business-casual type; she tapped the microphone once. The slide behind her read: Biochemistry at the Bedside: Why It Matters.
“Alright,” she said, voice warm but crisp. “I’m Dr. Ramirez. I promise not to ruin your day with metabolic pathways. You get enough of that. Today I want to talk about what this looks like when an actual human is being attached to the lab values.”
A few kids laughed. Jimmy leaned over.
“She’s one of the best. I’ve followed her work for years,” he muttered. “Just listen.”
Dennis gave a curt nod, folding his hands together to keep them from fidgeting.
“My job,” Dr. Ramirez continued, “is internal medicine. Internal medicine is a branch of medicine focused on diagnosing, treating, and preventing diseases in adults.”
She clicked to a new slide containing a set of lab values, highlighted in red.
“Seventeen-year-old male,” she said. “Came into the ER after a suicide attempt. Took a bottle of over-the-counter pain meds. On paper, I see he has elevated liver enzymes, prolonged clotting times, and metabolic acidosis. I know his liver is in trouble, and that time matters.”
Dennis’s chest tightened. Seventeen. Suicide attempt. He stared down at the blank page in his notebook. Of course, this was the lesson he had to decide to audit; it felt like a cruel joke from God himself. He clutches his hands together harder now to regulate himself.
“But here’s what the labs don’t tell you,” Dr. Ramirez said. “They don’t tell you that he sat in that bed asking me, over and over, if he was going to hell. They don’t tell you that he’d been told his whole life that who he was made him unlovable. That he had been prayed over, ‘counseled,’ threatened, but no one had ever just treated him.”
She took a beat after the word ‘treated,’ letting it hang heavy in the air.
“In that moment, my job wasn’t to argue theology. My job was to keep his liver from failing.”
She drew a quick sketch of a liver on the whiteboard, arrows leading to a simple chemical structure.
“Acetaminophen overdose,” she went on. “The drug overwhelms the normal detox pathways, so you get a toxic metabolite that binds to liver cells. Without intervention, those cells die. We use N‑acetylcysteine to replenish glutathione, which is your body’s little clean-up crew and gives the liver a fighting chance.”
She capped the marker and turned back to them.
“Sounds dry, right? Pathways, cofactors, enzymes. But when you’re standing at his bedside, it’s a clock ticking.”
Dennis thought of holding the calf, feeling its breathing slow, feeling utterly useless. Helpless. Holy. Unbearable.
“He asked me,” Dr. Ramirez said, “‘Am I going to hell?’ I told him, ‘Right now I’m worried about your liver, not your soul. And my job is to fight for your life because you are worth the fight.’”
Something in Dennis’s throat burned as if he were standing in front of Sam again, running away, again.
Jimmy scribbled something fast on his notes, then nudged Dennis’s elbow. “You good?” he whispered.
“Yup,” Dennis lied. “Just listening.”
“Here’s the thing I want you to understand,” Dr. Ramirez said. “You are going to hear that medicine is objective. That we deal in facts, not feelings. And that’s partly true. But every lab run belongs to a story. High cortisol in a kid who’s been scared for years. Elevated blood sugar in someone who has had to choose between insulin and rent. Abnormal liver enzymes in a boy who believes he deserves to die because he can’t change who he is.”
Dennis raised his eyes slowly to the screen. The red numbers there could have been anyone’s. Could have been Sam’s if someone had caught him in time. If anyone had tried. Dennis feels the guilt of everything that’s happened in the last two years rising in his body.
“In biochemistry, you’re learning the language of the body,” she said. “What happens when the machinery breaks. In medicine, you learn how to listen to what the body is saying, and then you act. Sometimes you fix it. Sometimes you can’t. But you never, ever pretend it doesn’t matter, you never pretend that your patient doesn't matter.”
She wrote two words on the board: Presence and Skill. Then, with her dry-erase marker, she linked them with an equal sign.
“Presence without skill is compassion that can’t intervene,” she said. “Skill without presence is cold. Medicine needs both.”
Dennis inhaled slowly. Presence. The priest’s voice brushed in the back of his mind. He always thought being a savior meant performing miracles, but it doesn’t. It means standing in the fire with someone, even when you can’t pull them out.
Dr. Ramirez went on. “When that seventeen-year-old came back to the clinic, his labs had improved. His enzymes were down, and his clotting times were normalizing. Biochemically, we’d pulled him back from the edge. But what he told me he remembered most was that no one left the room. Not the nurses. Not the psych nurse. Not me.”
She rested the marker on the lectern.
“I couldn’t fix his whole life. I couldn’t make his father accept him. I couldn’t rewrite his church or his town. But I could keep his body alive long enough for him to have the option of a different story.”
Her eyes swept through the lecture hall.
“You will never save everyone,” she said. “That’s not your job. Your job is to save who you can, when you can, with what you have.”
The words hit Dennis like a physical thing. Exactly the phrase the priest had used. Save who you can, when you can. It was as if the world had tilted and lined up for a second.
He stared down at his hands. They were steady now. Sam was still on his mind, but not weighing it, supporting it as if Sam were with him.
A girl in the front row raised her hand slowly, timidly,y as if she didn’t know if her question was acceptable.
“How do you deal with… the ones you don’t save?” she asked quietly. “Doesn’t it… get to you?”
Dr. Ramirez smiled, but there was something tired in it, the memory of late nights evident on her face.
“Of course it gets to me,” she said, “If it didn’t, I’d worry. I remember those patients. I remember what I wish I’d done sooner or differently. But I don’t let that turn into a story that says, ‘You are a failure, so stop trying.’ Instead, I let it become, ‘You owe it to them to listen better next time, to study harder, to speak up sooner.’ Their stories change me. They don’t end me.”
Dennis’s jaw clenched. Sam’s name pulsed heavy in his chest like a bruise. He could picture his letter, the ink, the dried blood on the corner of the page.
“I’m not here to preach,” Dr. Ramirez said. “But when people talk about callings. If there is such a thing, I think it sounds like that voice in you that won’t shut up when you see someone hurting. The one that says, ‘I cannot walk away from this.’”
Dennis remembered the classroom, Sam’s hand on his arm, the panic in his eyes. Remembered unlocking the door and saying, Don’t talk to me. Remembered choosing to run.
The voice in him had screamed; he’d smothered it with fear.
Now, listening to Dr. Ramirez, it was back, pressing against his ribs. Holding him in place, as he rethought his plans. Maybe his calling was to save people, but not spiritually; part of him always knew he wasn’t cut out for that.
The next day, Dennis has scheduled a meeting with his counselor, enrolling in all the classes he needs to be premed.
He simply falls in love with the program; he finds it all truly fascinating. Time passes faster than the first semester ever did, and before he knows it, he’s got three part-time jobs, barely swimming above water studying for his MCAT, but he loves it. Jimmy moved in with his girlfriend two weeks after the class Dennis audited, and they didn’t speak again, but Dennis never quite found out why; he did not mind much, they really weren’t close.
Dennis ran off pure fumes those two weeks leading up to his MCAT, energy drinks and expired protein bars being all he ate. Dennis didn’t quite have the money to go grocery shopping, so he would get everything that was, expired when it was just barely past the expiration date. He hasn’t gotten sick yet, at least.
He practically lives in the library every night, studying till he gets dragged out. While the librarian Linda loved him, she was worried, as everyone was. He never missed a class and worked all those jobs; nobody was sure how he was doing it. Frankly, he had no time for any sort of social life.
The day of the test is stress-filled, but Dennis knows that he knows this, despite the fact their is no one to cheer him on, he is still happy to be there, happy he gets to be here.
Dennis is fairly certain that once that test ended, he slept for two weeks straight.
Soon enough, Dennis is on a crowded Greyhound bus to Pittsburgh, and he wants to be as far as possible from Broken Bow, away from his family, away from Sam or the memory of him.
As soon as Dennis actually starts medical school, he realizes he does not have time for any part-time jobs. So he goes from shelter to shelter doing whatever he can for a little cash. So this is all Dennis does, for the first two and a half years, it's definitely a struggle, at times, he wonders if this was all a mistake, if he messed up by coming here, but he knows what he has known since he left, they don’t want him, and he has nothing to return to.
Soon enough, Dennis starts his rotations. Dennis hadn’t expected to like pediatrics. Kids had always been loud, sticky, and terrifyingly fragile. But instead, he found himself memorizing cartoon characters for bedside jokes and staying late to double‑check med doses, because it was impossible not to care when your patients handed you crayon drawings as a thank‑you.
While working one of his shifts, he is sent to get extra blankets from a different floor, but in the elevator, accidentally hits the eighth floor button. As the door opened, Dennis was shocked to find the floor was empty.
This is when Dennis has a realization, it wouldn’t hurt anyone if nobody was using the space, if Dennis just used it for a little while… so at the end of his shift, he began to live out of a room on the eighth floor.
Then he soon, sooner than he would like, it’s his last day in pedes, and while he enjoyed it, nothing would erase the feeling after he lost a child, especially his first.
She was 4, supposed to be discharged tomorrow, Dennis was staying late, and after he was destroyed. He had read the chart a dozen times. He knew the labs, the diagnosis, the prognosis. He knew, on paper, this was always a possibility. None of that helps when a four‑year‑old’s room goes suddenly, brutally quiet, except the sound of her parents, that sound he didn’t think would ever leave him.
Afterward, he scrubs his hands even though there’s nothing on them, as if he can wash off the sound of the monitor flatlining. He knows he can’t. And that night, he finds himself just wandering the streets trying to find a reason, a reason why God would do this?
He finds himself wandering into the closest Catholic church he can find. The entire place was eerily quiet. He finds a seat near the aisle in the last row, where he always sat back home. Except this place was much bigger, much prettier too. And for the first time in a long time, he prayed, prayed for guidance, and because he was frustrated, with himself, with God, with the way the world was.
But that was then, this is now, tomorrow is a new day, tomorrow he starts his rotation in the Emergency Department.