faith ↝ j. tartt

Prologue

O'Brien is afraid of blood. McAdoo is deathly allergic to shellfish. Richard is, tragically, lactose intolerant. Bumbercatch has a tricky knee. Zoreaux has broken his wrist eight times.

Dorothy MacTully jotted down everything Doctor Berman was telling her, feverishly noting each allergy and injury. It was her first day as lead medic, and she was praying it wouldn't be her last. She had graduated premed in three years and gotten her doctorate at Oxford four years later. In the year since her graduation, Dorothy worked as an emergency medic for the Premiere League from the sidelines of over one hundred matches, treating everything from a twisted ankle to an open collarbone fracture. When her former professor, Doctor Berman, had reached out about filling his position at Richmond, Dorothy had no choice but to say yes.

But now, her first day on the job, she was expected to learn and retain Doctor Berman's fifty-seven years worth of knowledge from working at the club. Each player's name, age, and country of origin. Each one's entire medical history. The location of each medical room in the massive building on Nelson Road.

It was daunting, to say the least. The day passed in a blink, and without meeting the rest of the medical staff or even the manager, Dorothy rode the tube home studying the notebook that may as well have been trading cards.

Number 24. Sam Obisanya. Right Mid. Nigeria.
Number 14. Dani Rojas. Forward. Mexico.
Number 12. Colin Hughes. Left wing. Wales.

She must have nodded off on her commute home, because she came back to consciousness four stops after she was supposed to get off. She hurriedly left the tube, and checking the projected time for the train headed in the right direction, decided it would be easier to walk.

Dorothy had been living in Hammersmith since taking her first job with the Premiere League, almost two years. Central London was terrifying to her, and she was unsure she would ever adjust to the differences between there and her hometown of Asheville, North Carolina. Even Oxford was easier to manage than being thrown into a flat between a fish monger from Sweden and an opera singer from Paris.

Emerging from the tube station, she found herself in a vaguely unfamiliar part of the neighborhood. Dorothy glanced at the darkening streets of what was, evidently, West Kensington. She was due to walk northwest for a dozen or so blocks, so she begun her trek through the foreign streets of Kensington and subsequently Hammersmith, until she reached her flat tucked underneath Ravenscourt Park.

On her way, Dorothy passed a row of white houses with brightly colored doors on Shepherd's Bush Road. The last house in the sequence had a light turquoise door with flower boxes on the windows. Something called to Dorothy from within the house, and she felt a tug at her heartstrings as she forced herself to walk away.

In the bleary-eyed, tired-minded soul of Dorothy MacTully, that house with the turquoise door had just commanded her to stay in her job at Richmond. It was something to work towards, something to achieve. Her position as lead medic was only part-time, so she would need to find a second job to fill the time in her new city, but she was confident it would all turn out.

Eventually, twenty feet-aching minutes later, Dorothy stumbled into her flat in Hamlet Gardens. The door was white, and there were no flower boxes under the window. She showered, laid out her AFC Richmond-branded scrubs for the next day, and spent her last waking moments messaging her best friend from uni. It was after two in the morning when she finally fell into bed, with an alarm set for a mere four hours later to do it all over again.

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Author's Note

thank you for reading faith! i look forward to sharing this story with you all! 

all the love,
captain <3