Flint saw me as I arrived in the dorm from my day of EMS. He was sitting upside down in the common area, reading a book.

“Andi, finally. Can you read me this? The words are floating off the page to attack me.”

I shook my head. “I have to do homework.”

“I need a personal assistant,” Flint said.

I sat down at my desk and Flint threw himself into the pillow fort we had created the other day.

“I was thinking we try one of those pizza cones tomorrow, celebrate the Lord’s Day.”

I shook my head again.

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Glorious EMS has called upon you to serve your campus.”

I gave him a little smack on the head and went back to my homework. Not that I could concentrate. My mind was filled with little brain cells practicing CPR and going over the facts I could remember about the organization. I wanted to be sharp. I wanted to ace the next test they decided to give me. I had no idea that it was going to be test after test after test, that I had signed up for a stressful, subjective ride.

* * *

The next morning, when we were in our seats, ready to continue learning, the EMS person who had come to interviews with Carl hungover was standing at the front of the classroom. He stood with his feet shoulder width apart and his hands grasped his belt buckle, drawing everyone’s eyes down the triangle of his torso. I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. His energy was electric. I would later learn that he had been in the military before college, which explained a great deal about his presentation style.

His voice carried over the hubbub that we were causing. “Listen up! We have a lot to cover and we have to get started.”

We settled down. His voice was so loud we couldn’t pretend to not hear him. I was intrigued by the calm way he commanded the room’s attention. I began to watch him, taking note of the way his soft lips shaped his words. His teaching voice invited us all to participate.

“My name is John. Today,” he said. “We’re going to talk about documentation. Can anyone tell me what that is?”

Anker’s hand shot into the air. I rolled my eyes internally. Of course the kid who had been doing EMS all his life knew.

“It’s an EMT’s way of recording what interventions they performed during a medical call,” Anker said.

Ruby rolled her eyes openly. I had filled her in on my interaction with Anker.

John nodded and moved on. “Can anyone tell me why we document these interventions?”

Anker’s hand was up again. John turned his attention back to Anker.

“Yes?” John said.

Anker giggled. “The documentation can be used as a legal document should an EMT get sued.”

John seemed short on praise. “Have any of you done documentation before?”

Anker’s hand was in the air. Surprise.

“Put your hand down,” Ruby mumbled. “We get it.”

John continued without acknowledging Anker. “We’ll start with the first page…”

Behind John a fizzing image of a web page appeared. He began to run through the boxes, highlighting those in which, he said, many people made mistakes. I tried to follow along but there were so many boxes to memorize and I didn’t have any context to organize the information with. He acknowledged that it was difficult out of context and that all of our trip sheets, the documentation, would be written under the supervision of a higher ranking member until we had been cleared to write trip sheets by ourselves.

“Now, for the radios,” John said.

He pulled a radio off of his tactical belt and held it up for everyone to see. The radio had a spiraling cord and what looked like an even smaller radio attached to it.

“This,” he said, “is your friend. This radio is how you will be able to communicate with the rest of the crew, to receive your dispatches from the police and to get additional resources, should you need them.”

“How do I use a radio, John?” a boy yelled. I turned to see Fothorn, Jacob Fothorn. Of course he was already friends with the old EMS members. I envied the ease with which he bantered with them. They had already accepted him. His acceptance to EMS was just a formality.

“Would you sit down?” John said. He waved him off like a bro, an affectionate bro. “These radios are incredibly simple. There is a button that you press. When you press that button, you will hear a tone. That’s called a key up. When you key up, you wait for that sound to stop and then you talk. Remember, this isn’t a conversation at 2 am with your girlfriends.”

Everyone smiled sheepishly, like John had already guessed that they planned to fool around on the radios.

“If you want to talk to someone, you say their call sign first. You will all be allowed to pick numbers, which will be your call signs, when you are full members of EMS.”

I understood the radios. My brother and I had used radios shaped like ladybugs to communicate with each other late at night when one or both of our phones had been taken away for misbehavior. I felt the tears threatening to overcome the barriers of my eyes. I smiled to banish the tears back to the pit of my stomach as more information got thrown at us. I tried to keep up but I wasn’t so afraid of falling behind. I reminded myself that I was learning something important, like Helen Keller when she first discovered sign language. I had found people that I wanted to communicate with.

The projector sent its lights to the board, forming digital words with weight. These EMS members were trying to impart weight to our activity, which was the least like an extracurricular activity of all the other groups on campus. It was most like a job, I would soon discover. Perhaps if I had known how hard the coming year would be, I would have reconsidered, said thank you for a great weekend and left the rest on the table. But they didn’t demonstrate how hard it was going to be and I didn’t leave them after that weekend.