THE THREE MUSKETEERS
T-minus one hour…
She could describe her two best friends in one word each, though one word could hardly do either of them any justice.
Jane was ethereal and her sister Lizzy was effervescent. Indeed, if you looked up those words and all their synonyms in the dictionary, they described the Bennet sisters to a T. Charlotte Lucas – Char- was just - dowdy. Oh sure, she was attractive, but standing in the same vicinity as the ethereal Jane and the effervescent Lizzy, Char was positively unappealing. Her friends saw what she could not see. Char was a beauty as well, but you needed time to see her for herself – after the shock that was the Bennet sisters wore off – though for some, it never did.
Charlotte, Jane and Lizzy called themselves the Three Musketeers as they had formed a bond of sisterhood from an early age. They each had a lust for life. Their equal intelligence drew them to one another in grade school and their individual personalities played off of one another so that they were the perfect trio. They held onto one another when the times were hard, a raft of arms and legs never letting go, always holding on, sometimes the only way they could stay afloat at all.
Jane was the peacemaker with her calm and quiet demeanor, while Lizzy harbored a more mercurial temperment. Char was an equalizer, a balance of Jane's goodness and Lizzy's excitability, together they flourished. They were the Three Musketeers – all for one and one for all! A slight to one was a slight to all, an achievement for one was celebrated by all. And now was a time for celebrating their singular and collective achievements.
In one hour they would collectively be graduating from the Perelman School of Medicine. The three girls graduated from high school and entered college at the same time. Char, at 18, had chosen an accelerated 7 year track for her specialty in pediatrics. Jane had skipped the 7th grade and so she at 17, would start her studies toward obstetrics, but as Lizzy was a prodigy, she entered college with Jane and Char at the age of 15, received her BA at 18 years, and was finishing her medical degree with a focus on anesthesiology at 22. The three had won the residency lottery and would be moving together to Pittsburgh. Char and Lizzy were matched in a residency program at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh with Jane matched close by at Magee-Women's.
"How do I look ladies?" Jane asked, innocently twirling for her roommates.
"You look like an angel in a choir robe, Jane, as usual!" Lizzy snapped her gum and grinned.
"Char! Let's get this show on the road, Murph's is holding some cold ones for us at our usual spots, but we gots to get that paper to make it O-Fish-E-Al first!" Lizzy giggled and held the door open for Jane and Char.
Char took a sweeping look at their nearly empty apartment, took a deep breath and marched on, as the Doctors Bennet awaited.
Three hours later . . . "please get Doctor Lucas another Guinness and the other Doctor Bennet another pinot! I will take a Jameson and ginger, my good man!" Lizzy drawled to the bartender. Congratulations were heard around the bar again, and someone paid for the latest round. "We did it." Lizzy whispered to herself. "We actually did it."
Char glanced down the bar at Lizzy who's laughing smile suddenly turned into a thin line as her eyes misted. Char watched as she swiped a small tear away, and turned her 600 watt smile back on to the eager young man sitting to her right. Making her way to Lizzy she whispered "they would be so proud of us. You know that they would. Your dad would be buying the entire pub a round and your mom would have been flirting with Bob the bartender while my mom took bets on who he liked better. We made it, babe, they saw us do it." She smiled quickly as Lizzy nodded and winked. Crisis averted.
The Three Musketeers were about to embark on their residencies in Pittsburgh. Three girls from Jim Thorpe, about to make the big time. Three girls, otherwise adrift, about to land in the city of Black and Gold.