Suicide Med (31 page)

Gingerly, I
crawl out from underneath the desk. My knees ache from being bent in that position for so long. I grab the top of the desk to steady myself as I rise to my feet, but my fingers slide right off the surface. The desk is wet. I look at my fingers and see the dark red substance on them.

That’s when I
see Matt slumped forward in his chair, right in front of me. For half a second, I’m able to kid myself that he’s just unconscious. But when I see the blood coming from the back of his head, I know that isn’t the case. I cover my mouth, smearing blood across my lips, trying to keep from passing out.

I’m still nearly four years away
from being a doctor, but it doesn’t take any advanced degree to know that Matt Conlon is dead.

I
bend down in front of his body, and lie my head down on his lap. I cry for the millionth time this week, this time knowing that he won’t be able to comfort me. I reach for his limp hand and hold it in mine. How can it end this way? It isn’t fair…

As I so
b into his slacks, I hear Matt’s voice speaking. But the voice is coming from within my head:
What are you doing, Rachel? I tried to save you! Get the hell out of here!

I
lift my head from his lap. It’s true—Matt made an effort in the last few minutes of his life to make sure I stayed hidden. He saved my life. But if Mason comes back, he can still shoot me. I’m sure he’s got more bullets in that gun.

I’ve got to get out of here.

I rise to my feet, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. I take one last look at Matt. His head is leaning forward as if he is resting and his arms are hanging off the sides of his chair. His blue eyes are cracked open, staring into nothing. There are only slight flecks of blood on the front of his shirt—the wall behind him has taken most of the brunt. I mouth the words “I love you” then open the door to his office.

I expect Mason to jump out at me with his gun when I come out of the office, but to my relief the hallway is clear.
But my next step isn’t entirely clear to me. I’ve got to find someone to help me, to report what’s been done. And I’ve got to do it before Mason finds me.

I start heading in the direction of the parking lot, knowing there will be a security guard by the exit.
I keep close to the walls, so as not to be seen. As much as I’m terrified of running into Mason, I’m also a little scared of what the security guard will do to me. I just came out of an office where my anatomy professor has been shot. My fingerprints are all over the room, probably in his
blood
. How in hell am I going to explain what I was doing there?

Oh God, what if they think I killed him?

After a few minutes, I round a corner and the vending machines come into sight. And there’s someone standing there, deciding what snack to buy. I wish my problems were as simple as Doritos versus Cheetos. As I near the machines, I realize that the girl is Ginny. Thank God. Ginny looks up at the approaching footsteps and her eyes go wide when she sees me.

“Oh my G
od,” she gasps.

“What?” I
say.

That’s when I
look down and realize that my T-shirt is smeared with fresh blood. It’s on my hands and probably on my face as well. I don’t know what to say to the horrified Ginny. What can I possibly say that will explain all this blood? Except for the truth, of course.

It’
s time to come clean. Time to confess to everything that has happened between Matt and me. And I don’t even care anymore. All I can think of is the fact that I loved him and he’s dead. It doesn’t matter who knows about the two of us or if I get kicked out of med school. I loved him. That’s all that matters.

“Ginny,” I
say in a low voice, “something terrible has happened. We have to get help right away.”

“Look to your left and look to your right.”

It’s a ridiculous exercise, but I do it anyway.
I’ve been waiting for an excuse to check out my classmates, and now I’ve got one. I look around and scope out the competition.

I’
m pretty underwhelmed.

Everyone talks about how talented and brilliant med students are.
Nobody in this room looks particularly talented or brilliant though. For the most part, they look like a bunch of kids. Most of them are dressed in jeans and T-shirts with dumb slogans on them. One girl has the word “sweet” written entirely in glitter across her chest. I’m sure she’s going to be a stellar physician.

People ask me all the time if I’m still in high school, but I’m
actually twenty-six years old, older than most of my classmates. In college, I worked as a waitress to help pay my tuition and then took on a second job as a nanny (for a spoiled three-year-old brat) when Dad got sick and needed help paying bills. You think it’s easy to be pre-med while working two part-time jobs? It isn’t. I ended up having to take a bunch of post-bachelor’s classes just to finish my pre-med requirements.

I also took care of my father.
He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when I was in high school, and he declined pretty fast. Lots of people live for decades with Parkinson’s, but my father wasn’t so lucky. By the time I was in college, he had to give up his job, and I moved back home to help my mother take care of him. It all went on my shoulders.

Dad hated how much I had to give up for him.
I’m his youngest daughter, and he came to this country from Russia in his twenties and worked hard his whole life in minimum wage jobs so I could have every opportunity available to me. He kept saying to me, “Ginny, don’t worry about me. Go become a doctor. I’ll be fine.”

But he wasn’t fine.
Soon after I graduated from college, he started having difficulty swallowing. Shortly after, he developed pneumonia and was admitted to the local hospital. He never came out.

For a long time after he died, I was angry.
At pretty much everyone. I was angry at the doctors that took far too long to diagnose him, even though in retrospect, his tremors were a dead giveaway. I was angry at the hospital that gave him the wrong antibiotics for his aspiration pneumonia, and then talked my mother into withdrawing care when he lay in the ICU.

And m
y mother—I don’t even want to get into how angry I was at her.

But I got over it.
My father wanted me to be a great doctor. That was his dream for me. And wherever he is right now, I want him to see me achieve my dream and graduate from medical school. And not
just
graduate. I intend to be at the very top of my class.

And
honestly, as I look around at my classmates, that goal doesn’t seem too unreasonable.

_____

Anatomy is
the center of first year. If you ace anatomy, you ace the year.

One of the key components to acing anatomy is supposedly Dr. Conlon’s book
,
Anatomy Inside Secrets
. That’s what all the upperclassmen told me. So early on the morning of orientation, I go to the hospital bookstore to buy myself a copy.

It seems like a lot of people ha
d the same idea as me. There’s an entire shelf dedicated to Dr. Conlon’s book, and now about half of those copies have been sold. I pick off a fresh copy of the book, flipping through diagrams of the human body, mnemonics, and something called “Conlon’s Law of Finger Flexion,” whatever that is.

It’s pretty obvious that our professor is a bit of a dork, what with the bowtie and all.

There are at least a dozen copies left on the shelf, and I’m suddenly seized by the urge to buy them all so that nobody else can have them. Obviously the bookstore would order more copies, but at least this way I’d have a head start for the first lab.

Of course, I don’t do it.
Mostly because this book isn’t cheap and I can’t afford twelve copies. I can barely afford the books I need.

Instead, I pull out the stack of paperback texts, and load them into my arms.
Conlon’s book isn’t that thick, but the stack is fairly heavy. I glance around to make sure nobody’s watching, then I relocate the stack to a little nook behind a life-sized skeleton. For good measure, I toss a Southside Med sweatshirt on top of them.

I check once more to make sure nobody saw me before I get in line to purchase my copy of
Anatomy Inside Secrets
. As I hand over my credit card, another student I vaguely recognize enters the store. He sees my purchase and smiles.

“I’m about to buy the same thing,” he comments.

“Oh, sorry,” I say regretfully. “I just bought the last copy.”

_____

I
t’s not too hard to shine in anatomy lab when put side by side with my lab partners. For the most part, they’re all disasters. Heather McKinley—a total airhead. It baffles me that she’s here when it took me
years
to finish my requirements to earn a spot in the class. Abe Kaufman seems intelligent enough, but also appears more focused on Heather than on studying. Rachel Bingham talks big, but I can tell that she’s struggling to master the material. And then there’s Mason Howard.

Right away, I hate Mason.

He’s way too good
-looking, for starters. Guys who look like that annoy me because they think they’re God’s gift to the world. If I ever get married, I’m going to marry someone really ugly who knows what it’s like to be shit on by the world. Also, Mason is super charming. I can just see the girls in our class eating it up. It’s
so
annoying. Heather ogles him all through lab.

He acts like he’s some sort of anatomy genius, but I know the truth: he studies his ass off.
He doesn’t mess around—he takes med school very, very seriously. He’s the only person who stays at the library as late as I do.

But you know what really pisses me off about Mason?

Even if I study night and day non-stop, even if every grade I get tops Mason’s, he’ll always have the edge over me. No matter what. Because Mason has one natural quality that I don’t possess: charisma. A little charisma goes a long way. And Mason has a
lot
of charisma.

“He already looks like a surgeon,” Heather says to
me, as we stand on the far end of the cadaver table, Mason cutting as we flip through the lab manual. Heather is practically swooning.

“Don’t you have a boyfriend
?” I say, raising my eyebrows at her.

“Yes,” Heather says.
She blushes. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing,” I
murmur.

Heather clears her throat and flips
the page in the manual. “How about you? Are you seeing anyone?”

I
dated a boy named Alex before med school started. It wasn’t very serious. He was the son of a woman my mother knew from work, and he was short. I’m short so I always get set up with short guys, even though I’m not that attracted to them. Anyway, it wasn’t a big loss to break up with him when school started. I couldn’t have any distractions.

“Not really,” I
say.

Heather’s eyes light
up. “Really? Because you know, Abe is available...”

Seriously?
Is Heather really so dense that she doesn’t realize that Abe is head over heels in love with her? He’s about as interested in me as he would be in a candy wrapper on the street. Which seems to be the reaction of most guys to me, actually.

“I’m not really interested,” I
say, trying to turn the conversation back to the celiac plexus.

“You know,” Heather says, “your hair will
look so spectacular in a French twist. You have such a graceful neck. I learned how to do it last summer…”

“I’m not
interested
,” I say again, talking through gritted teeth.

This time Heather seems to get it and backs
down. Except then she starts humming a pop song, which is this annoying habit she has. Always singing. Sometimes I want to strangle her. I don’t even get why she’s here—she’s easily the dumbest person in the class. The other day, we were looking at another cadaver and she said to me, “I think this person had a hysterectomy—I don’t see a uterus.” I had to inform her it was a male cadaver—Mason overheard the exchange and he couldn’t stop laughing.

Anyway, my love life is none of her busi
ness. Someday I’ll date again. There’s just no room in my life for that right now.

The scores to the first anatomy quiz are posted a few days before the hard copies are returned to us. They’re posted by each student’s five-digit school ID number. I see the crowd of students milling about a white piece of paper hung up near the lockers and figure the students are looking up their grades. I see Heather backing away from the group, looking rather pale.

I’ll bet
she failed.

I
edge my way closer to the scores, taking an elbow to the forehead in the process. That’s the problem with being so short—I can’t shove my way past my classmates effectively enough. But I can duck down past them until I have a clear view of the list of scores.

My
ID number is 44545. I scan the list, my heart thumping so loudly in my chest that I’m sure all my classmates can hear it. When I see the number, I follow the straight black line leading to my grade: Ninety-eight.

Ninety-eight
! I got an almost perfect score!

Before rejoicing, however, I
decide to check the list to see if anyone has beaten me. I don’t see any ninety-nines, but there is, in fact, a single grade of a hundred posted under the ID number 20205.

I take out an index card and carefully print the number 20205.
Next time, I will beat 20205. I want to be first in the class. You don’t get into a top residency by being second. Right now, I’m thinking about Emergency Medicine, maybe at Yale. Yale was where my father got diagnosed and he always said I belonged there. But that’s not going to happen if I’m second.

Whe
n the second quiz rolls around, I lose a single point for mislabeling the “main pancreatic duct” as the “pancreatic duct.” I’m very pleased with my grade, until I scan the list and am horrified to find, once again, a second perfect score.

Belonging, once again, to 20205.

Who is 20205? I practically become obsessed. This one person somehow managed to beat me twice in a row with two perfect scores. It could be dumb luck. Maybe 20205 will mess up the next exam. But even so, it’s obvious this person is very sharp. I have to take them seriously.

I
make a list of possible candidates who might be 20205. I select people who frequently speak up in class and give intelligent answers. I also notice who stays late studying in the library. Of course, I don’t know my classmates very well yet and the truth is, it could be anyone. After all, I’m sure nobody would guess that I have the second highest average in the class. Maybe 20205 is lying low.

Besides, I
know that there’s more to succeeding in med school than just grades. Take Mason, for example. Whenever Dr. Conlon comes to our table and asks a question, he always booms out the answer with confidence. And Dr. Conlon beams at him and says, “Exactly right, Dr. Howard!” Even though I knew the right answer too.

Dr. Conlon never
, ever compliments me like that. When I do manage to answer before Mason cuts me off, Dr. Conlon simply smiles and nods at me. I don’t think he even knows my name. And he knows
everyone’s
names.

I need to be more like Mason Howard.
Somehow.

I
notice that Mason studies in the library like I do, so I decide to quietly observe him. I have to respect the fact that he seems to study a great deal. At least he recognizes that his looks and charisma can only get him so far without some knowledge to back it up.

I’m watching him when a
classmate of ours, Julie Scott, stops by his desk to interrupt his studying.

“Hi, Mason,”
she whispers. “I baked some cookies yesterday. Do you want to try a few?”

“Uh, sure,” he says, smiling up at
her as he reaches for one of the chocolate chip cookies.

“What do you think?” Julie asks
as he takes a bite.

“Delicious,” he says.

Julie chats with Mason as he finishes the cookie, which is incredibly irritating. This is supposed to be a
quiet
area of the library—that means no talking. As soon as Julie leaves, I head over to the desk where Mason is sitting, intending to remind him of that fact.

“Mason,” I say to him and he looks up.
He has, I have to admit, astonishingly pretty hazel eyes. I wish I had eyelashes like those—mine are practically invisible. “There’s no talking allowed in this area of the library.”

Mason raises his eyebrows then he grins.
“Oh, Julie wasn’t talking. She was just babbling.” He makes a “blah blah blah” motion with his hand to show how she was going on and on.

“Still,” I say.
“She was making
noise
.”

“That’s for sure,” he agrees.
“And honestly? The cookies weren’t really all that good.”

Mason is still smiling at me, and it’s getting a little hard to stay angry at him.
But I’m really trying.

“How do you stand it?” I
ask him.

“Stand what?”

“Girls like Julie.”

Mason shrugs
.

“You probably like it,” I
acknowledge. “I mean, who wouldn’t want an attractive girl baking cookies for him?”

He shrugs
again, “She’s not really my type, actually.”

Not his type?
What did that mean? As irritating as Julie is, she’s objectively very beautiful. Who doesn’t like reddish blonde hair and legs that are like six feet long? Her legs are probably longer than my entire body.

Mason reaches into his backpack and pulls
out a small package of Oreo cookies. He holds them out to me.

“
Would
you
like a cookie, Ginny?”

“Home
-baked?” I ask.

“I had them cooking in the vending machine all day,” he says with a grin.

I smile despite myself. Damn Mason for being so charming. I want to hate him, but it’s surprisingly difficult. I stand up to take a cookie from him when a piece of paper sticking out from the pile of study materials in front of him catches my eye. It’s a copy of our last anatomy quiz, with the grade of a hundred circled at the top.

That’s
how I discovered that Mason is 20205.

And that’
s when things go horribly wrong.