Suicide Med (6 page)

I show up early at the Southside Med’s library the next day, equipped with my anatomy atlas and my textbook, along with a water bottle and a baggie full of chocolate bars and potato chips. Yeah, that pretzel and Coke yesterday were just the tip of the iceberg. Soon I’m going to have to make another trip to the mall to buy new pants. Or better yet, a tent.

Abe texts me that he’s
almost here, and I try to flip through the chapter on the thorax on my own. It’s hard to concentrate though. Truthfully, I keep thinking about my abysmal quiz grades.

“You look deep in thought.”

I snap my head up. It’s not Abe, like I expected. It’s Mason. He looks mildly amused at the expression on my face. He slides into the seat across from mine at the table.

“Mind if I join you?”

I could never study around Mason Howard. He’s pretty much the biggest distraction I can imagine. I would have thought spending all this time with him in lab and the fact that he’s proven himself to be the biggest asshole on the planet would diminish his appeal, but it doesn’t. He’s just that sexy.

He looks way too good right now.
Every med student I’ve seen so far today looks like they haven’t slept in weeks, but Mason seems like he’s just come back from a long vacation at a spa. His clothes aren’t wrinkled and his jaw is clean shaven. His books are lined up in a neat stack on the table and I can’t help but see one of his anatomy quizzes sticking out of the textbook. The grade at the top is a hundred. Figures.

“I put in some quality time la
st night with Frank. But now it’s time to hit the books.” Mason says.

Despite Rachel’s discomfort with naming the cadaver
and a long email rant she sent out to the entire class about how disrespectful it was, Mason still calls him Frank. It doesn’t bother me. And to be honest, I like how much it seems to infuriate Rachel.

“I feel like I should giv
e up right now,” I mumble.

Mason frowns
. “Why? What’s wrong?”

He really has
no idea.

“How
do you do it, Mason?” I sigh. “You know
everything
.”

“Well, I want to g
o into plastic surgery,” he says with a shrug. “I’ll never match in a plastics residency if I don’t study my ass off. What do
you
want to do?”

“I
thought
I wanted to be a doctor,” I say.

I meant it as a joke but it’s sort of true.

Mason winks
and flashes me this smile that makes my heart skip in my chest. Ugh, I need to stop being such a girl!

“
Don’t look so stressed out, Heather. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

“What if I’m not?” I say
. “What if I fail the exam?”

“So you’ll get a j
ob at the post office,” he jokes. “And one day you can come back with a shotgun and blow the brains out of all the other students.”

I don’t laugh.
The whole thing is kind of in poor taste considering we’re at a school nicknamed Suicide Med.

“Come on,” he says
. “You’re going to do fine on the exam. I promise.”

Mason reaches
across the table and puts his hand on top of mine. And my freaking hand starts to tingle like I’m having a stroke or something. I hate myself for having a schoolgirl crush on Mason.

“Y
ou’ll be fine, Heather,” he says. “Don’t worry so much.”

If I wer
e Mason, I wouldn’t worry either.

I hear a throat clear, and I look up.
It’s Abe. He’s standing at the other end of the table, holding his anatomy atlas and looking sort of peeved.

“I thought we were studying together,” he says to me.

I yank my hand away from Mason’s. “We are.”

Mason gets this amused look on his face.

“Don’t worry, Abe,” he says as he stands up.
“I’m not horning in on your action.”

Abe’s cheeks turn crimson.
It’s sort of cute how his complexion is so pale that it shows all his emotions.

“I’m not…” he stammers.
“I mean, we’re not…”

“I have a boyfriend, you know,” I say to Mason, sticking out my chin.
“At another school.”

“Is that so?” Mason doesn’t wipe that grin off his face.
I wish Abe would slug him, especially since he looks like he’d like to.

“Get out of here, Mason,” Abe says to his roommate.
He doesn’t lay a finger on him—it’s pretty clear that Abe isn’t the kind of guy who goes around slugging people.

Mason is still smirking as he relocates himself at a desk in the back of the library.
I notice he’s one desk away from little Ginny, and he stops to talk with her a minute before getting to work. I’ve yet to have a successful conversation with Ginny, so it’s surprising to see
anyone
talking to her, but especially Mason.

Abe sets down his books on the table and slides into the seat across from me.

“I thought we could start with the heart,” he says.

“Fine by me.”

“Or we could do the lungs, if you’d prefer?” he offers.

I don’t have a great understanding of the heart, but it’s probably no worse than anything else in the thorax. I’m equally confused about everything.

“Let’s just do the heart.”

Abe nods and pulls out a stack of index cards. He lays them down on the table and I see that he’s drawn color-coded diagrams of the heart. I gasp.

“Wow,” I say.

His eyes widen. “What?”

“I just…” I grin at him.
“I didn’t realize you were such a huge nerd.”

Abe looks down at his nerdy index cards, then back up at me.
“I’m not a nerd! I’m organized.”

I shake my head at him.
“That’s exactly what a nerd would say.”

He picks up a blank index card and flicks it in my direction.
He obviously meant to hit me with it, but the card doesn’t even make it across the table. It just kind of flies into the air, then flutters slowly to the ground. Abe and I both watch it, then simultaneously bust out laughing.

“Pretty pathetic, huh?” he says.

I nod. “The trick is to form it into a plane,” I explain.

I grab another blank index card and form it into a little makeshift paper airplane.
I aim it in Abe’s direction and it hits him directly in the forehead.

“Ouch!” Abe cries, rubbing his forehead.
He grabs himself another blank card. “Okay, you’re asking for it, McKinley…”

And then we spend the next thirty minutes making planes out of index cards.
I am such a bad influence.

_____

At some point, we get tired of acting like children and actually start studying for real.
It’s intimidating that Abe knows his stuff so much better than I do, but at the same time, it’s motivating. Someone once told me that it’s always better to study with someone who knows more than you do.

If that’s the case, Abe is screwed.

It’s dark out by the time we decide to call it a day. We’re both carrying an armful of books as we head down in the elevator to the parking lot.

“Where’d you park?” Abe asks me.

“Second floor. You?”

“Third.”
Abe steps out of the elevator. “It’s dark out. I’ll walk you to your car.”

I make a face and stand in the doorway to the elevator so the doors won’t close.

“I’ll be fine.”

“It’s safer if I walk you,” Abe insists.

The ele
vator starts to close on me, so I step aside. Fine, if Abe wants to waste his time walking me to my car, that’s his business.

“This is Connecticut, you know,” I say.
“Not Detroit.”

Abe shrugs.
“Still.”

“How are you going to protect me anyway?”
I challenge him. “Are you carrying a weapon?”

He rolls his eyes.
“I don’t need a weapon. Nobody’s going to attack me.”

“How come?”

“Heather, come on,” he snorts.

Okay, I guess Abe is a pretty big guy.
Still, he’s not some kind of Superman who can dodge bullets or something. (Can Superman dodge bullets? I’d assume so. As long as they’re not made of kryptonite.)

“Do you know karate?” I ask him.

He shakes his head.

“So what would you do if some guy attacked you?”

Abe shrugs. “I don’t know. Sit on him?”

Actually, that would probably be pretty effective.

I have to admit, it
is
pretty dark out and the parking lot isn’t particularly well lit. It’s late enough that the lot is completely silent aside from our footsteps echoing on the pavement. As I walk by a white Lincoln Continental I had thought was empty, I detect movement from within the dark car. Like someone is sitting there, waiting. But when I peer through the vehicle’s tinted windows, I can’t make out a face.

A shiver goes through me, and I
’m suddenly very glad Abe insisted on coming with me. I was joking around with him, but truthfully I’ve no doubt that he could defend me if he needed to. At one point while we were studying, he complained that the table we were sitting at was too close to the bookcase and it was making him feel squashed. So he got up and lifted the entire wooden table (which must have weighed at least several hundred pounds) with one hand and he didn’t even grunt.

You may not be able to see Abe’s muscles
under that layer of padding, but I have no doubt that they’re there and probably huge. And he’s so big that nobody in their right mind would attack him—he looks like he could break a guy’s neck with his bare hands. Abe is definitely not the kind of guy you want to run into in a dark alley. I feel completely safe walking next to him.

“This is me,” I tell him, gesturing at my scratched-up Ford.

Abe waits until I’m inside the car and have started up the engine before he turns around and
heads in the opposite direction. I’m guessing he had a good study session too because there’s a bounce in his step as he walks away.

When I arrive at the anatomy lab the next day, I find Ginny staring at our cadaver, looking perplexed. When she sees me, she frowns. “We have a problem,” she says.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

Ginny looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.

“The cadaver’s been turned over,” she says.

Wow. She’s right. How the hell did that happen?

Or the better question might be
, how did I not notice?

Actually,
no, the better question is probably how it happened.

We turned
Frank over a while ago so that he was lying on his back, so that we could get to the abdominal organs. But somehow, between our dissection yesterday and today, somebody has turned him over again so that now he’s lying on his stomach. I can’t imagine who did this or why. I mean, it’s not like he turned over by himself.

Oh God, I really hope he didn’t turn over by himself.

“I guess we should turn him back over,” I say.

Ginny looks at the cadaver doubtfully.
“Don’t you think we should wait for the boys?” she says.

She
may have a point. Frank probably weighs more than me and Ginny put together. And neither of us is particularly athletic. Ginny is downright tiny and I’m… well, suffice to say, I’m not in tiptop condition right now.

But Rachel has inspired me. I don’t need the boys to do anything. Ginny and I can manage this just fine
by ourselves.

Ginny gets on one side of the body and I get on the other side. She pushes and I pull. The body rocks a little bit, but he doesn’t really budge. And we try it the other way around: I push and she pulls. I have to admit, we barely move him an inch. And by the end of this exercise, I’m actually sweating.

“I really think we should wait for the boys to get here,” Ginny says again.

“No,” I insist.
“We can do this.”

I don’t know why it’s so important to me that we can turn this cadaver by ourselves. I guess it’s just that I feel that I’ve failed at everything I’ve done in medical school and I really just want to be able to do this on my own.
Just this one freaking thing. Is that too much to ask for?

I get on the same side of the body as Ginny, and the two of us start pushing. Nothing happens.

“This isn’t working,” Ginny says, stating the painfully obvious.

“Push harder,” I grunt.

And then all of a sudden, like magic, Frank starts to move. I have about five seconds to celebrate before something horrible happens. Once the body is moving, we can’t stop it. We both vainly try to grab at it, but we’re not strong enough. We both watch helplessly as the body flips off the table and lands on the hard floor with a resounding plop.

The noise is loud eno
ugh to make the entire room go silent. Everyone is staring at us: the two idiots who managed to drop their dead body on the floor. Including Abe, who has walked in just in time to see the spectacle.

“What are you guys
doing
?” he asks. As if this was some kind of well thought out plan.

“It was an accident,” I say lamely.

“I’ll say,” he says, laughing as he pulls on his gloves.

“Let me help you with that,” I start to say as he bends
down next to Frank. But before I can even get near him, he’s hoisted up the cadaver and dropped him back on our table, like he was lifting a small child. (Though I have to admit, I’m not sure Ginny or I would be any better at lifting a small child.)

Ginny’s eyes are practically bugging out.

“Whoa,” she says, clearly impressed.

“What?” he asks. He has no idea how much we were struggling to lift the cadaver.

“You’re really strong,” she says.

Abe blushes at the compliment, and then Ginny blushes too. I look at the two of them, staring at each other with their faces red.

Oh my God, how did I never see this before? Ginny and Abe are totally into each other! It’s so painfully obvious. Only a complete idiot wouldn’t be able to see how much he clearly likes her.

And it’s up to me to play Cupid and get these two together.

Right after I scoop these abdominal organs from the floor. Ugh.

_____

An hour later, Mason is staring into the chest cavity of our cadaver, a perplexed look on his too-handsome face.

“That’s odd,” he says.

We decided not to mention to Mason about the body falling on the floor. Mostly because Ginny and I were really embarrassed that it happened.

I look at where Mason’s staring.
He’s looking at the spleen, I think.
Did I put it back wrong? Oh crap. Is it upside down?
It doesn’t seem to be upside down, but what do I know? I mostly just shoved it back in the only way it fit. Five or six organs had fallen out of the body, and it was sort of like a jigsaw puzzle to get them back in the right way.

“No, it’s not that.
It’s just weird that…”

“
What?
”

Mason dives into the chest cavity with his gloved hands and pulls out the heart.

“Look at this heart
,” he says.

I look at it.
I have no idea what he’s talking about. “Um…”

Mason’s hazel eyes meet mine.
“It’s
perfect
.”

“You think I did a good job on the coronary arteries?” I feel a little burst of happiness.
I really thought I butchered them.

“No, that’s not what I’m saying,” Mason shakes his head.
Damn
.
“I mean, look at Gladys at the next table. Her heart is the size of a cabbage. Bernie at Table Eight has black lungs. We know why practically all these people died.” He pauses. “But not Frank.”

“So?”

“So don’t you think that’s a little strange?” Mason asks.

I never thought about it before. I guess he’s right though. Frank seems healthier than most of the other cadavers in the room. He’s a big guy and seems like he’d been strong as an ox. But even if there isn’t an obvious reason why Frank died, there must have been a reason. After all, he’s dead.

I almost confess to
Mason about how Ginny and I found Frank face down. I’m still really creeped out by it, and Mason’s words are making me wonder if it was more than just a case of an anatomy TA moving the body during a teaching session. What if there really is something going on with Frank?

I feel goose bumps rise up on my arms.
But in all fairness, it’s really cold in here.