Very Bad Things

by Susan McBride

  “If you’re gonna hurl, don’t do it on my kicks,” Steve Getty said, loudly enough for the whole room to hear. He made a show of stepping farther away from her, garnering snickers from his buddies.

  “Maybe I’ll aim for them,” she replied.

  “My dear, there’s no need to be squeamish,” Dr. Arnold said, looking directly at her. “Mr. Ogden’s a very willing volunteer. He’s not going to sit up and say ‘Ouch.’ ”

  “That’s reassuring,” Katie murmured, hoping the image of a dead Mr. Ogden popping upright wouldn’t stick in her head.

  It wasn’t that she was afraid of slicing through skin and finding guts and bones. It was touching something dead that had been alive, that had once felt things, maybe even loved or at least been hungry and sleepy and breathing. Worse still, the corpse on the slab looked a lot like her granddad, who’d died the year before her father. Her dad’s casket had been closed and covered with a spray of roses. But her granddad’s had been open. So the last time she saw him was at the visitation. Afterward, she wished she’d just remembered him as he was: alive and happy, not made up and dressed up, with bloodless hands folded neatly on his chest.

  Don’t look at his face, she told herself. Anywhere but the face. Or else she would be reminded that Mr. Ogden wasn’t made of wax but skin and bones.

  “So,” Dr. Arnold asked eagerly, looking at the students around him, “which one of you wants to take the first stab?”

  Katie focused on the doctor instead of the dead man. He was seriously working the mad-scientist thing, she thought, with his bulging eyes and tufts of gray hair and the way he poked at the air with the thin blade clutched in his latex-gloved hand. She’d heard that he used to be Barnard’s medical examiner before he took over the cadaver lab. She imagined him walking around the morgue at night, chatting with the corpses. Well, hello, Mrs. Smith. Not too cold in there, are you?

  She must’ve made a funny noise, as Tessa gave her a weird look.

  “You okay?” her roommate whispered.

  Katie nodded, though she felt anything but.

  “Hey, I think Katie’s volunteering,” Steve Getty said loudly, then leaned over to hiss, “Or are you chicken? Baawk baawk.”

  “Bite me,” she murmured, feeling Dr. Arnold’s overly bright gaze lock on her like a guided missile.

  “Young lady, are you up to the challenge? As I said before, you won’t hurt him. Mr. Ogden possesses a superhumanly high pain threshold,” the lab director quipped, raising tangled eyebrows as he extended the scalpel. “I’ll even make it easy on you. Would you like to cut our cadaver’s flexor tendons so we can examine his ulnar artery? It’s as good a place to start as any.”

  “Me?” Katie’s hands were sweating in her latex gloves. She rubbed them down the front of the surgical apron they’d all been made to wear. She had her hair tucked up in a scrub cap, and her scalp was starting to itch. “No, thanks. I’m sure there’s someone else who’d like to go first.”

  She glanced hopefully at the other faces in the circle, but no one seemed eager to step forward.

  Dr. Arnold wasn’t about to let her off the hook. “Don’t you want to play CSI? I thought everyone did.”

  “I’m pretty sure they don’t use real bodies on TV,” Katie replied.

  “Aw, c’mon, don’t be a wuss,” Steve Getty said, and Katie felt his meaty paw on her back, propelling her forward. She stumbled toward Dr. Arnold, who caught her arm, stopping her forward motion before she ended up flinging herself across Mr. Ogden on the slab.

  “Now, now, no need to shove,” Dr. Arnold said.

  Katie gave Steve a nasty look. Then she glanced helplessly at Tessa, who looked so mad she’d turned purple.

  “Well, my dear, why don’t you go ahead and kick things off since you’re up here.” The doctor passed her the scalpel. “Just take a deep breath, relax, and approach it clinically. Go on.” He put a hand on her shoulder, turning her toward the corpse.

  A deep breath was the last thing Katie needed. The formaldehyde stink was already making her dizzy.

  As the circle of classmates closed in on her, Katie swallowed and took a step nearer Mr. Ogden. You can do this, she told herself, holding the thin blade in her hand as she lowered it to the dead man’s wrist. Behind her back, Steve made clucking noises. Katie tried to ignore him, though she felt the weight of everyone’s eyes. Her hands began to sweat inside her gloves.

  “I’ve clearly marked the area over the tendon,” Dr. Arnold was saying. “Once you’re done, I’ll do some pinning and then we’ll give everyone a chance to look.” His voice buzzed in her ears like a hive of bees.

  Katie stared at the blue marks on the skin at the cadaver’s wrist, trying hard not to glance at the face with its sunken cheeks and eyes closed in a forever kind of sleep.

  Were you married, Mr. Ogden? Did you like your job? Did you die alone, or with someone holding your hand?

  She pursed her lips, pressing down on the scalpel, denting the skin but not piercing it. Corpses didn’t bleed, right? But what if he did sit up? she thought. She’d heard of it happening before. What was it called? Rigor mortis? No, that wasn’t it. Involuntary muscle contraction?

  “She doesn’t want to do it, for God’s sake!” Tessa’s voice rang out, followed by the clop-clop of her footsteps. Then she nudged Katie aside and took the surgical blade from her trembling fingers.

  “Miss Lupinski?” Dr. Arnold asked, squinting at Tessa. “Are you certain you’re up to the task?”

  “Yes,” Tessa said simply, and, without hesitation, she sliced firmly into Mr. Ogden, following the perpendicular lines that Dr. Arnold had mapped out. Within minutes, she had the flaps pinned back so all the tendons and veins and the artery were visible.

  Déjà vu, Katie thought as she stood there and watched. It was like freshman biology all over again, when she’d wimped out and Tessa had taken charge of their first frog, slicing it open with the same decisiveness.

  When Tessa was done, she stepped away from the corpse, saying nothing. She quietly returned the scalpel to the lab director before stepping back into her place in the circle to Katie’s left.

  “Bravo, my dear. Well done,” Dr. Arnold cheered.

  Steve let out a low whistle. “That is one stone-cold bitch,” he murmured from Katie’s right, just loud enough for her to hear.

  “Thanks for the save,” Katie said to Tessa once they were on the bus, heading back to Whitney. “I should’ve stabbed Steve with the scalpel while I had the chance.”

  “He probably would’ve enjoyed it,” Tessa said. “He’s a hockey player. They’re like vampires. They get off on blood.”

  “He’s been giving me a hard time since Mark and I got together. He’d love to break us up, just to mess with Mark’s head. Steve hates that Mark is captain and a power forward,” Katie said, because it was the truth. “He wants Mark out so he can be the star, but it’s not going to happen.”

  Tessa pulled out her phone and stared at the screen like her life depended on it.

  If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, huh? Katie thought. Okay, so maybe Steve Getty wasn’t the only one who wished she and Mark would split up. He could stand in line behind Joelle Needham and Tessa.

  Whatever.

  Katie turned away from her friend and gazed out at the scenery, grabbing hold of the seat in front of her as the bus hit a bump in the road. The country lane that connected the quaint town of Barnard with the private grounds of Whitney Prep was a mixture of potholes and gravel. If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t have a clue that such an unassuming path led to hundreds of acres of landscaped grounds full of ivy and roses, encircled by towering pines. On sunny days, Katie thought the campus looked picture perfect, like something you’d see on a postcard. When it was gloomy, she found the historic brick and stone buildings pretty creepy, with their Gothic arches and murky stained-glass windows.

  Whitney wasn’t exactly home, but Katie had adapted well enough these past
four years. Whenever she got homesick, she’d remind herself that her father had once arrived at the imposing wrought-iron gates as a scholarship kid, just like her. She doubted the school had changed much since then.

  It was a twist of fate that eventually landed her at Whitney Prep. Her dad had always wanted her to go, but her mom had been dead set against sending her so far away. “No eleven-year-old girl should be apart from her mother,” Katie remembered hearing her mother argue. “Besides, she’s been attending St. Mary’s since preschool. It’d break her heart to leave her friends there.”

  That was back when Katie’s dad was alive and they’d lived in a big house in a posh suburb, when her mom had dabbled in the Junior League and played tennis at the country club. But that life had disappeared when Katie turned twelve, the market crashed, and her dad lost everything. He’d died in their garage, sitting in his Mercedes sedan with the engine running. “Heart attack,” her mom told everyone, but Katie knew no one believed her. When the dust had settled, they had next to nothing. Her mom went to work as a secretary so they could afford to rent an apartment, and Katie transferred to public school. Katie missed her friends at St. Mary’s. She felt like an outcast at public school, especially since everyone gossiped about her behind her back. She wasn’t just the new girl. She was “the girl whose dad had offed himself.”

  After her dad had been buried and the lawyers had sorted through the mess of paperwork, they found something that had stunned both Katie and her mother: before he’d killed himself, her dad had sent off an application for Katie to go to Whitney on scholarship. And she’d been accepted.

  Instead of freaking out and insisting Katie stay home, her mom had seemed relieved. “I hate that you’re going away, sweetheart,” she’d said, “but your dad was right. Whitney’s as good an education as you’ll get anywhere, and it’s what he always wanted.”

  Losing her dad had been rough all around. Her mom hardly acted like her mother anymore. Katie figured it was the Valium that her mom swallowed like aspirin. It made her numb, like a walking zombie. She could barely take care of herself, much less Katie.

  So Katie’s bags had been packed, and she’d been shipped off to Whitney to start her freshman year.

  She’d met Tessa right off the bat, when they were thrown together in Amelia House, one of the girls’ dorms. “You’re a scholly kid, too, huh?” Tessa had remarked before even saying hello. “They like sticking us charity cases together.”

  Katie remembered being struck by Tessa’s ice-blue eyes and her tough-girl demeanor. It had taken a while for Tessa to trust her. Now Katie wondered if she was the only person in the world Tessa trusted.

  She pressed her forehead to the window splashed with drizzle as the rain began to fall, and her thoughts turned to Mark. She was happy he’d been hanging around to see her off on the bus this morning, but he’d looked so tired and anxious. When she’d asked what was up, he’d grumbled about trying to find something that was missing.

  “Do you need me to help?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you lose it at the party?”

  “Not sure.”

  What kind of answer was that?

  “How wasted were you?” Katie asked.

  “I wasn’t wasted!” he’d snapped. “Two beers don’t get me drunk.”

  “Okay, okay.” She’d backed off, not used to him barking at her like that.

  “Sorry.” He’d pressed his mouth into a tight line, and Katie had known there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  She’d touched his cheek. “You can talk to me, you know.”

  “I know.” He had sighed. “Okay, don’t hate me, but I can’t find the St. Sebastian medal.”

  “You lost it? Oh, Mark.” Katie had given it to him right before the prep school hockey play-offs. St. Sebastian looked after athletes and soldiers, which felt like one and the same whenever Katie watched Mark on the ice. And he had the biggest game yet of the season two weeks off. “I can skip the trip to the morgue and help you look for it.”

  “No,” Mark had replied, and rubbed his stubbly jaw. “I’ll find it. I’m just having some trouble remembering stuff.”

  Katie had squinted at him. “But you said you weren’t drunk.”

  “I wasn’t.” He’d glanced around them and tugged down the bill of his cap. “Can we not talk about this? I feel like crap, and I need to get to class.”

  “Sure.” Katie didn’t want to argue. Instead, she’d forced a smile and kept it light. “I’ll see you when I’m back from dissecting a dead guy, okay?”

  He’d tousled her hair. “Yeah, have fun with that.”

  She had paused on the bus’s steps and glanced back at Mark as he’d walked away, feeling a knot in the pit of her stomach. She felt that knot even now as she stared out the window at a uniformed guard waving the bus onto campus. Katie peered through the drizzle as the administration building came into view.

  There was Mark, his arms crossed as he leaned against a pillar. He put a hand above his eyes, and Katie knew he was looking for her. She beat on the window until he spotted her and waved back.

  Tessa groaned. “Ever heard of playing hard to get?”

  “Why? He’s already got me,” Katie said. She couldn’t stand up fast enough when the bus finally parked. It let out a gassy puff and then a squeal as the pleated door opened. Chatter swelled around them as Katie stood, nudging Tessa into the aisle.

  “So do you want to grab lunch?” Tessa said as they disembarked. “It’s spaghetti today, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Katie murmured, only half listening.

  “Hey!” She heard Mark’s voice above the others and then saw his blond hair and wide shoulders pushing through the crush of people as he made his way toward her.

  “Hey, yourself!” Katie said, and dropped her bag to throw her arms around him, holding on tight. The Whitney rule book stated: No public displays of affection on campus shall be tolerated. Right. Maybe that made sense to the Whitney sisters who’d founded the school a hundred fifty years ago. Katie had seen old paintings of them. Calling them ugly was an understatement. She highly doubted they’d had to worry about PDAs with anyone. But how was she supposed to resist a guy who smelled as good as Mark? She inhaled the sweetness of his skin, like soap and citrus and something entirely masculine.

  “You must’ve missed me,” he said, and drew back, resting his forehead on hers.

  “I did.” Katie’s heart swelled. She was happy to see him looking more like himself. “I hope everything lost is found?”

  “I’ve got the most important thing right here,” he said, sidestepping her question by distracting her with a kiss.

  Tessa cleared her throat. “If you haven’t noticed, our bug-eyed AP Bio instructor, Mr. Archibald, is staring daggers over here. So unless you’re itching for demerits, you should put a little space between you.”

  Katie sighed. “C’mon, Tessa—”

  “She’s right.” Mark leaned closer to whisper, “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  Reluctantly, she took a step back and turned to see that Mr. Archibald was indeed watching. She gave him a little wave, which softened his pinched expression the tiniest bit.

  Katie turned back to her boyfriend.

  “You up for lunch?” she asked, and Mark nodded. “Good, ’cause Tessa and I were headed that way, weren’t we?”

  Her roommate uttered an unenthusiastic “Uh-huh.”

  Mark grabbed Katie’s bag and slung it over his shoulder. She caught his hand and laced her fingers with his. “I don’t want to see another corpse as long as I live,” she told him as they walked. “Poor Mr. Ogden. He looked so—”

  “Dead?” Tessa finished for her.

  Katie stuck her tongue out at her friend.

  “So it went okay?” Mark asked. “I can’t picture you cutting up a worm, much less a person.”

  “Well.” Katie paused, making a face. “I didn’t exactly, um, I kind of couldn’t go through with
it.”

  “Katie’s a marshmallow.” Tessa caught up with them, her long legs keeping pace. “She’s not good with blood and guts.”

  “Tessa came to my rescue,” Katie admitted.

  Mark wrinkled his brow. “What happened?”

  “You should ask your buddy Steve,” Tessa said, her head down.

  “What about Steve?” Mark stopped just outside the cafeteria. He caught Katie by the arm. “Did he do something to you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Katie tugged at his hand. “He’s not worth worrying about.”

  “It matters to me,” Mark insisted. He looked at Tessa. “What?”

  “Tessa, don’t,” Katie said under her breath, but Tessa ignored her.

  “The jerk shoved your girlfriend into the dead guy’s lap, that’s what,” Tessa reported, stretching the truth by a hair. “Now can we go inside and have some spaghetti like everyone else?” Tessa waved at the students coming and going around them. “Or should we stand here and take a poll on whether or not Steve Getty is the biggest douche on the planet?”

  Voices swirled around them the moment they stepped inside the dining hall. Heads turned as they walked past. Katie felt like everyone in the room was watching them and whispering. Mark didn’t seem to notice, but then he was used to being the center of attention. It made Katie uneasy.

  Had the whole school already heard about her panic attack at the morgue?

  She stared down at her feet, hanging on to Mark’s hand as he headed toward the lunch line.

  “Hey, bro! Over here!” A whoop rose from a table filled with Mark’s teammates, and Katie caught Steve Getty waving wildly at them.

  To her dismay, Mark let go of her hand and walked straight in Steve’s direction.

  Katie glared at Tessa. “Look what you started,” she said, and went after him.

  “Summers, you dog!” Steve smirked as Mark approached. He stepped over the bench and gave Mark a slap on the back. “I might’ve expected it from you, but not her,” he added, eyebrows arching as Katie approached. “Guess she just pretends to be shy, huh?”