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 enough 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.
Chapter 9
I swear to God, every day the cadaver smells a little worse.
Mason agrees to do most of the genital dissection today. I just can’t bring myself to cut a penis in half. As I watch Mason rip open the scrotum, I look away and wince.
“What are you so upset about?” Mason asks. “This is more painful for me than it is for you.”
I peer down at his dissection. “Why is the penis all black? Nobody else’s penis is black.”
“Abe’s is,” Mason says with a grin.
Abe does not look amused.
At the end of every lab, we go through a ritual of spritzing the body with water, cleaning up the little bits of flesh and fat that have accumulated on the table, and then covering the body up with plastic. I know, being a med student is glamorous. It’s basically housekeeping and not particularly fun or a great learning experience, which is why Rachel and Mason generally hightail it before it’s clean up time.
Technically, cleaning up isn’t a five-person job, and Abe, Ginny, and I can handle it just fine, but it’s the principle of the thing. Mason and Rachel ought to help, at least some days. We’re not their maids.
Rachel, although not my favorite person in the world, seems less at fault. She just doesn’t care about lab. She doesn’t even show up at least half the time, and when she does, she mostly seems like she’s barely paying attention.
But Mason is there every day. And every day, he leaves ten minutes before clean-up time. Like clockwork. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
“Where is he always running off to anyway?” I ask Abe, as we pass the spray bottle back and forth to get both sides of the body.
Abe shrugs. “The library, I guess. All he ever does is study.”
“He could take ten minutes to help us, couldn’t he?” I grumble.
“I don’t mind so much,” good-natured Abe says as he gives Frank’s face a healthy spritz. “Hey, you want to go to the library and study after this?”
“Sure,” I say. I hesitate and glance over at Ginny, who is over by the sinks. “Do you want to invite Ginny?”
Abe frowns. “Why?”
“I just thought it might be nice,” I say.
Before he can reply, Ginny finishes washing her hands and heads out of the lab. Oh well. I’ll have to play matchmaker another day.
The sinks in the lab are essentially a deep, giant trough. I turn the water on as hot as it can go and soap myself up so high up my arms that I’m practically showering in it. I know now even the strong anti-bacterial soap won’t block out the smell. I bought a vanilla-scented body spray to apply after the lab, but now the smell of vanilla just reminds me of dead bodies.
In addition to anatomy, we’re also taking biochemistry, so when we get to the library, Abe and I decide to take a break from studying anatomy in order to study biochem since we have a quiz coming up in that class. It’s a sad day when studying biochemistry is considered a break. But the class is so much easier than anatomy that it really does sort of seem like a break.
Abe was a biochemistry major in college
, so this stuff is really just review for him. I wish I could say that I majored in something sensible like biochem, or even biology or chemistry. Instead, I majored in English, the most useless thing I could think of apparently. People told me that you should take classes in college that you’ll never get to take again for the rest of your life, stuff you’ll really enjoy. And I did, in all honesty, enjoy being an English major with my premed minor. But right at this moment, it feels like an awful decision.
Abe sits across from me at our usual table, sipping from a gigantic thermos of coffee. I’ve definitely stepped up my coffee consumption lately, but I’d venture to say that Abe has developed a problem. He is always drinking coffee. Any minute, he’s going to start levitating.
“Okay,” Abe says. “What are the phases of the Kreb’s cycle?”
The Kreb’s Cycle, a.k.a. the citric acid cycle, a.k.a. what’s ruining my life today, is a component of the metabolic pathway through which people make energy. But they don’t call it energy—they call it ATP. Which stands for…something.
I close my eyes and try to focus: “Pyruvate goes to acetyl-CoA goes to citrate goes to aconitate…”
“Cis-aconitate,” Abe corrects me.
I groan. “I hate the Kreb’s cycle.”
Abe takes another long sip of coffee. “Yeah, I’ve memorized it like five times now. Never sticks.”
He takes another sip, tilting his head slightly to drain as much coffee as he can.
“You need to lay off the coffee, Abe,” I say.
“Look who’s talking,” he snorts, gesturing at my own Styrofoam cup. “When I said we were dissecting out the fascia lata yesterday, you asked if I said fascia latte, and you almost started salivating.”
“No, you’re way worse,” I say. “I think you’re developing a tremor.”
Abe holds out his left hand and we both lean in to inspect it. I definitely notice him shaking a bit.
“Well,” he says, “there goes my career in surgery.”
“You want to be a surgeon?” I ask in surprise. Abe doesn’t seem like the surgeon type—he’s too nice.
“Hell no,” he says as he takes another sip.
“What do you want to be?” I ask him.
“Maybe an ophthalmologist,” he mumbles, looking slightly embarrassed.
It’s hard to imagine Abe as an eye doctor. Eyes are so small and delicate—sort of the opposite of what he is. He looks like he’d end up squishing some eyeballs accidentally.
Now that we’ve already moved off topic, I’m well into procrastination mode. I nudge Abe’s foot with my own under the table.
“Hey,” I say.
He grins at me. “Hey yourself,” he says.
“I want to ask you something,” I begin. “And I want you to tell me the truth, okay?”
Abe’s eyes widen and his smile falters slightly. “Okay…”
“What do you think of Ginny?”
He blinks at me. “Who?”
Okay, that is definitely not the response I was looking for.
“You know. Ginny, our lab partner?”
“Oh.” Abe still seems a little befuddled. “Uh, she’s… okay. I mean, she seems to know her stuff, I guess. Why? What did she do?”
“Nothing,” I say quickly. “I just think… she’s sort of cute, don’t you think so?”
Abe blinks a few more times. When he speaks again, his voice is slow, careful. “Um, she’s all right. I guess.”
Why’s he being so weird about this? Unless…
A sudden revelation hits me.
“Oh my God,” I gasp. “Are you gay?”
I shouldn’t have said it like that. What’s wrong with me? Now Abe is just staring at me and probably thinking that I’m judging him, even though I’m definitely not. He just really didn’t seem gay to me, but really, what do I know?
“I don’t care if you are,” I say quickly. “I mean, I am definitely not anti-gay. I’ve had lots of gay friends. I think it’s a crime that you can’t get married in any state that—”
“God. Please stop, Heather,” Abe cuts me off. He’s shaking his head. “I’m not gay. At all.”
“Oh.” And now I feel like an idiot. “I’m sorry, I just thought that you and Ginny… well, you know…”
“I’m not interested in Ginny,” he says quietly.
There’s a long silence between us that gets broken only by Abe taking another long sip of coffee.
“Kreb’s cycle?” I say.
He nods.
Chapter 10
A few years ago somebody died here.
I’m standing directly over Southside River. There’s a bridge that runs across the river, hovering about twenty feet overhead. When I look down, I can see the water rushing below my feet. The story, according to a newspaper article that I dug up, is that a few years ago, a student hurled himself into the river. Well, he stabbed himself and then threw himself in. As you can imagine, he didn’t survive.
I can’t imagine feeling that way, so depressed that it seems like the only option is to end it all. I heard he was failing anatomy. So I could very well be in his shoes in the near future. The very near future.
But I wouldn’t do this to myself. I mean, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t.
Of course, I wonder if that student would’ve imagined he’d be up here when the year first started.
I look down again into the swirling water of the river below my feet. A wave of nausea washes over me and I cling to the rail of the bridge. The water seems so black and foreboding. And cold. I can’t help but imagine my body being submerged in that dark icy water, the water filling my lungs.
Drowning slowly.
A noise startles me out of my thoughts. My head jerks up and I see a car pulling up beside the bridge. It’s that white Lincoln Continental, the one that spooked me in the parking lot the other day when I was walking with Abe. I’ve seen it a few times since then parked in front of the hospital, and it’s always been empty so I’ve never figured out who belonged to. But now I can see the face of the driver clearly through the windshield.
It’s my anatomy professor, Dr. Conlon.
What is he doing here?
I don’t know what it is, but there’s something odd about the look on my professors face. There’s a dark expression in his eyes that sends shivers down my spine. I realize that he can’t see me, that the branches of a nearby tree are obscuring his view of me. And suddenly, I’m seized by the desperate urge to get the hell out of here before he realizes that I’m standing here. That my life might depend on it.
Slowly, quietly, I back away. And I don’t feel safe again until I’m back in my car with the engine running.
Chapter 11
Our first anatomy exam is today. I didn’t sleep at all last night.
I meant to sleep. Believe me, it wasn’t my intention at the beginning of the night to stay awake for twenty-four hours straight and leave myself feeling like I’m about to collapse.
I went to the library yesterday after spending several hours in the lab, going over anatomy. Abe insisted that I leave with him at midnight, and I did it only because I knew he wouldn’t go until I did. But when I got back to my room, I continued studying. My room looks like an anatomy tornado hit. Every time I even contemplated closing my textbooks, it just seemed like there was too much that I didn’t know. By four in the morning, it just felt pointless to try to sleep.
I’m pretty tired.
At eight a.m., I change into my green scrubs and join the large group of my classmates in front of the anatomy lab, waiting for the practical portion of the exam to begin. I can almost see the nervous energy radiating from the group. I showered this morning, but it’s obvious many of my classmates didn’t bother. We’re a pretty scruffy group.
You could probably fill a small lake with the amount of coffee we’ve had to drink this morning. Several dozen of us are clutching identical white Styrofoam cups. This is my fourth cup in the last two hours, and I’m starting to have palpitati
ons. And there’s a very real chance I might wet my pants.
“Hey, Heather.” It’s Phil, the boy with the messy ponytail that I’d spied on the first day. “You nervous?”
Obviously.
“I’m just really tired from staying up all night,” I say.
Phil reaches into his pocket and produces a small container filled with tiny white pills.
“Want one?” he asks.
I can’t even conceal my horror. Oh my God. He’s offering me drugs. I feel like I’m in an afterschool special. Well, I’ve learned something from those specials. I’m going to Just Say No!
“Um, are those…?”
“Mint-flavored caffeine tablets,” Phil says. “Got ‘em at the gift shop.”
“Oh,” I say. Damn. Now I’m never going to get to prove I can stay strong in the face of peer pressure. “No, thanks.”
“Are you sure?” Phil asks. “It’s like drinking a cup of coffee, but you don’t have to pee!”
I shake my head and wander off in search of Abe. Instead, I find Rachel leaning against the wall, her long dark brown hair hanging loose around her shoulders and obscuring the lettering on her T-shirt. She’s tapping her toes against the floor impatiently, and every few minutes she lets out an irritated sigh.
Mason is standing next to Rachel, looking fresh as a daisy. He’s also staring so blatantly at her chest that I can’t help but say something.
“What are you looking at?” I bark at him.
Boy, I’m irritable today.
Mason lifts his eyes and looks at me in surprise.
“I’m trying to read her T-shirt.”
Oh. I guess that could be true.
Rachel smiles at him. “It says, ‘I am the doctor my mother wanted me to marry.’”
Mason starts to laugh. He looks Rachel straight in the eyes and says, “Not yet you’re not.”
The doors to the anatomy lab open and the students file in like we’re on some kind of death march. The first part of the exam is the practical, where various structures on different cadavers are tagged with pins and the students are given a sheet of paper and clipboard on which to record their findings. I have to confess, the clipboard makes me feel very professional.
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