Suicide Med

by Freida McFadden

  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 business. Someday I’ll date again. There’s just no room in my life for that right now.

  Chapter 58

  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.

  When 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.

  Chapter 59

  I hate visiting my mother these days.

  It takes me about an hour and a half to make the drive from Southside, Connecticut, to Brooklyn—an hour and a half I can’t really spare—but I still go. I do it more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. I know Dad would want me to check up on her, see how she’s doing. She’s not so young anymore, after all. So that’s why I do it.

  But I’ll never stop being angry at her for the way that Dad died.

  Fine, he was on life support. Yes, he had a chronic, degenerative disease. But I still can’t help but feel his life got cut short. If she’d just waited a little longer, he might have pulled through. She didn’t even ask me if I was okay with it. She just decided to take him off the ventilator and that was it. I know Dad wouldn’t have wanted to die.

  As far as I’m concerned, she killed him.

  When I visit my mother about a month into the semester, I notice the apartment hasn’t changed much since my father died. Mom preserved it in roughly the state it’s been in since I was in high school. The furniture is scuffed and secondhand, and just hanging together by a thread. The walls are desperately in need of a paint job, but we can’t afford it and I don’t have time to do it myself. The refrigerator is still making that loud whirring noise.

  I immediately start cleaning the tiny apartment. Ever since Dad died, Mom has let housekeeping fall to the wayside, and my sisters are too busy with their own families to help her out. I do three loads of laundry in the basement, wash the dishes by hand (we’ve never been able to afford a dishwasher), and vacuum the carpet.

  “You don’t have to do all this, Virginia,” Mom says, as she watches me fold her clothes.

  She speaks to me in Russian, even though my parents were pretty strict about speaking English around the house when I was growing up. It’s like since Dad died, she just gave up on everything, even English.

  “It’s fine,” I mumble.

  She watches me for another minute in silence. My mother and I have never had much to say to one another. I was always more of a “daddy’s girl.”

  “Are there any nice boys in your class?” Mom finally asks, as I sort through the socks.

  “No,” I say curtly.

  Why am I not surprised this is my mother’s first question? I’m twenty-six years old and practically an old maid in her eyes. She came to this country from Russia when she was just a girl, and back there, I gather they get married pretty young.

  “None?” Mom raises an eyebrow. “Now how could that be, Virginia? Isn’t the class mostly boys?”

  I don’t bother to point out that these days, medical school classes are at least half female. My mother would never believe it.

  Finally, my mother says what she’s been waiting to say since the moment I walked in: “Ginny, why don’t you come back home?”

  “Daddy wouldn’t want me to quit,” I say through my teeth.

  “Daddy didn’t know everything,” Mom says quietly. “I think… you’d be happier at home. Maybe that nice family will hire you back to watch their kids until you find a husband.”

  I look down at the sock ball in my hand. I want to hurl it at my mother.

  “I don’t want to have this conversation again, Mom,” I say. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to use the bathroom…”

  I don’t need the bathroom. Really, I just need to get away from my mother. Instead of going to the bathroom, I brush past the small bedroom I used to share with my two sisters and end up in my parents’ bedroom. Just like the rest of the house, it hasn’t changed a bit since my father’s death… but there’s something comforting about this fact. I open the closet and see rows of my father’s shirts, all neatly pressed. I can still vaguely smell his aftershave.

  “I’m trying my best, Papa,” I whisper, as I run my hand along the sleeve of my father’s old blue shirt.

  Then I really do go to the bathroom, which has also remained untouched since my father’s death. I see his razor and shaving lotion still on the sink counter, and a large lump forms in my throat that makes it difficult to swallow. I guess my mother misses him too. Maybe it comforts her to see Dad’s stuff still around the bathroom and in the closets.

  I open the medicine cabinet and see the pill bottles that contain all my father’s medications. Before his death, he was taking several kinds of pills that attempted to increase the amount of dopamine in his brain and decrease the symptoms of the disease. The medications decreased his symptoms somewhat, but the dopamine had an undesired side effect: hallucinations.

  I remember how my father was haunted by voices he started hearing in his own head and visions of things that weren’t there. It tortured him to the point where he chose to live with the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease rather than continue the medications. He preferred shaking hands, poor balance, and shuffling feet to the voices in his head.

  I pick up a large bottle of a medication called Sinemet. This medication is essentially pure dopamine, the substance implicated in many patients diagnosed with schizophrenia—it caused the worst of my father’s hallucinations. I shake the bottle and discover that it’s still almost full.

  There’s only a seedling of an idea in my head as I shove the bottle into my pocket.

  _____

  I definitely hate Mason, but I actually sort of like having him around in the library on the late nights. Sometimes it’s just the two of us, and it’s comforting to look up and see him sitting there. Sometimes I look up from my own books and just watch him working—his brow furrowed in deep concentration as he stares at the diagrams of muscles and bones. When he catches me looking at him, he always smiles at me.

  A few days after my visit to my mother’s apartment, I approach Mason late in the evening while he’s studying.

  “I’m going to get some coffee,” I say. My voice cracks strangely on the words and I clear my throat. “You want a cup?”

  Mason blinks in surprise. “Uh… yeah, sure. Thanks, Ginny.”

  “Black?” I ask.

  “Sounds perfect.” He smiles at me and I get a little lost in those hazel eyes. Sheesh, he is really good looking. But I have no interest in a guy like that. Not a chance. He’s a jerk and a phony and absolutely not my type.

  I go to the coffee machine down in the med student lounge and fill up two cups of black coffee. It’s close to midnight and the floor is deserted, but I still cautiously glance over my shoulder to make sure I don’t have company. When I feel certain I’m alone, I pull my father’s bottle of pills out of my pocket.

  I open the bottle and remove a single capsule. I break it open and let the contents dissolve into one of the cups of coffee. I wait until the powder is completely invisible before I start back toward the library.

  It’s almost a little surreal, in a way. I mean, I’m poisoning him. I’m poisoning my classmate.

  It isn’t really poison though. Calling it poison is really melodramatic—it’s a medication. And it’s not really going to hurt him—maybe just distract him enough that he
won’t be able to spend every waking hour studying. Or more likely, it won’t affect him at all.

  I hand Mason the cup of coffee, careful to give him the cup with the Sinemet mixed in.

  “Wow, thanks, Ginny,” he says. “I really appreciate it.”

  I smile. “My pleasure.”

  Chapter 60

  Mason and I are dissecting the large intestines and he’s pretty focused, but I notice that every once in a while, he looks up and stares at Rachel’s breasts. It’s incredibly irritating. No matter how good a student Mason is, men only have one thing on their minds.

  I’ve been slipping Mason the Sinemet nearly every day for a couple of weeks now. As far as I can tell, it isn’t affecting him at all. In some ways, I’m glad—I’m sort of scared of something terrible happening to him. I know what I’m doing could get me kicked out of med school in the blink of an eye.

  Dr. Conlon limps over to our table, “How are things going?

  I have a few questions, but Mason quickly replies, “Very smoothly.”

  “Good to hear it,” Dr. Conlon says. He leans over our cadaver and glances inside at the dissection we’ve been working on. “Very nice job, Dr. Howard.”

  Of course, Mason gets all the credit.

  I watch Dr. Conlon’s blue eyes flit up for a second to where Rachel is standing. Oh my God, is Dr. Conlon staring at Rachel’s breasts too? Are you kidding me? I’m so angry, I nearly threw the scalpel to the ground and storm off in a tantrum. Rachel loves to go on and on about how men are all sexist pigs, but the least she could do is wear a bra so that her nipples aren’t poking out through the fabric of her shirt. Rachel is a hypocritical phony, just like everyone else.

  As I continue my dissection, I notice that Mason is looking at the cadaver’s upper arm. There’s a tattoo on the arm that reads, “To serve and protect.” He had probably been a cop. I wonder if he died in the line of duty, although I guess that if he had, there probably would have been an autopsy. More likely he had a coronary from stress or too much fast food.