Dead Med, page 24
“I’m not 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 grit my teeth. “I’m not interested.”
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.
77
The scores for the first anatomy quiz are posted a few days before the hard copies are returned to us. A large crowd of students is milling about the white piece of paper hung up near the lockers containing the scores posted by each student’s five-digit school ID number. 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 small—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 one 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 Columbia. Columbia 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, 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.
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, Brogan 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?” Brogan asks as he takes a bite.
“Delicious,” he says.
Brogan 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 Brogan 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, Brogan 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 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 Brogan.”
He 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 my type, actually.”
Not his type? What did that mean? As irritating as Brogan is, she’s objectively very attractive. Who doesn’t like strawberry-blond hair and legs that are like six feet long? Her legs are 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, Sasha?”
“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 continue to hate him, but it’s surprisingly difficult. I stand up to take a cookie from him, and 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 a grade of one hundred circled at the top.
That’s how I discover Mason is 20205.
And that’s when things go horribly wrong.
78
I hate visiting my mother these days.
It takes me about two hours to make the drive from DeWitt, Connecticut, to Brooklyn—two hours I can’t spare—but I still go. I do it more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. Dad would want me to check up on her, to 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 Dad died.
Fine, he was on life support after that bout of pneumonia that spread into his bloodstream. 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. 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, Sasha,” Mom says as she watches me fold her clothes.
She speaks to me in Russian, even though my parents were pretty strict about always 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 I gather that back there, they get married pretty young.
“None?” Mom raises an eyebrow. “Now how could that be, Sasha? 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: “Sasha, 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 something is 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. His razor and shaving lotion are 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 head and visions of things that weren’t there. It tortured him to the point that 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 carbidopa-levodopa. Levodopa is converted by the body into dopamine. But that dopamine also caused the worst of my father’s hallucinations—he couldn’t tolerate these pills for more than a few weeks. 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.
79
I hate Mason, but I 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 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. He’s somehow become the closest thing I’ve got to a friend at this school.
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.” My voice cracks strangely on the words, and I clear my throat. “You want a cup?”
Mason blinks in surprise. “Uh… yeah, sure. Thanks, Sasha.”
“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 head 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.
The irony of the whole thing isn’t lost on me. DeWitt has a drug problem—too many students are popping pills to get through their classes. But Mason is straight as an arrow and would never take drugs. And yet here I am, drugging him.
Calling it a drug is melodramatic though—it’s a medication. It’s not 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 dopamine pill mixed in.
“Wow, thanks, Sasha,” he says. “I really appreciate it.”
I smile. “My pleasure.”
80
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 dopamine pills 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. 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 before I can ask them, Mason 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 throw 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, Mason is staring down 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.
“Hey, Sasha.” Mason nudges me. “What do you think this tattoo means?”
“It means he was probably a cop,” I say.
Mason’s eyes widen, and he looks impressed. He talks about it all through the rest of the lab, how cool it is we’re dissecting the body of such an important person. He’s talking faster and louder than I’ve ever heard him speak before, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s a side effect of the medication.
Nah, probably not.
It’s a Friday night, and everyone is beginning to feel the crunch from our upcoming anatomy exam. I’m in the library as usual, as is Mason Howard. I brought him a cup of coffee laced with the usual hallucinogenic that seems to have no effect whatsoever. I’m beginning to wonder why I even bother.
“Do you mind if I join you?” he asks, nodding toward my table as I hand him the cup of coffee.
“Uh… sure,” I agree. I feel a flash of fear as I wonder if he discovered what I’ve been doing. Why else would he want to talk to me?
He shakes his head at me. “Don’t you ever go home?”
Wow, what a hypocrite.
“Do you?” I ask belligerently.
Mason blinks a few times, taken aback by my response, and that’s when I realize it: holy crap, he’s flirting with me.
Mason Howard is flirting with me.
It seems so impossible. I mean, I’m not ugly or anything, but Mason is… well, Mason. He’s in a different league. Well, at least the girls who throw themselves at him on a regular basis seem to be in a different league. Those girls are gorgeous. Why would he pay any attention to me when he could have them?
“So tell me, Sasha,” he says, “why do you want to be a doctor?”
For a second, I’m completely taken in by his smile. Even though I officially hate him, I find myself blurting out the whole sad story about my father and how much it changed me. And he actually looks like he cares. I’m sure he’s faking it, though.
