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  “Cheer up,” I say. “In less than two years, we’ll be working in the hospital and you’ll have more cute nurses flirting with you than you know what to do with.”

  Abe barely seems to be listening. He stares ahead at the television, his eyes unfocused.

  “I’m going to keep her,” he says. “No matter what I have to do, I’m not going to let her get away.”

  “Okay…” There’s a disturbing desperation in Abe’s voice. No matter what I have to do. What the hell does that mean? “Look, you should get some sleep.”

  “Can’t,” Abe mutters, changing the channel absently. On the nature channel, a lion is ripping apart a young zebra. Okay then.

  If there is one thing I’m not, it’s a future psychiatrist. Abe’s problems are his own. Whatever stupid shit Abe intends to do on Heather’s behalf, that’s his business. I have too much of my own work to do.

  _____

  Dr. Conlon’s morning lecture is on the extraocular muscles. The muscles that allow the eye to move are controlled by three pairs of cranial nerves: the oculomotor nerve, the trochlear nerve, and the abducens. The mechanism is pretty complicated and weakness of any one of these nerves causes the affected eye to deviate in a way that would cause vision to double.

  I have to admit that Dr. Conlon is a damn good lecturer. The eye is a very complicated organ and there are a lot of dumb people in my class. But by the end of the lecture, everyone seems to get it.

  When we’re in lab an hour later, even Rachel seems well-versed in the extraocular nerves. She recites them to Dr. Conlon proudly as her nipples poke through her T-shirt. And he seems really excited she got it right. Or excited by her nipples. Either way.

  “And where’s the rest of your group?” he asks.

  It’s just me, Rachel, and Ginny today. Abe and Heather aren’t around—they’re probably somewhere making out or something.

  “I have no idea,” I say to Dr. Conlon, and then I add, “Guess they have something better to do.”

  Dr. Conlon just shakes his head.

  “By the way,” I say. There’s something that’s been on my mind and I’ve got to ask him about it. “I was just wondering… do you know what happened to our cadaver? Like, how he died?”

  Dr. Conlon raises his black eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

  “Well, he just seems so healthy…” I laugh, but somehow it comes out a little strangled. “I mean, aside from being dead.”

  I’d always thought of Dr. Conlon as being really good-natured, but his blue eyes suddenly get really dark behind his spectacles.

  “That’s confidential, Mason,” he snaps at me.

  I just stare at him. It was an innocent question and his response was… well, pretty surprising.

  “Sorry,” I stammer.

  Without another word, Dr. Conlon grips the handle of his cane and limps away from our table. He seemed so furious all of a sudden. What the hell was that all about?

  Almost like he’s hiding something, isn’t it?

  I shake my head, wondering where that thought came from. I’m definitely overworked and not sleeping nearly enough. But I can’t shake the feeling that something is very wrong about this whole situation.

  Chapter 22

  “How much weight have you lost, Mason?”

  I’m flipping through the pages of my anatomy textbook as I sit on the bed in my room. My mother called me and immediately started grilling me on whether I’m taking care of myself. She’s right—I’m not eating enough and what I eat is crap. But what can I do? I’m sure as hell not going to start cooking myself healthy meals every night. It’s cafeteria food or else Ramen Noodles. Or if I’m feeling really motivated, I’ll crack open a box of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” I say.

  “Come home this weekend,” she says. “Have a home-cooked meal.”

  I don’t point out that any “home-cooked meal” is in fact cooked by the housekeeper. For years, my father and I have been complimenting my mother on Olivia’s food. My mother would routinely burn toast.

  “I guess so,” I say.

  Thanksgiving break isn’t for a few more weeks, and some real food would be amazing. I could probably spare a couple of hours of studying for that.

  “You can bring your girlfriend if you’d like,” she adds in a sly voice. “We’d love to meet her, darling.”

  My mother has always taken too big an interest in my personal life. She misses my college girlfriend Holly. I really think my mother would have married Holly herself if she could have.

  “I don’t have a girlfriend, Mom,” I try to tell her.

  “You?” she snorts. “Of course you do.”

  I don’t know what to say to that.

  After giving it some thought, I decide to invite Ginny to come. She’s not my girlfriend, but I can’t imagine asking anyone else. But I’m really into her these days, and it wouldn’t be painful to spend a whole night together.

  I ask Ginny during anatomy lab when it’s just the two of us.

  “Your parents’ house?” Ginny asks, genuinely surprised.

  Christ, it’s not like I gave her a freaking engagement ring.

  I feel my face get hot and I quickly play it down.

  “I just want a friend with me to help get me through the evening,” I explain quickly. “Come on, aren’t you a little bit curious?”

  “A little bit,” Ginny admits with a smile. “What should I wear?”

  I pick Ginny up at five o’clock on Saturday night and my parents are a forty-five-minute drive away. I told her to dress casual. She’s wearing a skirt that is short but could be shorter. I like that I can see some cleavage poking out of her neckline. And when she leans forward, I catch a glimpse of a lacy black bra strap. So freaking hot.

  “Wow,” I say.

  Ginny’s olive skin colors slightly, which is even sexier. “What?”

  “You look… really nice,” I say.

  Really, I can’t stop looking at her. I mean, I always think she’s attractive, but damn.

  And that’s when I decide: tonight, after we leave my parents’ house, I’m going to ask Ginny out on a real date. No strings attached sex is fun, but it’s not enough anymore. I probably sound like a tool saying this, but I want Ginny to be my girlfriend. I’m going to talk her into it somehow. I can be very persuasive.

  If she shoots me down like Janet, it will kill me.

  “I love your car,” Ginny says as she climbs into the passenger’s seat. She sweeps her dark hair off her olive shoulders as she looked down at the gears. “You drive a stick?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’m impressed. Sticks are cool.”

  She thinks I’m cool. Score one for Howard.

  At first, I tune in to the radio, but we end up talking so much that I just turn it off. Mostly, we talk about school and our classmates. Ginny knows all the gossip, which makes me feel really out of the loop. I’ve been studying too much, I guess.

  Then again, there’s really no such thing as too much studying, right?

  We get to my parents’ house just before six. I still have my keys to the front door, but I figure the polite thing to do is to ring the bell. My mother would never forgive me if I just busted into the house with company, not giving any warning.

  My mother responds to the bell herself. She gets this huge smile on her face when she sees us, although she doesn’t hug me. We’re not a family that does lots of hugs, which is fine by me. My mom looks about ten years younger than last time I saw her—all those lines on her forehead are gone. Botox, I’m almost positive. Not that I’d ask.

  “Hello, darling,” Mom coos. She turns to Ginny, “And this must be Virginia. How nice to meet you.”

  “Ginny,” she says, fiddling with her shirt collar.

  As we walk inside, I can smell dinner. It smells really amazing. So much better than the cafeteria crap. I glance over at Ginny and see she looks pale.

  “What’s wrong?” I whisper.

  �
��This place is huge,” she whispers back. “When I lived at home, I shared a bedroom with my two sisters.”

  I always just thought of my parents’ house as just home, but now that Ginny pointed it out, I guess she’s right. The foyer opens up into an impressive living room, with three leather couches and the latest model in large-screen television sets. On the far corner of the room is a fireplace that is now burning bright orange flames. A wide, carpeted staircase leads up to the second of three stories that make up the house.

  I can see a little crease form between Ginny’s brows, and instinctively, I fling my arm around her shoulders. She stares up at me in total surprise—I’ve never done anything like that before. But she doesn’t push me away, so I count that as a win.

  “Virginia,” my mother gushes, “I absolutely must give you a tour of the house.”

  “Um… okay…” Ginny says.

  “Mason,” my mother says, “would you be a dear and take your and Virginia’s coats in the den?”

  As my mother drags away my date, I wander in the direction of the den. As expected, my father is sitting in a reclining chair, reading The New England Journal of Medicine. Dad’s black hair is now threaded with gray as is his beard, but his dark eyes still scare the shit out of me. I instinctively straighten my posture as I carefully arrange the coats on an empty sofa.

  My father looks up at the sound and peers at me over the rim of his reading glasses.

  “Mason,” he says in a deep, rumbling voice several octaves lower than mine. “I’m glad you were able to make it.”

  I nod.

  “How is school going?” my father asks. “At the top of your class, I assume.”

  I nod again. “Yes, sir.”

  “Of course,” my father says. “You’re my son, aren’t you?”

  My father stands up and I straighten my spine further, but I’m still not as tall as he is. He’s six foot one and I’m not even quite six feet. It kills me that I didn’t even hit six feet. And when I stare at people, they don’t cower in fear. They just smile at me, and maybe ask me if I want to go on a date with their granddaughter.

  I’m nothing like my dad. And I bet that disappoints the hell out of him.

  “Well, I’m going to get washed up for dinner,” my father says, as he brushes off his pants. “I’ll see you at the dinner table, Mason.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, letting out a breath as my father leaves the room.

  I lag behind in the den. This one room feels like a castle compared to my dorm back at school. It’s nice to be able to walk across the room without bumping into furniture or tripping over Abe’s dirty laundry.

  I cross the room and find myself at my father’s desk. It’s a large mahogany piece that cost a small fortune—I’m no stranger to expensive furniture, but I actually gasped when I saw the price tag on it when it was delivered last year. I sit down at the desk, wondering when I’ll have enough money to afford a den of my own that looks like this. I still have four years of medical school ahead of me, then a long, low-paying residency. My parents lend me a lot of money, but they wouldn’t be willing to bankroll me if I wanted to buy a house.

  I try to open the desk drawer, but it’s locked. Typical of my father. I feel around under the drawer and immediately touch the outline of the key that is taped to the bottom of the drawer. My father is still using the same hiding places.

  Open the drawer.

  I hear the command loud and clear, as if someone is speaking to me, right in my ear. A deep male voice that I can’t identify. I look around the room, but nobody is there.

  Huh. That’s weird.

  Open the drawer, Mason.

  “Hello?” I say aloud. Someone definitely said something that time. I heard it. I glance over and see that the door to the room is closed. I’m alone.

  The television? Could it be the television? I walk over to the set and examine it for a second, but it is definitely not turned on. The stereo is off too. And besides, they said my name.

  Where the hell did that voice come from?

  I go back over to the desk and examine the drawer. When I was younger, it used to be a game to unlock my father’s desk drawers without him knowing about it. There was never anything interesting in the drawers back then. Usually I just found some boring bills, and once I found a copy of their mortgage, with numbers so high that it made me dizzy. I’m probably a little bit old now to be digging around in my father’s desk drawer. Still, I find myself pushing the key into the lock.

  I don’t know what I had expected to find. But I hadn’t expected to find a .357 Magnum.

  I pick up the gun and a handful of bullets roll to the front of the drawer. I know how to shoot. My dad firmly believes in the right to bear arms and had taken me to a range for shooting practice when I was younger. We even went hunting once, but we didn’t kill anything, probably because I was so loud that I scared all the animals away. This gun feels lighter than the ones I had held before, easily concealable in one’s pocket. But still really powerful.

  Take the gun.

  The sound of the command startles me and I nearly drop the gun on the floor. I blink my eyes, desperately looking around the room.

  “Who’s there?” I snap.

  The room is empty.

  I take a deep breath and study the gun in my hand. My father keeps it around for protection, but I know the house is already alarmed up the wazoo. There’s no way anyone is getting into this fortress, and even if someone did, isn’t there some statistic that showed that you’re more likely to accidentally shoot a family member than a burglar? Or something like that.

  I’m certain now that nobody else is in the room. But this voice is real. I heard it loud and clear. And it seems to somehow know something I don’t.

  “Why do I need it?” I say aloud.

  No answer.

  Well, what did I expect? To have a conversation about firearms with some invisible person?

  Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I’m going to need this gun.

  I take a deep breath, then scoop out the bullets and lock the desk drawer. I place the gun and the bullets in the pocket of my coat that’s lying on the sofa. Then I leave the room to join my family for dinner.

  _____

  “This looks delicious, Mom,” I say as I dig into the lemon pepper chicken cooked by Olivia, the housekeeper.

  “Delicious, Elise,” my father echoes.

  I look over at Ginny, waiting for her to offer a compliment, but she just frowns. Finally, she says, “The cook did a great job.”

  I almost smack myself in the head. How could she have said that?

  “Do you cook much, Virginia?” my mother asks her.

  Ginny is toying with her food, shifting her mashed potatoes into a little pile. “I used to. For my father. But now I live alone. I mostly eat TV dinners.”

  As Ginny finally takes a bite of her mashed potatoes, I want to yell at her, Elbows off the table! I don’t know why I care so much. When I’m at school, I eat with my elbows on the table about 100% of the time, and Abe eats with his feet on the table most of the time. But right now, I’m seeing Ginny through my parents’ eyes. And they’re not impressed.

  I don’t know what I was thinking, considering asking Ginny on a real date. Yes, I think she’s smart and hot and… well, a lot of things. But she just doesn’t fit in to my life here. I can’t have a girlfriend who looks like Ginny. I have to project the right image, and Ginny honestly just isn’t that hot. At least, not in a way anyone but me can appreciate.

  On top of that, she isn’t even American. I think she’s Russian or Slavic or something like that. She may have been born here, but it’s pretty clear from her name that her ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower like mine did. If my mother heard her last name, she’d probably have a stroke.

  It’s fine that I’ve been hooking up with Ginny, but how could I have invited her home with me? It’s embarrassing.

  By the end of the meal, Ginny is barely speaking at
all, just staring down at her plate, absently moving her food around with her fork. In fact, nobody is talking very much. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here.

  “Your girlfriend seems… very nice,” my mother says to me at the end of the evening.

  “She’s not my girlfriend, Mom,” I say as I watch the relief on my mother’s face.

  The drive home is tense. I barely look at Ginny and instead keep my eyes pinned on the road ahead of me, watching the headlights of oncoming cars flashing by. Why did I bring her tonight? What a dumb mistake. She’s not my girlfriend—she’s not even my friend. I should have let our relationship stay what it was, instead of trying to turn it into something it could never be.

  “I didn’t realize you were so rich,” Ginny says, breaking the silence.

  “I’m not rich,” I say.

  “Oh sure.”

  “My dad’s a surgeon, what can I say?”

  “Have you ever worked a day in your life?”

  What a bitchy thing to say. Who is she to judge me?

  “Flipping burgers? No.” My grip on the steering wheel tightens. “But I’ve worked hard in school. It’s not like I paid off my teachers to get good grades.”

  Ginny doesn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, after several minutes, she speaks while looking out the window.

  “You better never screw up, Mason,” she says. “They’ll eat you alive.”

  For some reason, I think of the Magnum still in my pocket.

  Chapter 23

  A few days after the dinner at my parents’ house, I take my father’s credit card and make a trip to the Southside bookstore to raid the shelves for anatomy texts. The bookstore has a full floor dedicated to medicine and there is no shortage of overpriced textbooks and review books. Our second midterm is in a few weeks and there’s no time to mess around.