The police surmised that Jared had shot Mary in the head, then buried the gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. They both died instantly.
There’s a quote from Dr. Conlon that’s repeated in several of the online articles: “Mary was a wonderful student and a wonderful person. She had so much potential. This is a great tragedy.”
So much potential.
Isn’t that what Dr. Conlon said about me? Does he think I’m like the girl who was murdered last year? Or does our professor just go around telling everyone that they’ve got oodles of potential?
The icing on the cake is that the whole thing took place in the Southside dorm—the very place where I’m living right now. For all I know, Mary and Jared died in this very room.
I look down at the carpeting. It’s dark brown and looks brand new—suspiciously new. Was it changed to get rid of the bloodstains?
A door slams and I nearly jump out of my skin. I quickly minimize the window on my laptop seconds before Rachel strolls into our bedroom. I can’t say exactly why, but I don’t want her to know I was reading about the murder-suicide. Mostly, I’m afraid she’ll say something to make me feel worse about it than I already do.
Without asking if it’s okay, Rachel lays out her yoga mat on the floor, and starts playing some music that is probably supposed to be soothing, but it just gets on my nerves. Besides, I’m studying (kind of). I know listening to classical music is supposed to make you study better or something, but I can’t concentrate with music playing, and anyway, this isn’t classical music.
“I’m trying to study,” I say to her.
She’s already on her hands and knees on the mat. “So study. Who’s stopping you?”
I can’t imagine Rachel would understand, considering I’ve yet to see her actually crack open a book. “You know,” I say. “We’ve got our first exam coming up soon in anatomy.”
“You’re kidding.” Rachel straightens out her legs and spine so that her body makes a triangle with the floor.
I don’t get it. I’d say she’s got a photographic memory or something like that, but it’s clear from lab that Rachel has no clue what’s going on. Isn’t she worried about failing?
“Let me tell you a story, Heather,” Rachel says, straightening up.
“Okay…” I say. I hope this story doesn’t involve a murder or suicide.
“A man was being chased by a deadly tiger,” Rachel begins.
Okay…
“He runs but soon comes to the edge of a high cliff,” Rachel continues, “Desperate to save himself,he climbs down a vine and dangles over the fatal ledge. But he soon realizes that his weight is too much for the vine—”
“Maybe he was snacking too much while studying,” I joke.
Rachel glares at me and ignores my interruption. “Anyway, the man realizes that his weight is too much for the vine and in a few minutes, it will probably break and he’ll fall to his death.” She pauses dramatically. I brace myself for the gory details. “Then he spots a strawberry hanging from the vine. He reaches out and picks the strawberry, and he eats it. And you know what?”
“What?” I ask.
“It’s the best strawberry he’s ever tasted,” Rachel says.
What? What in hell does that mean? What does that story have to do with anything?
“I don’t get it,” I finally say.
“No,” Rachel murmurs. “I wouldn’t imagine you would.”
Then she goes back to her yoga without offering further explanation.
Maybe I should try yoga. Maybe if I did some meditation and stretching, I’d stop worrying about the exam too, and just waste my time telling stupid stories about strawberries and tigers.
Since Rachel clearly has no intention of turning off her music, I grab a few of my books and head out into our living area. It’s been furnished for us, but very sparsely. We’ve got a loveseat that’s decorated with flowers and is so old that a puff of dust rises out of it every time I sit on it. Somehow I always imagine insects swarming under the surface of the cushions. We’ve also got a little “dining table,” which is nothing but a tiny square wooden table flanked by a couple of metal chairs. I sit on one of these chairs, but it has a bum leg and shifts every time I move. I try the other chair, which creaks so threateningly that I get scared and move back to the gimpy chair.
Sighing, I pull my cell phone out of my pocket and call Seth. This time he answers after only two rings. “’Lo?”
“Hey, it’s me,” I say.
“Hi, me,” he says. I can hear him smiling at the other line and I smile back. Maybe my life isn’t completely awful if he’s in it.
“What are you up to?” I ask him.
“Not much. You?”
“Just trying to study, but Rachel’s being loud.” I hesitate. “Seth, did you know that there have been a bunch of suicides at Southside?”
“Yeah, of course,” he says. “Suicide Med. Everyone knows that.”
Everyone but stupid me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew,” Seth says. “Everyone knows. How could you not know?”
“But…” I want to make this his fault somehow, at least partially. “Weren’t you worried about me going to a school where a bunch of students died?”
“No,” Seth says. “I mean, they killed themselves. You’re not going to do that.”
I might, I almost say. But he’s right—I wouldn’t. “Well, there was that murder-suicide last year.”
“Yeah, but the killer is dead now,” he points out. “It’s not like there’s some crazy serial killer stalking the campus. These are all, like, independent events.”
Somehow I think of what Rachel said, about how every single year since Dr. Conlon’s been at Southside, a student has died. That’s definitely a coincidence though.
“It’s just a little disturbing, that’s all,” I say.
“I guess so,” Seth says, not sounding like he means it.
I hear a flush in the background. I pull the phone away from my ear and stare at it in horror.
“Seth,” I gasp. “Were you on the toilet?”
He pauses, then I hear him say: “Yeah.”
I groan. “Seriously, Seth? You picked up the phone while on the toilet? Number one or number two?” Before he can answer, I say, “Wait, forget it. I don’t want to know.”
“Look, Heather,” he says. “The other night you were crying because I didn’t answer my phone. So I figured, you know, I better pick up.”
“Not on the toilet!”
He sighs. “What do you want from me, Heather?”
I get this jab of pain in the pit of my stomach. What do I want from him? I want him to be my boyfriend. I want him to care about me. And not just because I tell him to.
“Nothing,” I say quietly and the chair creaks beneath me.
Chapter 7
I show up early at the Southside Med’s library the next day, equipped with my anatomy atlas and my textbook, along with a water bottle and a baggie full of chocolate bars and potato chips. Yeah, that pretzel and Coke yesterday were just the tip of the iceberg. Soon I’m going to have to make another trip to the mall to buy new pants. Or better yet, a tent.
Abe texts me that he’s almost here, and I try to flip through the chapter on the thorax on my own. It’s hard to concentrate though. Truthfully, I keep thinking about my abysmal quiz grades.
“You look deep in thought.”
I snap my head up. It’s not Abe, like I expected. It’s Mason. He looks mildly amused at the expression on my face. He slides into the seat across from mine at the table.
“Mind if I join you?”
I could never study around Mason Howard. He’s pretty much the biggest distraction I can imagine. I would have thought spending all this time with him in lab and the fact that he’s proven himself to be the biggest asshole on the planet would diminish his appeal, but it doesn’t. He’s just that sexy.
He looks way too good right n
ow. Every med student I’ve seen so far today looks like they haven’t slept in weeks, but Mason seems like he’s just come back from a long vacation at a spa. His clothes aren’t wrinkled and his jaw is clean shaven. His books are lined up in a neat stack on the table and I can’t help but see one of his anatomy quizzes sticking out of the textbook. The grade at the top is a hundred. Figures.
“I put in some quality time last night with Frank. But now it’s time to hit the books.” Mason says.
Despite Rachel’s discomfort with naming the cadaver and a long email rant she sent out to the entire class about how disrespectful it was, Mason still calls him Frank. It doesn’t bother me. And to be honest, I like how much it seems to infuriate Rachel.
“I feel like I should give up right now,” I mumble.
Mason frowns. “Why? What’s wrong?”
He really has no idea.
“How do you do it, Mason?” I sigh. “You know everything.”
“Well, I want to go into plastic surgery,” he says with a shrug. “I’ll never match in a plastics residency if I don’t study my ass off. What do you want to do?”
“I thought I wanted to be a doctor,” I say.
I meant it as a joke but it’s sort of true.
Mason winks and flashes me this smile that makes my heart skip in my chest. Ugh, I need to stop being such a girl!
“Don’t look so stressed out, Heather. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”
“What if I’m not?” I say. “What if I fail the exam?”
“So you’ll get a job at the post office,” he jokes. “And one day you can come back with a shotgun and blow the brains out of all the other students.”
I don’t laugh. The whole thing is kind of in poor taste considering we’re at a school nicknamed Suicide Med.
“Come on,” he says. “You’re going to do fine on the exam. I promise.”
Mason reaches across the table and puts his hand on top of mine. And my freaking hand starts to tingle like I’m having a stroke or something. I hate myself for having a schoolgirl crush on Mason.
“You’ll be fine, Heather,” he says. “Don’t worry so much.”
If I were Mason, I wouldn’t worry either.
I hear a throat clear, and I look up. It’s Abe. He’s standing at the other end of the table, holding his anatomy atlas and looking sort of peeved.
“I thought we were studying together,” he says to me.
I yank my hand away from Mason’s. “We are.”
Mason gets this amused look on his face.
“Don’t worry, Abe,” he says as he stands up. “I’m not horning in on your action.”
Abe’s cheeks turn crimson. It’s sort of cute how his complexion is so pale that it shows all his emotions.
“I’m not…” he stammers. “I mean, we’re not…”
“I have a boyfriend, you know,” I say to Mason, sticking out my chin. “At another school.”
“Is that so?” Mason doesn’t wipe that grin off his face. I wish Abe would slug him, especially since he looks like he’d like to.
“Get out of here, Mason,” Abe says to his roommate. He doesn’t lay a finger on him—it’s pretty clear that Abe isn’t the kind of guy who goes around slugging people.
Mason is still smirking as he relocates himself at a desk in the back of the library. I notice he’s one desk away from little Ginny, and he stops to talk with her a minute before getting to work. I’ve yet to have a successful conversation with Ginny, so it’s surprising to see anyone talking to her, but especially Mason.
Abe sets down his books on the table and slides into the seat across from me.
“I thought we could start with the heart,” he says.
“Fine by me.”
“Or we could do the lungs, if you’d prefer?” he offers.
I don’t have a great understanding of the heart, but it’s probably no worse than anything else in the thorax. I’m equally confused about everything.
“Let’s just do the heart.”
Abe nods and pulls out a stack of index cards. He lays them down on the table and I see that he’s drawn color-coded diagrams of the heart. I gasp.
“Wow,” I say.
His eyes widen. “What?”
“I just…” I grin at him. “I didn’t realize you were such a huge nerd.”
Abe looks down at his nerdy index cards, then back up at me. “I’m not a nerd! I’m organized.”
I shake my head at him. “That’s exactly what a nerd would say.”
He picks up a blank index card and flicks it in my direction. He obviously meant to hit me with it, but the card doesn’t even make it across the table. It just kind of flies into the air, then flutters slowly to the ground. Abe and I both watch it, then simultaneously bust out laughing.
“Pretty pathetic, huh?” he says.
I nod. “The trick is to form it into a plane,” I explain.
I grab another blank index card and form it into a little makeshift paper airplane. I aim it in Abe’s direction and it hits him directly in the forehead.
“Ouch!” Abe cries, rubbing his forehead. He grabs himself another blank card. “Okay, you’re asking for it, McKinley…”
And then we spend the next thirty minutes making planes out of index cards. I am such a bad influence.
_____
At some point, we get tired of acting like children and actually start studying for real. It’s intimidating that Abe knows his stuff so much better than I do, but at the same time, it’s motivating. Someone once told me that it’s always better to study with someone who knows more than you do.
If that’s the case, Abe is screwed.
It’s dark out by the time we decide to call it a day. We’re both carrying an armful of books as we head down in the elevator to the parking lot.
“Where’d you park?” Abe asks me.
“Second floor. You?”
“Third.” Abe steps out of the elevator. “It’s dark out. I’ll walk you to your car.”
I make a face and stand in the doorway to the elevator so the doors won’t close.
“I’ll be fine.”
“It’s safer if I walk you,” Abe insists.
The elevator starts to close on me, so I step aside. Fine, if Abe wants to waste his time walking me to my car, that’s his business.
“This is Connecticut, you know,” I say. “Not Detroit.”
Abe shrugs. “Still.”
“How are you going to protect me anyway?” I challenge him. “Are you carrying a weapon?”
He rolls his eyes. “I don’t need a weapon. Nobody’s going to attack me.”
“How come?”
“Heather, come on,” he snorts.
Okay, I guess Abe is a pretty big guy. Still, he’s not some kind of Superman who can dodge bullets or something. (Can Superman dodge bullets? I’d assume so. As long as they’re not made of kryptonite.)
“Do you know karate?” I ask him.
He shakes his head.
“So what would you do if some guy attacked you?”
Abe shrugs. “I don’t know. Sit on him?”
Actually, that would probably be pretty effective.
I have to admit, it is pretty dark out and the parking lot isn’t particularly well lit. It’s late enough that the lot is completely silent aside from our footsteps echoing on the pavement. As I walk by a white Lincoln Continental I had thought was empty, I detect movement from within the dark car. Like someone is sitting there, waiting. But when I peer through the vehicle’s tinted windows, I can’t make out a face.
A shiver goes through me, and I’m suddenly very glad Abe insisted on coming with me. I was joking around with him, but truthfully I’ve no doubt that he could defend me if he needed to. At one point while we were studying, he complained that the table we were sitting at was too close to the bookcase and it was making him feel squashed. So he got up and lifted the entire wooden table (which must have weighed at least several hundred pounds) with one han
d and he didn’t even grunt.
You may not be able to see Abe’s muscles under that layer of padding, but I have no doubt that they’re there and probably huge. And he’s so big that nobody in their right mind would attack him—he looks like he could break a guy’s neck with his bare hands. Abe is definitely not the kind of guy you want to run into in a dark alley. I feel completely safe walking next to him.
“This is me,” I tell him, gesturing at my scratched-up Ford.
Abe waits until I’m inside the car and have started up the engine before he turns around and heads in the opposite direction. I’m guessing he had a good study session too because there’s a bounce in his step as he walks away.
Chapter 8
When I arrive at the anatomy lab the next day, I find Ginny staring at our cadaver, looking perplexed. When she sees me, she frowns. “We have a problem,” she says.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
Ginny looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“The cadaver’s been turned over,” she says.
Wow. She’s right. How the hell did that happen?
Or the better question might be, how did I not notice?
Actually, no, the better question is probably how it happened.
We turned Frank over a while ago so that he was lying on his back, so that we could get to the abdominal organs. But somehow, between our dissection yesterday and today, somebody has turned him over again so that now he’s lying on his stomach. I can’t imagine who did this or why. I mean, it’s not like he turned over by himself.
Oh God, I really hope he didn’t turn over by himself.
“I guess we should turn him back over,” I say.
Ginny looks at the cadaver doubtfully. “Don’t you think we should wait for the boys?” she says.
She may have a point. Frank probably weighs more than me and Ginny put together. And neither of us is particularly athletic. Ginny is downright tiny and I’m… well, suffice to say, I’m not in tiptop condition right now.
But Rachel has inspired me. I don’t need the boys to do anything. Ginny and I can manage this just fine by ourselves.
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