I’m just not sure I can do that.
_____
When I get home later that day, I discover a huge basket of flowers that takes up half my bed. I see the lavender card embedded between two lilacs, and I open it up to see Abe’s handwriting: Please forgive me.
Rachel is lying in my bed with headphones over her ears. She pulls them off and makes a face.
“I think your boyfriend is single-handedly supporting the flower industry.”
I bring my nose close to the bouquet to inhale the scent. I love lilacs and Abe knows it.
“Seriously,” Rachel says, “will you just forgive him already? Before I asphyxiate from all the pollen?”
I stare at my roommate in surprise. “You approve of my relationship with Abe? I can’t believe it.”
Rachel shrugs. “Well, he appears to make you happy and… I guess he’s not as horrible as most guys.” She shakes her head. “So what despicable thing did he do to piss you off anyway?”
I wish I could tell Rachel everything. But even though we’ve been living together for months, I don’t trust Rachel. Especially since I’m fairly sure she’s hooking up with someone in the class and she won’t tell me who. Anyway, this is Abe’s secret and I don’t want to share it with just anybody, even if I don’t know what it is.
Yet.
Tonight that’s going to change. I’m going to confront Abe and offer him an ultimatum: the truth or I walk. Simple as that. If Abe cares about me, he’ll make the right decision.
I felt so sure of myself when I composed my plan to confront Abe, but as I walk up the stairs, it occurs to me that I’ve never successfully talked anybody into anything in my life. I’m a complete pushover. That’s why I always try to bring friends with me shopping, so the saleslady won’t talk me into buying half the store. How am I going to be strong enough to force Abe to tell me what is obviously a really big secret?
And then there’s the other side of the coin. If he does confess, maybe I won’t want to hear it. Whatever it is that he’s hiding from me, it’s bad. Really bad.
I knock on the door to Abe and Mason’s apartment, but nobody answers. I knock again with the same result. On a whim, I try the doorknob and it turns.
Someone is definitely here—I see the light on inside the bathroom and hear noises coming from inside. I venture into the common area, intending to knock on the bathroom door, but then something I see on the wooden floor takes my breath away:
It’s a butcher knife.
I stare at it, gripped with an odd feeling of déjà vu. This is the same knife Abe was holding in that strange vision I’d had months ago—the one where he was stabbing me to death. How does he even have a knife like this? And what the hell is it doing on the floor?
Or maybe I don’t want to know the answer to those questions. Maybe I should do like Patrice told me and get the hell out before it’s too late.
The door to the bathroom swings open and Abe’s hulking frame stands before me. For one moment, I am gripped with paralyzing fear—if Abe got it in his head to hurt me, he could destroy me. He could rip me limb from limb if he wanted—he wouldn’t even need the knife to do it. There’s nothing I could do to stop him.
But Abe doesn’t seem to have any intention of harming me. He looks from me to the knife and his face turns pale.
“Heather,” he murmurs. “I can explain…”
I’m sure he can. But will he?
Abe crosses the room and wraps his arms around me. It feels so good to be in his arms again. I’m instantly ready to forgive him and also hand over all my credit card numbers.
“I’m so sorry, Heather,” he whispers into my hair.
He doesn’t even care that my hair smells like formaldehyde.
No! Abe is not cuddling his way out of this! I have to be strong. I push him away and hold him at arm’s length.
“Mason isn’t home, is he?” I say.
Abe shakes his head. “We’re all alone,” he says. He still had his hand on my arm, leaving sweaty imprints on my white blouse. “Heather,” he says, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
I freeze. This is it.
I compose myself, brush my hair from my face, and turn to look at him. Whatever it is, I will accept it. I’ve decided. “Yes?”
“Heather…” He takes a deep breath. “I love you.”
What?
“No, goddamn it!” I cry, before I can stop myself. “No! You are not going to get away with not explaining what happened yesterday just by telling me you love me! I won’t let you.”
“But I do love you…”
“What’s going on, Abe?” I demand with a burst of resolve that surprises me. “I want an answer right now.”
His eyes fill with tears. I’ve never seen a guy cry before, certainly never over me.
“I love you too,” I say, in a voice that I hope is gentle but firm. “But I can’t spend another day with you without hearing the truth.”
Abe collapses onto the futon with a resounding thump and buries his face in his palms. I want to reach out and stroke his red hair, but I hold back. He has to know that I mean business.
“What’s it going to be, Abe?” I say. “Are you going to tell me or… or do you want me to leave?”
Abe lifts his eyes to meet mine. “You’ll leave me either way,” he says.
Part 2: Mason
Chapter 17
“Look to your left. Now look to your right.”
Christ, this is stupid.
I’m not into the whole “motivational speech” crap. I know Dean Bushnell is trying to get us all psyched up. But this is just dumb.
Besides, he’s wrong. Not everyone in this room is going to be a doctor. Some of them are going to drop out. Some will flunk out (probably that girl two seats over with the bullring through her nose). And if the last six years are any indication, at least one of them is going to be dead.
Not me though.
I’m going to graduate in four years with the highest honors and I’m going to land myself the best residency in the whole freaking country. Wait and see.
I look over at my roommate Abe. I’ve been secretly calling The Incredible Hulk in my head. No kidding, slap a little green paint on the guy, and he’d be a dead ringer. Minus the temper though. Abe is too freaking mild-mannered to be in med school. He’s a good roommate though—he’s a slob like me.
Abe’s really taking in the dean’s inspiring words. I can see his jaw hanging open, awed by the whole experience. He’s going to be one of those touchy-feely doctors, you can just tell. When he rotates in the hospital, everyone will write on his evals that he has a great “bedside manner.”
Nobody’s going to say I’ve got a great bedside manner. I’ll be shocked if a few of the residents I work with don’t write down that I’m a huge asshole or something. But who cares? They’re going to love me on my surgery rotation and that’s all that matters. That’s what I was born to do.
My father is a cardiothoracic surgeon. Dr. Walter Howard is the head of cardiothoracic surgery at Yale, and probably one of the most respected surgeons in the country. I used to want to do what he was doing, but he told me don’t bother. Angioplasty is killing his field. When I graduated college, Dad took me aside and said, “Plastics, son. That’s where the money is.”
It’s plastic surgery or bust.
_____
When I was about six, my mom brought me to this crazy fancy dinner to honor my dad.
My dad is tall, really tall. Practically a giant—that’s what it felt like anyway. Back then, he had this black beard that scared the shit out of me for some reason. When he gave his speech, I listened as hard as I could because I thought his black eyes would maybe shoot laser beams at me if I didn’t.
“Mommy,” I whispered. “What’s it mean that Daddy is a pioneer?”
In school, they said pioneers settled middle America. I was pretty sure my dad hadn’t done that. But it was possible.
“It means he’s done surge
ries that nobody’s ever done before,” my mother whispered back. She added, “He’s a great man.”
Then everyone in the room stood up and wouldn’t stop applauding for my dad for at least five minutes.
When I visited my grandparents on my father’s side, they wouldn’t shut up about my father. They would drag out a box that was as old and dusty as they were, filled with perfect test papers and report cards with rows of straight A’s. They saved everything.
“Did Dad ever get less than an A in school?” I asked as I wiped the dust off a thirty-year-old transcript and sneezed loudly.
“I think Walter got a B in gym once,” my grandmother recalled. “But everyone got a B in gym that semester.” She added, “That gym teacher was a little soft in the head.”
Sometimes my mother would bore me with the story of how she met my father. I never listened but over the years, the details sunk in. Elise Howard, née Elise Mason, was a year out of college and working at an art gallery, although her studio apartment was largely funded by—guess who—her rich parents. My dad was an attending surgeon then, almost a decade older than my mom, and he approached her at a gallery function and asked for her number. They started dating and he actually proposed only a few months later.
“Sometimes you just know,” Mom would sigh.
Bullshit. The truth was, and I’m going to be blunt here, my mother was really hot back then. I saw the photos. My dad always used to go around saying she’s the prettiest woman in the room. All my friends in high school used to call her a MILF.
My dad, on the other hand, isn’t what you’d call a handsome guy. But he’s as intimidating as all hell. He probably just cocked his finger at my mom and she came running.
I got straight A’s in high school. Even in freaking gym. Yeah, I worked my ass off. I had plenty of friends and even occasional girlfriends, and I ran track and played soccer, but most of my time was spent studying.
And then I bombed the SATs. Or that’s what it felt like when I saw my father’s face. I didn’t get a perfect 1600—I was ten points short.
“It’s an all right score,” my father said with a shrug.
The word “asshole” was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t say it. I was the one who had messed up. My dad got a perfect score on his SATs.
I hung my head and mumbled, “Sorry, sir.”
I was valedictorian of my high school class. My speech was about the path to success, as if anyone in my shitty high school had a chance at success besides me. My dad liked the speech—or at least, he was nodding a lot. I believed in my words. I was going to be a huge success someday.
I got a perfect score on the MCATs to get into med school, by the way.
Ever since I decided on going to Southside Med, people have been asking me: why not Yale? Southside is a good school, but Yale is Ivy and I had connections there (not that I’d have needed them to gain admission). There’s no comparison. People acted like I’d lost my mind.
Even my father was pissed off that I picked Southside over Yale.
But I had a really good reason for not going to Yale. At Yale, everyone would have assumed that I got in because my dad is a big cheese there, not on my own merit. And on every rotation, everyone would be comparing me with the Great Dr. Howard. I’d never have a chance to get out from under his shadow.
Southside is perfect for me. When I look around at my classmates, I know that I can really stand out here. I can be in the honor society and impress the hell out of all the professors. I won’t be one of a huge crowd of overachievers at Yale or one of the other Ivies. Plastic surgery is one of the most competitive residencies to get into, and being number one in my class is a great way to get there. If I succeed, if I become a plastic surgeon, maybe someday I’ll have a house that is bigger than my father’s and a wife that is hotter than my mom. Maybe someday they’ll have a dinner honoring the Great Dr. Mason Howard.
Chapter 18
I studied up on anatomy all summer. I wanted to be really solid when school finally started. I even had my father bring me home some suture material so that I could practice tying knots, because I heard sometimes they let you practice in the anatomy lab and I wanted to be the best from the onset. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a scalpel and start cutting.
My lab partners were no big surprise. On the first day of orientation, Abe nudged me after lunch and said, “You want to be partners for anatomy?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Also,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could request to Dr. Conlon that Heather McKinley could join our group…”
I had no clue who he was talking about. He nodded his head in the direction of a pretty blond girl in the corner of lecture hall. Well, she would have been pretty if she had less junk in the trunk. I could tell Abe didn’t mind though—I took one look at his face and I got it.
“Sounds good,” I said.
Poor guy—I had already heard Heather yakking about her boyfriend.
In lab, Heather is a complete disaster. I mean, really bad. She’s trying hard, but she just doesn’t get it. And I have much better things to do than waste my time explaining every goddamn little thing to her five times. Good thing Abe has endless patience with her. With his help, maybe she has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.
I prefer Rachel, Heather’s roommate. Rachel doesn’t have a clue either, but she doesn’t care. Plus she has fantastic tits and she never, ever wears a bra. I think about her a lot when I’m alone in my room, if you get me. The best part is that she despises me. It’s really fun to try to get a rise out of her. The easiest trick is calling the cadaver “Frank.” Rachel absolutely hates that.
“Can’t you respect that he is a real human being?” Rachel snaps at me. “He’s not some inanimate object that you can just give a name to.”
“He seems pretty inanimate to me,” I say with a shrug and poke him in the arm.
Her brown eyes flash. “It really blows me away that you’re going to be responsible for other people’s lives.”
Rachel doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. You can’t make it in medicine if you don’t learn to distance yourself from the patient.
My fifth lab partner is Ginny. She’s at least a head shorter than me and was practically mute at first, but it soon becomes obvious that Ginny knows her stuff when it comes to anatomy. The first words we exchanged were when Ginny was looking at the tattoo on Frank’s arm. She had stretched out the skin taut, in an attempt to read the words. The dye had faded somehow in the embalming process and the words were barely legible.
“To protect and serve,” Ginny read.
“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s the police force motto,” she said.
I was sort of blown away. What was a cop doing in an anatomy lab? It just seems… wrong. But whatever.
_____
My life is studying. Okay, not entirely. I eat sometimes (while studying). I take a piss (sometimes while studying). I sleep a little. But mostly, I study.
I go upstairs to the library every night and read through my textbooks until my eyelids are like lead. Then I head home, where I study some more. It’s hard. But my grades make it worth it.
Ginny is often in the library as late as I am. At first, she sat at the far left corner of the library while I was on the far right. But then I moved to the right corner because it was closer to the anatomy textbooks in the library. I’m guessing that’s why she chose that corner too.
The medical student lounge has free coffee and usually Ginny would go downstairs to get a cup every night at around eleven o’clock. Eventually, she started bringing me a cup too. Black, no sugar. I always take the coffee. I’d die without coffee.
“Don’t you ever go home?” I ask her one Friday night in the library.
“Don’t you?” she retorts.
I wink at her. “I think it’s pretty obvious that I don’t.”
Ginny smiles, “I just want to be a good doctor.”<
br />
She’s holding the anatomy textbook in her hands. Her hands are so freaking tiny, it’s almost weird. The book is so heavy that I can see her fingers shaking. If Abe were here, he’d probably offer to carry the book for her, but that’s not my style. Still, the truth is, I’m pretty into Ginny. She’s not hot in an obvious way. But I like that about her. She’s been replacing Rachel in my fantasies lately.
“Why do you want to be a doctor anyway?” I ask.
Ginny raises an eyebrow. “Is your next question about how I’d change the health care system in America?”
I laugh. “No, I’m serious. I don’t want your bullshit med school interview answer. I mean, everyone’s got a reason for being here, right?”
“What’s your reason?” Ginny asks.
“Money, power, and respect,” I reply without hesitation. “Not necessarily in that order. Although at the interview, I think I said something along the lines of ‘wanting to help people’ or some crap like that.” I smirk. “Okay, now your turn.”
“My father had Parkinson’s disease,” Ginny says. “He got it young and died a year before I started medical school.”
I frown, “I’m sorry.”
“His care was completely mismanaged,” Ginny goes on. “It took him a long time to even get diagnosed and then it seemed like we were being shuffled from one rude doctor to another. I want to become the one doctor who could have helped him.”
I take a long sip of my coffee. “God, Ginny… that’s a terrible story.”
I can see she’s tearing up. Shit, I hate it when girls cry. I never know what the hell to do.
So I kiss her.
Five minutes later, we’re ripping each other’s clothes off in the deserted medical student locker room. It’s been a freaking long time for me. I can’t get enough of Ginny’s bare skin and her tiny, sexy body shoved against me. She smells like flowers and coffee. For some reason, the smell of coffee is really turning me on—go figure. She’s so goddamn sexy. And from the way her fingers fumble with the button on my jeans, I can tell how bad she wants me too.
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