I laughed. “I’ve always admired her. I used to kind of wish I was more like her than like Julian.” I thought about my self-portrait on the wall of the living room in my mother’s house, wondering what new one I might paint if I was to try again. “And then, I keep dreaming about those brain scans, the way they remind me of my visions. Maybe they were . . . are . . . a sign of sorts.”
“Look at me,” Finn said.
I shook my head.
“Marlena, come on.”
Slowly, I shifted so I could meet Finn’s eyes.
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed,” he said. “I think it’s perfect.”
The next day when Finn came home, he had a present for me. “You have to promise me you’ll use this someday.”
I looked at the gift he’d placed on the table. It was wrapped in bright pink paper, the same pink of the peonies in the painting on the wall of the living room. “What is it?”
“Just open it.”
I removed the paper carefully, and opened the box inside. Took out what was waiting for me.
“Do you like it?” he wanted to know.
I nodded. Held it up in my hands. Finn helped to put it around my neck. I picked up the round metal circle that dangled like a heavy charm down the front of my chest and pressed it against Finn’s. And I listened.
I looked into his eyes, heard the thump of his heart quicken.
“It’s perfect,” I told him.
Finn gave me a stethoscope.
I am twenty. It’s October. The trees are a fiery red and orange and yellow. It’s drizzling outside, the leaves wet and sticking to my shoes. I don’t care.
Big thick textbooks are hugged to my chest.
I am a college student.
The campus is buzzing with people hurrying to the cafeteria. To class. To the library. To their residence halls.
“Hi, Professor Carse,” I say when I enter the biology lab.
“Marlena,” she says, nodding.
Professor Carse doesn’t smile much. She’s all business, so unlike Angie. But she’s also all brilliance, so very like Angie.
I take my seat on the stool by the tall black table I share with Kelsey, another first-year student. She is my lab partner. My books land with a loud thump. “They should give us carts to carry these things around.”
Kelsey laughs. “Speak for yourself. The late nights and lack of partying are enough to distinguish us premed people, I think.”
“Probably,” I say, laughing along with her.
Kelsey and I are becoming friends.
My first friend at college.
My mother was wrong about so many things, but she was right about this:
I was born to heal.
Knitting together the bones of the body, the muscles, the flesh, ridding a person of what ails them, soothing the pain in people’s hearts and minds, is what I am called to do, what I have always been called to do.
But Fatima was right, too. It’s possible to be both things, to both have a life and use one’s gifts, to be a person of faith and a person of science. If there is anything I’ve learned over this last, complicated year of love and of loss, it is this:
There are many ways to be a healer.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo credit Allen Murabayashi
DONNA FREITAS is the author of the Unplugged series as well as other young adult and middle grade novels, including The Possibilities of Sainthood, The Survival Kit, and Gold Medal Summer. Donna is also a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson’s MFA program and at Hofstra’s Honors College. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can visit her online at www.donnafreitas.com.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
BOOKS BY DONNA FREITAS
The Unplugged Series
Unplugged
The Body Market
The Mind Virus
The Healer
The Survival Kit
The Possibilities of Sainthood
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COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE HEALER. Copyright © 2018 by Donna Freitas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Cover art by Bose Collins
Cover design by Michelle Taormina
* * *
Digital Edition OCTOBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-266213-2
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-266211-8
* * *
1819202122PC/LSCH10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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