Suicide Med (14 page)

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 t
op 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 does
n’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.

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.

I
pick out half a dozen books and lug them to the checkout counter. The act of carrying the texts to the counter is enough to make me gasp for breath. Wow, really pathetic. When is the last time I’ve been to a gym? Oh well, no time for that now. I’ll get in shape again after residency is over.

The girl ahead of me
in the checkout line reminds me a lot of Holly from college. She’s tall—long blond hair loose down her back, great tits, great ass. This is the sort of girl my parents would have wanted me to bring home—someone who wouldn’t embarrass me.

I
hadn’t even realized I was staring at her until she catches me. I feel my face get hot and I quickly look back down at my stack of books.

“Got anything to read?” the girl asks me teasingly, gesturing at the two foot stack.

She’s interested. Go for it, Howard!

“I’ve got an anatomy exam coming up,”
I explain, flashing a broad smile.

She glances
down at the titles of the books. “You’re in med school?”

“My first year,”
I confirm.

“I’m April,” she says
.

Oh yeah, she’s
really
interested.

“I’m
Mason,” I reply.

“So what kind of doctor are you going to be?” April asks me.
Am I imagining it or did April’s chest just get bigger?

“A surgeon.”

“
Really
?” April says. “Very impressive. I’ve heard it’s pretty competitive to become a surgeon.”

“I’m not too worried,” I
say. I grin at her. “How about you? Are you in school?”

“I’m a junior in college,” April says.

“What’s your major?”

I bet an
ything it’s something completely useless. April looks like the kind of girl who expects to get married and have her husband support her for the rest of her life.

“Art
history.” Bingo.

“Sounds really interesting,” I
lie.

My mother would love
this girl. They could have a blast discussing Monet or some crap like that.

I
’m trying to decide if I should ask her out when she reaches out and touches my arm, “So when are you going to ask me for my number, Doctor?”

“Um,”
I say. Wow. I’m really not used to girls being
quite
so forward. I force a grin. “Can I have your number, April?”

April scribbles
her digits on a blank page in one of the textbooks I’m buying, and I think to myself how perfect she is. She’s beautiful, tall, reasonably articulate, and I bet anything she’s really easy. This is the kind of girl any guy would be thrilled to have a date with.

So why can
’t I stop thinking about Ginny? What is
wrong
with me?

_____

My life is still mostly studying.
I got the highest grade in the class on the first exam and I want to make a similarly strong showing on this one. My only regret is that I can’t break my own record. I go to the library every day after class and stay there until I can barely keep my eyes open.

Ginny continues
to keep me company in my corner of the library. We still talk and she still brings me coffee when she goes to get herself a cup, but we haven’t had sex since the dinner with my parents.

“Black, no
sugar,” she says as she places the cup in front of me.

“Thanks, Ginny,”
I say. “You’re the best.”

“Am I?”

I always have to bite my tongue to keep from asking her if she wants to go to the locker room with me. I figure if I ask, she’ll probably say no. I pretty much blew that aspect of our relationship, and I can’t admit to her how desperately I miss it. I made a huge mistake that night at my parents’ house. But I’m glad that I at least have her company during the lonely nights in the library.

A few days before the test
is scheduled, I’m sitting in the back of the library studying the muscles of mastication when I hear a voice from over my shoulder: “Holy shit… anatomy. Whenever I think my life is the worst it could possibly be, I remember that class and I feel a little better.”

I
look up and see a tall guy with a shaved head, wearing green scrubs and a long white coat. The nametag hanging from his lapel proclaims him to be “Resident, Department of General Surgery.” He has his arms crossed and is shaking his head in amusement.

“You a first year?”
he asks me.

“That’s right,” I
say. I look the guy up and down, “You a resident?”

“Bingo.”
He holds out his hand, “The name’s Norm. I’m a surgery resident.”

That
will be me someday. Except at Yale.
I take Norm’s hand, “I’m Mason.”

“So is Conlon still torturing you guys?” Norm asks, dragging a chair over so
he can sit down.

“
He’s not that bad,” I say.

“He got nicer,” Norm says
, rubbing his bald head. “You don’t know what he was like his first year teaching—that was the year Brett Shelton killed himself. You know, the first of the suicides.”

I raise my eyebrows.
“That was your class?”

Norm nods.
“Oh yeah. It was a mess. You wouldn’t believe it.” He leans forward in his chair. “You know the story, right?”

I shake my head no.
All I know is that six years ago, Brett Shelton hung himself in his room. With a belt.

“Brett was failing anatomy,” Norm says, grinning
like he has a great piece of gossip. Which I guess he does. “And he was a rich shit, so he wasn’t willing to take it lying down. His parents and some lawyer started putting a lot of pressure on the university to get him a passing grade. Conlon was
pissed
. The two of them got in a huge shouting match outside of class one day.”

“Conlon was in a shouting match?”
I can’t picture it. He’s way too laid back for that.

Norm nods vigorously.
“Brett started it, but Conlon really let him have it. Told him he was a spoiled brat. That he’d never get anywhere in life. Then he failed him.”

“Whoa,” I breathe.

“Next day, Brett hung himself,” Norm says, leaning back in his chair, satisfied that he’d blown my mind.

“Wow,” I say.
“Conlon must have felt awful about that.”

Norm shrugs.
“You’d think. But the truth is, if Brett hadn’t killed himself, Conlon was facing a lawsuit. That suicide got him out of a load of trouble.” He lowers his voice. “There was a rumor in our class that he killed Brett himself and made it look like a suicide.”

All of a sudden, I get this tight feeling in my chest like I can hardly breathe.

“Of course,” Norm says, “he couldn’t have, right?
I mean, look at the guy. He can barely walk. He couldn’t have overpowered Brett.”

That’s true.
Dr. Conlon’s disability lets him off as a murder suspect.

Then again, what’s wrong with him anyway?
It’s not really clear from looking at him and he’s never shared it with anyone in the class. Maybe it’s all an act. Like in that movie with Kevin Spacey. Maybe he’s using that cane as his alibi.

“Hey man, you okay?” Norm says. He’s frowning. “Sorry, did I freak you out?”

“I’m fine,” I
say quickly. “I think I need to get more sleep.”

“I hear that,” Norm says, grinning.
“Anyway, it’s been nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll see you in your third-year surgery clerkship. It’s loads of fun.”

I
barely manage a distracted goodbye.

I
close my anatomy text and rub my fingers into my temples. I have always believed I’ve got good intuition and my intuition is screaming out that there’s something fishy going on with Dr. Matthew Conlon. I know I have to focus on my upcoming exam, but all I can think of is those six suicides. Six suicides and one murder.

Or is it
more than one murder? 

The look in Dr. Conlon’s eyes when I started questioning him about Frank’s cause of death was chilling.
I asked an innocent question and he jumped down my throat. Seems really suspicious, if you ask me. For some reason, there’s a dead cop in our anatomy lab and I have no idea why.

I
stand up so fast that my chair falls over behind me. I feel my heart pounding in my chest. I look around the library and see that it is almost completely empty now—even Ginny has gone home for the night. It’s so empty that nobody even noticed when my chair fell to the floor. I wipe my brow with the back of my hand and it comes away wet with sweat.

An anatomy professor has got to have some connections
to the local morgue, right? Maybe there are strings he can pull to get a body to come to him rather than risking an autopsy. And once a body gets ripped apart in anatomy lab, there’s no chance of finding out the real cause of death.

Unless there’s a med student in the class who gets too curious.

But Conlon would never allow that to happen.

I bac
k away from the table, my hands trembling. My breaths are coming quickly, too quickly. I’m hyperventilating. I recently learned that during hyperventilation, the lungs blow off too much carbon dioxide. As the amount of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream goes down, the blood vessels going to the brain constrict, cutting off the brain’s oxygen supply.

I’ve got to calm down.

This is crazy. My anatomy professor isn’t a murderer. He’s just a nice, dorky guy who wears bowties to class every day. He’s not murdering students and hiding bodies in the cadaver lab. Stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life.

And that’s when I hear that
deep voice again:

Think about it.
What sorts of things can kill a man but won’t show up on a routine anatomy lab dissection?

“Shut-up!”
I whisper.

The sound of my
own voice startles me, but it seems to put a stop to my racing thoughts. My thumping heart slows down and I suddenly feel completely exhausted. Maybe four hours of sleep every night really isn’t enough. I have to start taking better care of myself before I blow everything I’ve worked so hard for.