Suicide Med (35 page)

Poor Dr. Conlon.

“Honestly?” I ask.

“Yes, honestly.
Does she know the material or not?”

“
She doesn’t.”

Dr. Conlon’s shoulders sag
. “Okay, thanks, Virginia.”

My mother calls me on the Friday evening prior to our final exam. I’m on my way out to the library, and I get irritated when I see her name pop up on my phone, but I answer anyway. I realize that I’ve only been home to visit her twice since the year started, but I don’t feel guilty. Honestly, she’s lucky that I visit her at all.

“How are you doing, Ginny?” Mom asks me.
“Do you have time to visit this weekend?”

“My final exam in anatomy is on Monday,” I explain
, the irritation seeping through my voice.

“Oh,” Mom says.
She sounds like she doesn’t quite buy this as a legitimate excuse. “How about for Christmas? Can you spend the week here?”

“Maybe a few days,” I say vaguely.

“I hope you do,” Mom says quietly. “It’s very lonely here.”

I feel my blood pressure creeping up.

“Well, that’s
your fault, isn’t it? If Dad were still alive, you wouldn’t feel so lonely.”

There’s a long pause on the other line.
Finally, Mom says, “I know. I wish he were still here too.”

I nearly throw my phone at the wall.

“What are you talking about?” I say.
“If you hadn’t taken him off the ventilator, he’d still be here! It’s
your fault
he’s dead!”

“
Virginia!” Mom gasps.

I shut my eyes and feel the tears rising to the surface.
I can’t believe I just said that to my mother. But I’m not sorry. I meant every word of it. I’ve been itching to say it since the day he died.

“It’s true,” I manage.

“Virginia,” Mom says in a quiet, sad voice. “I didn’t take your father off the ventilator. The doctors just followed his wishes. He signed an advance directive saying he didn’t want to be kept on life support.”

What is she talking about?
This is total bullshit.

“No way,” I say.
“Dad would never have done that. Never.”

“He did it for
you
, Ginny,” Mom says. “He realized that as long as he was alive and sick, you’d never be able to live out your dream. He didn’t want you to waste your life taking care of him.”

No.
She’s lying. I don’t believe her. My father loved life—he’d never agree to something like that.

“He was so proud of you,” Mom says.
“You being happy and becoming a doctor was all that mattered to him.”

“And if not for you,” I say through the lump in my throat, “he’d be able to watch me graduate from medical school.”

And then I hang up on her, my hands shaking. I just can’t see how what she’s saying could be true. Dad knew that if he wanted me to go to medical school, I would have gone. He didn’t have to be
dead
. I mean, yes, I did want to stay at home and take care of him in those last few years. But I wasn’t going to do that forever.

I had every intention of leaving him to go to med school.
I really did.

_____

For a Saturday night, the library is surprisingly crowded.
When I look around, I see several of my classmates feverishly outlining textbooks and studying drawings of muscles, arteries, and nerves. It makes me nostalgic for the days when it was just me and Mason.

I feel confident
I’ll at least earn an honors grade in the class. I know the anatomy atlas backwards and forwards, and I put in countless hours in the lab this week, memorizing all the structures. But is it enough to get the top grade in the class? I don’t know.

I haven’t checked
Locker 282 yet. I have no idea if the exam is in there or not. I walk by the locker every day, debating if I should risk checking it. But I can’t bring myself to do it.

I haven’t seen Mason since that night in the library.
Maybe he decided to pick another location to study, one less distracting. There are students scattered all over the hospital studying this weekend. Despite how awful he looked the other day, I can’t believe he isn’t putting everything he’s got into this exam.

Believe it or not, I almost went and talked to Patrice about him.
I stood in front of her office for about five straight minutes, my hand poised to knock on the door. But in the end, I just couldn’t do it. I want to get the highest score in the class on this exam—and if Mason rehabilitates himself, that might not happen.

Of course, the only surefire way to get the highest score lies in the contents to
Locker 282.

I
’m debating whether to get up and check the locker, when a familiar voice makes me stop short.

“
Ginny?”

My breath catches
in my throat. It’s Rachel Bingham. Great.

“Um… hey, Rachel…”

“I’m glad I’m not the only one here on a Saturday night,” Rachel says, sliding uninvited into the seat next to mine. I feel the comment is a little patronizing. It’s not like Rachel needs to be here late studying when she’s sleeping with the professor.

“It’s never empty here on Saturday night,” I
say irritably.

Rachel sighed loudly and look
s off into the distance. I feel like she expects me to say something, so I finally ask, “Are you okay, Rachel?”

“It’s just this guy I’ve been seeing,” Rachel says.

This guy
?
You mean
our professor
, don’t you? God, I hate her.

“We sort of… broke up recently
,” she sighs. “I really messed things up.”

I
frown. Rachel and Dr. Conlon aren’t sleeping together anymore? Does that mean she hasn’t been able to get the answers to the final?

“I… I’m sorry.
Did all the studying get in the way?”

“No, not really.”

Rachel doesn’t look like she wants to say anything more, but I need to know what happened. I need to know if those exam answers are waiting for me.

I have to feel her out.
“So you’re having a fight?”

“No,
it’s over,” Rachel assures me. “I did something… pretty unforgivable.”

“
You cheated on him?”

That seems unlikely.
Rachel doesn’t seem interested enough in men to have sex if it wasn’t for a grade. From the comments I’ve heard her make, she seems to despise men.

“
No, it’s not that…” Rachel bites her lip.

She looks
away and that’s when I realize that there are
tears
filling her eyes. Oh my God, is she actually crying
?
I’m confused. Is she crying over her grade? She can’t possibly have been
in love
with Dr. Conlon, could she? No way.

This is the weirdest conversation ever.

Rachel stands up rather abruptly, nearly knocking over her own chair. She looks almost manic.

“Uh, I’ve go
t to go for a minute,” she says. “Watch my stuff?”

I
nod, perplexed. I don’t bother to mention that nothing ever gets stolen out of the library. I left my purse here all the time when I snuck off to the locker room with Mason.

After Rachel disappears,
I try to go back to studying, but it’s difficult. All I can think about is what Rachel was talking about. If she and Dr. Conlon are over, will the exam still be in that locker?

I’ve got to know.

I stand up. I glance around, and nobody seems to be particularly paying attention to me. Now is the time, before Rachel gets back.

I hurry across the floor, in the direction of the anatomy lab.
My heart is pounding and my palms are sweaty. For all I know, Rachel is lying in wait in the locker room, and she’s going to bust me the second I open that locker. But that’s a chance I’ve got to take.

A few minutes later, I’m standing in front of
Locker 282. My combination lock is hanging from the door, and for a moment, the combination flies right out of my head. But then it comes back to me: 28-16-8. I start turning the dial.

Before I pop the lock open, I check the hallway one last time.
Empty.

The door to the locker swings open and there it is: the final exam.
My heart beats wildly as I pick it up and flip through over a dozen pages of anatomy diagrams and multiple choice questions. I can’t believe I’m actually holding
the final exam
. I can’t believe my plan actually worked. I’m going to get the highest score in the class on the final.

But as I stare into the empty locker, somehow a distant memory fills my head: My father bouncing around the ER, telling everyone who would listen:
“My daughter wants to be a doctor!”

Ginny, you make me so proud…

I look back down at the final exam, and I suddenly feel ill. All I wanted was to make my father proud of me. If my mother is to be believed, he gave up his own life so that I could have my dream.

And all I know is
that if my father could see what I’m doing right now, he would not be proud. He would be ashamed of me.

Before I can change my mind
, I start ripping up the final exam into shreds. I tear up every single page into about a dozen pieces and hurl them into the nearest trash bin. It doesn’t even register that I’m crying until the final shreds of paper have been deposited into the garbage.

Please, Papa
, forgive me…

I’m just glad he isn’t alive to see me like this.

_____

After several minutes of sobbing in the locker room, I get myself collected. Being in the locker room late at night makes me miss Mason almost desperately. Somehow, I know if I told him about my dad, he’d understand. He’d understand everything. He isn’t nearly as much of a jerk as I always made him out to be.

I wander around the floor, just trying to clear my head,
halfheartedly looking for Mason, and eventually I find myself at the vending machines. During school hours, the vending machines usually have a line in front of them, but now they’re completely deserted. I stare at the different candies and cookies suspended in the machine, but I don’t have much appetite. I remember how Mason offered me vending machine Oreo cookies the first time we talked in the library. That feels like a million years ago now.

I decide on some peanut butter cups, and a
s I’m getting ready to drop my change in the machine, I hear footsteps coming from behind me. For a moment, I get my hopes up that maybe it’s Mason, but when I turn around, I see Rachel hurrying towards me. Rachel’s lipstick is smeared and isn’t hard to guess what she’s just been doing.

So much for the big break-up.

I’m not going to judge her though.
All right, I’m going to
try
not to judge her. Or at least, I’ll try to try.

Any contempt I have for Rachel quickly fades though when I realize that the red on Rachel’s face i
sn’t lipstick—it’s blood. Fresh blood, not the old clotted kind that we find in the cadaver. And it’s all over her shirt as well.

“Oh my G
od,” I gasp.

Rachel is crying.
She’s wiping her eyes with the back of her hand, spreading more blood onto her face. Oh God, where did all that blood come from?

“
Ginny,” Rachel says in a low voice, “something terrible has happened.”

Yeah, no kidding.

“What happened?” I ask, sounding a lot calmer than I feel.

“Mason Howard
…” Rachel’s eyes well up with a new batch of tears. “He… he
shot
Dr. Conlon!”

Oh G
od…

“Dr. Conlon and I were…”
She lowers her eyes. “We were… you know, sort of seeing each other. I know it’s wrong but… it just sort of happened. And… and I was in his office when Mason came in and…”

Rachel collapses
against the wall, sobbing hysterically. And that’s when I get a second jolt of shock. She wasn’t just sleeping with him—she actually
liked
him.

“Is he… dead?”
I ask.

Rachel nods
slowly.

Oh no.

“We need to get help,” I say.

Nobody can ever know what I’ve done.