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He looks down at me, past the tubes and the panic. He is scruffy-looking with too much hair, too little shaving. He’s tall and wide-shouldered, muscular, blondish. Extremely blue eyes. My preliminary taxonomy: skater or surfer, one of those guys.
I’d really like him to get his hand off me because he doesn’t know me and I’m already having personal-space issues, what with the tubes and the IV.
“Chill, Eve,” he tells me, which I find annoying. The first phrase that comes to mind involves the word “off,” preceded by a word I have absolutely no chance of pronouncing since it includes the letter “F.”
Not in the mood to meet new friends.
In the mood for more painkillers.
Also, my mother calls me Evening and my friends call me E.V. But nobody calls me Eve. So there’s that, too.
“Please reconsider, Dr. Spiker…” The doctor trails off.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” says the guy named Solo. He’s about my age, a junior, maybe a senior. If he does work for my mother, he’s either an intern or a prodigy. “Will you be coming in the ambulance, Dr. Spiker?”
“No. God knows what microorganisms are in that ambulance. My driver’s waiting,” my mother says. “I’ll need to make some calls and I doubt the back of an ambulance is the place. I’ll meet you at the lab.”
The doctor sighs. He flips a switch and my contraptions still.
My mother kisses my temple. “I’ll get everything set up. Don’t worry about a thing.”
I blink to show that I am not, in fact, worried about a thing. Not with the morphine drip taking the edge off.
Solo hands my mother her briefcase and phone. She vanishes, but I can hear the urgent staccato of her Jimmy Choos.
“Bitch,” the doctor says when she’s out of earshot. “I don’t like this at all.”
“No worries,” Solo says.
No worries. Yeah, not for you, genius. Go away. Stop talking to me or about me. And take your hand off me, I’m nauseous.
The doctor checks one of my IV bags. “Uh-huh,” he mutters. “You an MD?”
Solo makes a half smile. It’s knowing and a little smug. “Just a gofer, Doctor.”
Solo gathers up my bagged belongings and my backpack. Suddenly I remember I have AP Bio homework. A worksheet on Mendel’s First Law. When a pair of organisms reproduce sexually, their offspring randomly inherit one of the two alleles from each parent.
Genetics. I like genetics, the rules, the order. My best friend, Aislin, says it’s because I’m a control freak. Like mother, like daughter.
I have a load of homework, I want to say, but everyone’s buzzing about purposefully. It occurs to me my biology worksheet won’t be all that relevant if I’m dying.
I believe death is on the list of acceptable excuses for missing homework.
“You’re going to be fine,” Solo tells me. “Running 10Ks in no time.”
I try to speak. “Unh onh,” I say.
Yep. Can’t pronounce “F” with a tube in your mouth.
Then it occurs to me: How does he know I
like to run?
3
SOLO
So. This is the boss’s daughter.
