Chapter 4

To sayI'm anxious about this lab would be an understatement. I am terrified.

Everyone has assured me I'll be okay. That you get so involved in what you're doing, you forget it's a real dead body. It's sort of like dissecting that plastic dummy we used during our CPR course.

Anyway, that's what I keep repeating to myself over and over. But what if I faint? What if I vomit? What if I vomit then faint in a puddle of my vomit? I'll never live that down.

I stand outside the door to the lab for far too long before I work up the nerve to enter. Long enough that I'm starting to get a few funny looks. About five other students push past me before I heave a deep breath and step inside.

The lab is cold. Really cold. Little goose pimples rise up on my forearms, and I hug my chest for warmth. Also, it's bright. Bright enough that I have to squint for a few seconds until my eyes adjust.

Also, the room is filled with dead bodies.

There are a couple dozen metal tables spread throughout the room. The bodies have been covered with plastic, but several gray mounds have been exposed by the lab groups. The only good thing I can say is that the bodies have been positioned face down, so no dead eyes are staring up at me. But it's still pretty creepy.

I hug my chest tighter.

"Heather?" A soft-spoken voice comes from behind me, and a (hopefully clean) hand falls on my shoulder. "Are you okay?"

I look up. It's Abe, the nice bearlike guy I met yesterday. He's got a little furrow between his red-orange brows.

I decide to be honest with him. "I'm feeling a little… squeamish."

"Oh!" He looks appropriately concerned but not judgmental at all. "Do you think you're going to faint?"

I shake my head. "No. But… it's not outside the realm of possibility, you know?"

Abe scratches his chin, where he's got a bit of red stubble growing. "Well, you wouldn't be the first person to faint in the anatomy lab. It's not that big a deal."

I consider telling Abe my fear about fainting in the puddle of vomit, but I decide against it.

"It would be embarrassing," is all I say.

Abe nods in understanding. I hadn't realized when I met him earlier, but he has really nice, kind green eyes.

"How about this? If you faint, I'll catch you and whisk you out into the hall before anyone notices," he says.

"You'd catch me?" I'm a bit skeptical, considering Abe seems like kind of an oaf. Maybe I'm just being biased because of his size. Then again, he did manage to practically break my foot yesterday.

"Seriously, I have catlike reflexes," Abe assures me, although he's grinning. "So which table were you assigned to?"

"Thirteen," I reply.

Abe brightens. "Hey, me too."

I feel a flash of relief. Whatever else I know about this guy, he definitely will make sure I'm okay if I start to faint. Despite his intimidating size, he seems very nice.

We weave through the tables of dead bodies, finally coming to a stop in front of a table with a big laminated paper that says "13" on it. This is us, I guess, lucky 13. We're the first to arrive, and the body is still draped in thick, clear plastic.

"You okay?" Abe asks me, lifting his eyebrows. "Should I… remove the plastic?"

I nod and brace myself.

Abe yanks the plastic off the body. Too fast. Embalming fluid or other cadaver juice squirts into the air, generously peppering my forearms. I scream in absolute horror.

"Oh my God, I'm so sorry!" Abe gasps.

He's sorry, and I'm drenched in cadaver juice. I race over to the nearest sink and submerge my arms in the hottest water the sink will provide. I soap myself up practically to my shoulders, wash my arms off, then do it again. This is so disgusting.

Well, at least it didn't get in my face. Although I wouldn't be surprised if that's Abe's encore. From now on, I'm keeping my mouth closed during the lab—the last thing I want is to taste the cadaver.

By the time I get back to the table, two more members of my five-person lab group have arrived. One is a tiny, olive-skinned girl with dark-brown hair swept back into a ponytail—she looks almost like a child standing next to gigantic Abe. And then there's the other member of the group: Dreamy McCutie, the guy who changed in front of me by the lockers. My knees buckle slightly when I see him.

"I'm really sorry," Abe says to me again when I return.

I nod at him, noting that Dreamy McCutie is snickering slightly as he pries open our dissection kit. Abe must have told them what he did to me. I'd vow revenge on him if he didn't look so upset about the whole thing.

"I'm Heather," I say to my two new lab partners. I don't bother to offer my hand, since they're both already wearing blue rubber gloves.

"Mason," says Dreamy McCutie (apparently actually named Mason). He glances up at me only briefly before going back to rifling through our dissection kit. He fishes out a scalpel and examines the blade carefully through narrowed hazel eyes.

The tiny girl gives me a little wave and speaks in a voice that's barely a whisper, "I'm Sonya."

"Nice to meet you, Sonya."

"Sasha."

"Oh, sorry. Sasha."

I can barely hear her. She's one of those people who would benefit from a volume knob.

"Mason and I are roommates," Abe explains to me. "They usually assign roommates to be lab partners to make it easier to share study materials."

"Oh." I glance at tiny Sasha. "But Sasha and I aren't roommates."

"I live alone off-campus," Sasha explains.

I get this really bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. We're still expecting a fifth person in our lab group, and Sasha doesn't have a roommate. That means that the most likely person to be our fifth lab partner is…

Oh great.

As if on cue, Rachel arrives at our table. She looks like she'd rather be anywhere but here. Her dark hair is pulled into a messy ponytail so that strands fall along her cheeks, and she's not even wearing scrubs—she's wearing a T-shirt and sweatpants. Worst of all, I'm pretty sure she's not wearing a bra.

"Hey," she says, running a hand through her loose strands of hair.

Mason manages to tear his eyes away from the dissection kit long enough to notice Rachel's breasts, and his breath catches slightly. "Hey," he says.

We go around the table with another set of mumbled introductions. To Abe's credit, he doesn't seem remotely interested in Rachel's chest.

Now that the trauma of being splattered with embalming fluid has worn off, I take a look at our cadaver. He's really big—a good two hundred fifty pounds, at least. But he's tall, fit, and carries the weight evenly. He could have been a bouncer in a bar. His face is pressed into the cold metal of the table, but I place his age around fifty. There's a tattoo on his right arm that I can't make out due to the dryness of his skin.

"He looks like a Frank to me," Mason speaks up. "What do you girls think?"

Rachel shoots daggers with her eyes. "To me, he looks like a human being who had a name of his own."

"Aw, come on," Mason says, flashing a killer smile.

"You're naming this cadaver over my dead body," Rachel says through her teeth.

"Fair enough," Mason says. He winks at me as he menacingly lifts a scalpel out of the dissection kit. Abe shakes his head at his roommate. Seriously bad taste. Fortunately, Rachel is too distracted by the cadaver to notice.

"I brought gloves," Abe volunteers, nudging my elbow with his. He points under the table, where there's a little tower of glove boxes. "Three different sizes. I heard you're supposed to double glove in order to, uh, keep out the smell."

"Don't kid yourself," Rachel says. "Nothing is going to keep out the smell. Tonight, we're all going to stink like formaldehyde."

My roommate—always a burst of positivity.

"So who wants to make the first incision?" Abe asks the group.

Anyone but me. I step away from the table, trying to make myself invisible.

"I'll do it," Mason volunteers with a shrug. He holds out his right hand. "Scalpel," he barks.

Before I know what I'm doing, I start fumbling with the dissection kit and remove a scalpel, which I obediently place in his right hand with a resounding plop.

Rachel's eyes widen, and she looks furious. "You know," she says to Mason, "Heather's not your scrub nurse."

Well, she's right. But let's face it: between the five of us, Mason is the only one who looks like a real surgeon. I can almost picture him in the operating room, slicing through the skin of a real patient's back. His hands are so steady. Mine are shaking like a leaf, and I'm not even doing anything. I'm just standing there.

"Dr. McKinley!"

My heart practically jumps out of my chest. I whirl around and come face-to-face with Dr. Conlon, our anatomy professor. He's dressed in scrubs (no bowtie), which makes him look much less dorky than he did on stage the other day. I noticed before how black his hair is, but I didn't realize how bright-blue his eyes are, even behind thick glasses, and he looks younger up close than I originally thought he was. He's still clutching that cane in his left hand.

"Dr. McKinley," he repeats. How does he already know my last name? "How are you going to learn anything from back there?"

I avoid eye contact. "I'm not a doctor."

"And how are the rest of you feeling?" Dr. Conlon asks my partners. "Are you making the first incision, Dr. Howard?"

Mason nods. "Just about."

"Dr. Kaufman…" Dr. Conlon lays his eyes on Abe. "Can you tell me the names of the three erector spinae muscles?"

I have no idea what the answer to that question is. Does Abe know? I don't think he does, based on the way he's squirming. But Dr. Conlon doesn't make him suffer for too long.

"Going from lateral to medial, we have iliocostalis, longissimus, and spinalis," Dr. Conlon says. "The mnemonic is ‘I Love Sex.' Or if you'd prefer, ‘I Love School,' depending on which you like better, school or sex." He winks at us.

Okay, Dr. Conlon isn't so bad. He's kind of cool. Even though he wears bowties.

As he limps away, Rachel leans toward me and murmurs in my ear, "God, what a sexist pig. Who does he think he is?"

"Our anatomy professor?"

"It's like they forget there are women in this class too," Rachel continues to rant. "It's not as if women make up… oh, I don't know, half of all students entering medical school…"

I try to block out the sound of her voice as Mason's steady hand draws the blade of the scalpel down the length of the cadaver's back. There's a layer of thick yellow fat beneath the skin, and I brace myself for that queasy sensation, but to my surprise, it doesn't come.

I look up, and Abe is raising his eyebrows at me. I give him a thumbs-up sign.

Wow, I might actually get through this in one piece.