Deadly Design - Emarsan Page 0,19

old and middle-aged faces. I take a deep breath and, with tears burning in my eyes, extend my middle finger to the crowd.

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hate doctors and doctors’ offices. I hate needles, X-rays, and nurses who say this will only hurt a little as they jab giant syringes filled with radioactive isotopes into your veins. I hate being injected with something called radioactive isotopes. It just sounds like a bad idea. The dentist puts that lead jacket over you so your organs won’t absorb the radiation from your annual bicuspid photo, and the cardiologist thinks it’s a good idea to put nuclear waste right into my veins. Of course I’m reassured that it’s not harmful; I just have to avoid using public restrooms for the next twelve hours lest I spray someone with my radioactive pee. Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and he can scale buildings. I get injected with the stuff, and I have twelve hours to stop bad guys with my stream of death.

The autopsy report, which took almost three weeks to get back, confirmed that Connor died of a heart attack. The report also showed that his arteries were clear. It was like his heart stopped for no reason. So now a machine is taking continuous pictures of my heart. It’s just a precaution; Mom and Dad both 5 8

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said so. Just a precaution to make certain everything inside me is working fine. But according to the autopsy, everything inside of Connor had been working fine, until it suddenly wasn’t.

This last test is supposed to take forty-five minutes.

The walls are a dingy green. The molding has been stripped from around the doors and the floor, and there are signs everywhere apologizing for the mess while they remodel. IT’S ALL

FOR YOUR COMFORT the signs read. Do they think a new paint job will make people comfortable here? I feel like I’m in some sci-fi movie. Or worse, one of the docudramas Mom likes to watch where some beautiful woman finally meets the man of her dreams, only to discover he has a rare disease. I don’t have a rare disease. I’m fine. At least, I’m pretty sure I’m fine. Connor was fine.

But there had been something.

Maybe if the skinny nurse with smoker’s breath had pumped shit into his veins, he’d be alive now. Maybe if he’d been told to stay still, with his left arm bent over his head, for a mere forty-five minutes while a giant machine inched its way around him, they would have found something. A doctor could have fixed it, and Connor could have given his own speech at graduation, and we’d have made it to level forty by now and saved the Pentagon and the world from the zombies I can’t stand to look at anymore.

But he didn’t get the chance to have someone look under his hood to make sure his engine was fine. I may hate this room and this machine and the radioactive shit in my veins, but I don’t hate them that much.

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ey,” Mom greets me when I get back from picking up an application from the Sak & Save. Since my tests came back all right, I get the pleasure of finding a summer job, and what could be better than sacking groceries?

I show her the two-page application. She glances at it, then puts it on the kitchen counter.

“I’m not sure I like the idea of you pushing carts all day out in the hot sun,” she says, more to herself than to me.

“It’s cool in the store. I’ll be inside as much as I am out. It’ll be fine.”

“Of course.” She smiles, then wraps her arms around me and hugs me tightly, starts to let go, then tightens her arms again. At night, I hear her crying. It’s been a month, and she still cries herself to sleep every night. She has a job as a receptionist in an insurance office, but she hasn’t gone back yet. I’m not sure she ever will.

Dad’s boss offered him time off, but he didn’t take it. He seems okay. He gets up, goes to work making airplane parts, calls home a couple of times a day to check on Mom, and 6 0

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spends every night holding her

Deadly Design - Emarsan Page 0,19

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