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I studied anatomy all summer.I wanted to be way ahead of the class even before school started. I had my father bring me home some suture material so that I could practice tying knots because I heard sometimes they let you practice in the anatomy lab, and I wanted to be the best from the onset. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a scalpel and start cutting.

My lab partners were no big surprise. On the first day of orientation, Abe nudged me after lunch and said, “You want to be partners for anatomy?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Also,” he said. “I was thinking maybe we could request to Dr. Conlon that Heather McKinley could join our group…”

I had no clue who he was talking about. He nodded his head in the direction of a pretty blond girl in the corner of the lecture hall. Well, she would have been pretty if she had less junk in the trunk. Abe didn’t mind, though—I took one look at his face, and I got it.

“Sounds good,” I said.

Poor guy—I had already heard Heather yakking about her boyfriend.

In the lab, Heather is a complete disaster. I mean, really bad. She’s trying hard, but she just doesn’t get it. And I have much better things to do than waste my time explaining every little thing to her five times. Good thing Abe has endless patience with her. With his hand-holding, maybe she has a snowball’s chance in hell of passing.

I prefer Rachel, Heather’s roommate. Rachel doesn’t have a clue either, but she doesn’t care. Plus she has fantastic tits, and she never, ever wears a bra. I think about her a lot when I’m alone in my room, if you catch my drift. The best part is that she despises me. It’s really fun to try to get a rise out of her. The easiest trick is calling the cadaver Frank. Rachel hates that.

“Can’t you respect that he is a real human being?” Rachel snaps at me. “He’s not some inanimate object that you can just give a name to.”

“He seems pretty inanimate to me,” I say with a shrug and poke him in the arm.

Her brown eyes flash. “It blows me away that you’re going to be responsible for other people’s lives.”

Rachel doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about. You can’t make it in medicine if you don’t learn to distance yourself from the patient.

My fifth lab partner is Sasha. She’s at least a head shorter than me and was practically mute at first, but it soon becomes obvious that Sasha knows her stuff when it comes to anatomy. The first words we exchanged were when Sasha was looking at the tattoo on Frank’s arm. She had stretched out the skin taut in an attempt to read the words. The dye had faded somehow in the embalming process, and the words were barely legible.

“To protect and serve,” Sasha read.

“What the hell does that mean?” I asked.

“It’s the police force motto,” she said.

I was sort of blown away. What was a cop doing in an anatomy lab? It just seems… strange. But whatever.