Page 116 of Dead Med

“Oh.” 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 cry. “If you hadn’t taken him off the ventilator, he’d still be here! It’syour faulthe’s dead!”

“Sasha!” 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.

“Sasha,” 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 foryou, Sasha,” 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 bedead. 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.

90

For a Sunday night,the library is surprisingly crowded. When I look around, several of my classmates are feverishly outlining textbooks and studying drawings of muscles, arteries, and nerves, trying to put in a last-ditch effort to prepare for our final exam tomorrow. 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 backward and forward, 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 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 of Locker 282.

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

“Sasha?”

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

“Um… hey, Rachel…”