“Are there any nice boys in your class?” Mom finally asks as I sort through the socks.
“No,” I say curtly.
Why am I not surprised this is my mother’s first question? I’m twenty-six years old and practically an old maid in her eyes. She came to this country from Russia when she was just a girl, and I gather that back there, they get married pretty young.
“None?” Mom raises an eyebrow. “Now how could that be, Sasha? Isn’t the class mostly boys?”
I don’t bother to point out that these days, medical school classes are at least half female. My mother would never believe it.
Finally, my mother says what she’s been waiting to say since the moment I walked in: “Sasha, why don’t you come back home?”
“Daddy wouldn’t want me to quit,” I say through my teeth.
“Daddy didn’t know everything,” Mom says quietly. “I think you’d be happier at home. Maybe that nice family will hire you back to watch their kids until you find a husband.”
I look down at the sock ball in my hand. I want to hurl it at my mother.
“I don’t want to have this conversation again, Mom,” I say. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to use the bathroom…”
I don’t need the bathroom. Really, I just need to get away from my mother. Instead of going to the bathroom, I brush past the small bedroom I used to share with my two sisters and end up in my parents’ bedroom. Just like the rest of the house, it hasn’t changed a bit since my father’s death, but something is comforting about this fact. I open the closet and see rows of my father’s shirts, all neatly pressed. I can still vaguely smell his aftershave.
“I’m trying my best, Papa,” I whisper as I run my hand along the sleeve of my father’s old blue shirt.
Then I really do go to the bathroom, which has also remained untouched since my father’s death. His razor and shaving lotion are still on the sink counter, and a large lump forms in my throat that makes it difficult to swallow. I guess my mother misses him too. Maybe it comforts her to see Dad’s stuff still around the bathroom and in the closets.
I open the medicine cabinet and see the pill bottles that contain all my father’s medications. Before his death, he was taking several kinds of pills that attempted to increase the amount of dopamine in his brain and decrease the symptoms of the disease. The medications decreased his symptoms somewhat, but the dopamine had an undesired side effect: hallucinations.
I remember how my father was haunted by voices he started hearing in his head and visions of things that weren’tthere. It tortured him to the point that he chose to live with the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease rather than continue the medications. He preferred shaking hands, poor balance, and shuffling feet to the voices in his head.
I pick up a large bottle of a medication called carbidopa-levodopa. Levodopa is converted by the body into dopamine. But that dopamine also caused the worst of my father’s hallucinations—he couldn’t tolerate these pills for more than a few weeks. I shake the bottle and discover that it’s still almost full.
There’s only a seedling of an idea in my head as I shove the bottle into my pocket.
79
I hate Mason,but I sort of like having him around in the library on the late nights. Sometimes it’s just the two of us, and it’s comforting to look up and see him sitting there. Sometimes I just watch him working—his brow furrowed in deep concentration as he stares at the diagrams of muscles and bones. When he catches me looking at him, he always smiles at me. He’s somehow become the closest thing I’ve got to a friend at this school.
A few days after my visit to my mother’s apartment, I approach Mason late in the evening while he’s studying.
“I’m going to get some coffee.” My voice cracks strangely on the words, and I clear my throat. “You want a cup?”
Mason blinks in surprise. “Uh… yeah, sure. Thanks, Sasha.”
“Black?” I ask.
“Sounds perfect.”
He smiles at me, and I get a little lost in those hazel eyes. Sheesh, he isreallygood-looking. But I have no interest in a guy like that. Not a chance. He’s a jerk and a phony and absolutely not my type.
I head to the coffee machine down in the med student lounge and fill up two cups of black coffee. It’s close to midnight, and the floor is deserted, but I still cautiously glance over my shoulder to make sure I don’t have company. When I feel certain I’m alone, I pull my father’s bottle of pills out of my pocket.
I open the bottle and remove a single capsule. I break it open and let the contents dissolve into one of the cups of coffee. I wait until the powder is completely invisible before I start back toward the library.
The irony of the whole thing isn’t lost on me. DeWitt has a drug problem—too many students are popping pills to get through their classes. But Mason is straight as an arrow and would never take drugs. And yet here I am, drugging him.
Calling it a drug is melodramatic though—it’s amedication. It’s not going to hurt him—maybe just distract him enough that he won’t be able to spend every waking hour studying. Or more likely, it won’t affect him at all.
I hand Mason the cup of coffee, careful to give him the cup with the dopamine pill mixed in.
