Angel by Jamie Canosa Read Free Book Online Page B

She’d find out one way or another, soon enough. I just hoped it was the right way.

 
     
     
    Six
     
     
    “No. Chapter seven .”
    Tom slapped his textbook shut and glared across the oversized, round table at Alex, the fifth and final member of our study group. “He said chapter six was going to be on the test.”
    We’d been meeting together every Wednesday night since the beginning of the semester and it occurred to me that I didn’t know a single one of their last names. Or anything about them outside of the fact that they were studying Intro to the Human Body. Pathetic . Other than Beth, I didn’t even know what they were majoring in. The classic college icebreaker question and I hadn’t even bothered to ask it.
    “Guys.” Beth sighed and rubbed at her forehead. “Did we cover chapters six and seven in class? Then they’re both going to be on the midterm. We can’t concentrate on just one chapter. We have to review them all or we’re never going to pass.”
    She wasn’t wrong. This exam was going to be a nightmare. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the professor asked his middle friggin’ initial. He wouldn’t even give us a study guide. Apparently, if we’d been paying attention in class, we shouldn’t need one. Well, I’d been paying attention—mostly—and let me tell you, I needed one. Fourteen chapters on the anatomy and functions of the human body were not something the human brain naturally stored, I knew that much for sure.
    “Why don’t we just start at the beginning and work our way through?”
    No one was pleased with my suggestion, Marjorie groaning out loud. Beth was the only one who seemed to get that not wanting to do it and not having to do it were two entirely different things. She flipped to the front of her book and opened it to page one.
    Only four-hundred-and-seventy-six more to go.
    ***
    Ulna, radius, collarbone . . . My pencil drifted over the lined paper, giving shape to the source of all my troubles: the human body. Trachea, epiglottis, mandible, maxilla. Long, thin nasal bone. High zygomatic arches. Orbital eye sockets filled with eyes so blue they—
    I jerked my hand away from the image, leaving a long gray streak, and stared at the page. My mockup of the human skeleton had taken on a life of its own. Fleshed into a person . . . A girl.
    Jade stared back at me from my notebook. She was in black and white, but I could see the color of her eyes, her hair, her pale pink lips. Right down to the tiny dent in her nose.
    “Shit.” Slapping the book closed on her image, I shoved it in my laptop case.
    Beth glanced up from her own notes. “Everything alright?”
    “Yeah. I . . . uh . . . I just realized there’s somewhere else I need to be.” Throwing the case over my shoulder, I headed for the door as quickly as my legs could carry me.
    This wasn’t working. My mind was in so many different places, I couldn’t concentrate on any of them. Even engulfed in the calming silence of the campus library, surrounded by people doing nothing but studying the same boring crap as me, I still couldn’t focus.
    My brain felt like one of those mirrored funhouses. Every time I turned around I saw something else. Sometimes the images mixed and warped together, but none of them ever came through clearly. I was losing my damn mind.
    “Somewhere else? Caulder . . .” Beth left her books and papers behind to scurry after me, bringing me to a stop just inside the doors. “You know this test makes up half of our grade, right?”
    “Yeah.” When I wasn’t dealing with doctors, and nurses, and drug dealers , it was absolutely my first priority. “I know.”
    Beth was a smart girl. She worked hard and studied harder. It made sense that she’d have trouble understanding that anything else could come first. Besides my particular set of circumstances, I really couldn’t think of much else. Unfortunately, my circumstances were my circumstances, and that was life.
    “Alright, well,