The Secret Life of Damian Spinelli by Carolyn Hennesy

Author:Carolyn Hennesy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hyperion

I found Robin already sittin’ in a corner booth, way back, her fingers wrapped around a cup of coffee, black as the mascara streaks runnin’ down her face.

“C’mon,” I said, slidin’ across from her, “can’t be bad as all that.”

“What’ll it be, Jackal?” Candy asked, stridin’ up, her waitress uniform just a little too tight.

“The usual, Candy, thanks.”

“One cuppa coffee with an orange soda chaser. Comin’ right up.”

When Candy got a good distance away, I turned to Robin.

“Tell me what’s got you lookin’ like Alice Cooper.”

“Where do you want me to start?” she asked. I could tell she was barely holdin’ it together.

“Take it nice and slow and start from the beginning.”

She took a deep breath.

“You won’t tell anyone else?”

“That’s what you’re payin’ me for.”

“Okay. When I was in med school at the Sorbonne . . . in France, I had a professor . . . Mr. Xavier. He was nice enough and I always did really well in his classes. But more than that, I always felt like I could go to him if I had a problem understanding organic chemistry or submolecular biology, and he wouldn’t laugh the way some other professors might have done. So, I liked him. When I came back to the States . . . before I started my residency, I got a letter from Professor Xavier saying that I had accidentally skipped one course in France—an important course in EGC interpretation—and the Sorbonne was going to deny my diploma until it was completed. He went on to say that, as luck would have it, he just happened to be coming to the States to teach that very course over the summer in a little college in New Hampshire. He could get me in, the Sorbonne would be satisfied, and no one here would ever know. So I spent the summer in Monadnock. And it was easy, you know? It was pretty basic stuff, so I was acing it. Then one day, my lab partner didn’t show up for class because she’d contracted cholera . . . or something, I don’t remember . . . and Mr. Xavier stepped in real quick and offered to partner up for the lab portion of class. So, one thing leads to another, and as I’m sliding the sample ECG across the desk, our fingers touched and . . . and . . . that was it. We sort of . . . saw . . . each other for the rest of the year. And it was great . . . he was great. He’d joke with me all the time that just because I was dynamite in the . . . uh . . . just because I was a good girlfriend, he was still going to grade me fairly and all that. So the summer ended and I told him I was leaving to start my residency. Only . . . only he didn’t want to let me go. He told me that he’d been

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