Girls Fall Down Read Online Free PDF Page A

like a computer box or something, and he’d written on it in pink marker: CAUTION, DO NOT OPEN. CONTAINS EVIL. The pink marker was what I liked.’
    â€˜Do you suppose it was true?’
    â€˜My thinking is, why would someone lie about a thing like that?’
    Alex zoomed the lens onto Walter’s careful hands, coated with the patient’s blood. ‘David, could you come over here?’ the surgeon was saying. ‘I think you’ll be interested to see this.’ The resident shifted around the table, and Alex moved back, wondering what it was that was interesting and hoping he’d gotten a good picture of it.
    Where he was standing now he could see the man’s face, slack and still, his mouth distorted by the breathing tube. He thought of this man getting up and walking away, damaged and healed. The heart cut open and motionless, this man as dead right now as anyone would ever be, short of the final death. He stepped back and photographed Walter leaning over the man, touching his heart with a knife.
    The boy with the box of evil sat in the cafeteria of his high school, the box on the table beside him, eating a hamburger and feeling unusually cheerful. He hadn’t heard about the problems on the subway the day before, and didn’t know that a security guard had phoned in an alert while he was on the train, though it would have made him happy to know this.
    He was a medium-sized boy with brown hair and thick glasses, and he had carried the box with him into every one of his classes that morning and sat it on the desk. When anyone asked him what it was, he said it was a prop for a play, which was almost sort of true.
    The box had previously contained a computer game that wasn’t much fun, just your basic maze game when you stripped away the effects, and the effects weren’t so great themselves. There was nothing inside it, because he hadn’t been able to think of what evil should look like, aside from maybe a lot of bugs, and you couldn’t just fill up a box with bugs that easily. Or maybe if you lived in some really bad neighbourhood you could.
    â€˜Did you hear about the guy who found the biggest prime number in the world?’ he asked the girl sitting next to him.
    â€˜Did he go insane or what?’
    â€˜No, he did not go
insane
, Sharon, why would he go insane? He just discovered the biggest prime number. It was, like, huge.’
    â€˜I just thought. Like the guy in the movie.’
    â€˜He was not like the guy in the movie, okay?’
    â€˜Yeah, okay, so he found the biggest prime number, what did he do with it?’
    â€˜Oh, like he had to
do
anything.’
    â€˜Well, you’d just think. What good is it if you don’t do anything with it? And are you going to carry that box with you all afternoon?’
    â€˜I’m gonna carry it forever. You can’t let evil run around unguarded.’
    â€˜You’re such a freak.’
    â€˜Yeah. I try.’ He moved the box so that the sign could be more easily read by people passing the table, and took another bite of hamburger.
    Alex left the OR at lunchtime, and paused to check his blood sugar and inject his afternoon insulin before he went into his studio, checking the list of ambulatory patients he’d been assigned. A few hours later a girl came in, a last-minute addition to the list – a pale teenager, strawberry blonde, in tight jeans and a powder-blue T-shirt, carrying her coat and sweater and flanked by a nurse and a woman in business clothes, presumably her mother. He could see that her face and arms were splattered with bright red hives, but he didn’t make the connection right away.
    â€˜Hi,’ he said, smiling, reaching his hand out to the girl and then to the mother. ‘My name’s Alex, I’m the photographer.’ He took the file from the nurse and glanced at it. ‘Okay. Looks like they just want some pictures of that rash there. Could you put