Pretty Ugly: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

felt the deeply satisfying pop of his spine.
    The tiny nurses’ lounge reeked of stale sterility, like it had been cleaned with sour towels and hand sanitizer. When the doctors’ lounge received a multimillion-dollar remodel two years earlier, the nurses inherited a museum of outdated sofas and easy chairs. Most were threadbare and musty, but Ray slept better on them than he did his own bed.
    A blister pack of sample pills left by a pharmaceutical rep sat on a stack of old magazines by the twenty-seven-inch TV that hadn’t worked since the world went digital. Ray quickly popped two of the orange caplets without reading the label and swallowed them dry. New sample packets arrived daily like junk mail, and Ray tried every one he found. It had become a game he played to pass the time: take a pill, wait an hour, then try to figure out what he’d taken based on the side effects. Everyone needs a hobby, he told himself. After a decade as a respected medical professional, he could now identify most medications on sight, so taking something new was always exciting.
    A standard tox screen would have shown his blood to be a cocktail of muscle relaxers, painkillers, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, depressants, antidepressants, antibiotics, anti-anxieties, steroids, blood clotters, blood thinners, finasteride, Valium, Zoloft, lithium, Percocet, Depakote, Soma, Adderall, Xanax, Vicodin, Focalin, Lortab, Paxil, Coumadin, Estrace, OxyContin, Effexor, Ambien, Ativan, Flexoril, tramadol, Provigil, Nuvigil, Proscar, prednisone, Klonopin, Lexapro, Lipitor, Lunesta, Valtrex, Ritalin, Dexedrine, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Tylenol with codeine, codeine without Tylenol … The list went on and on, and so did his boredom.
    Ray had stopped keeping track of how many hours he worked. He just showed up, punched his card, and did the job: six days a week at the hospital and five nights working hospice. At thirty-four, he felt at least ten years older, and with small gangs of gray hairs starting to bully the remaining brown ones, it wouldn’t be long until he looked it. Miranda said his gray hair looked “dignified,” but she said it in the way one might tell a bald man that his toupee looks “natural.” To be honest, Ray didn’t care.
    “Better to turn gray than turn loose,” one of his hospice patients said right before she died.
    The walking kept Ray fit, and the pills kept him balanced enough to deal with the few hours he spent at home with his family.
    People often praised Ray for his hospice work, casually throwing around words like “noble” and “hero,” but those people were full of shit. Nothing about Ray’s life bore even a passing resemblance to nobility or heroism. He worked hospice because it paid. After nearly a decade, Miranda had spent roughly $89,687 on Bailey’s pageants, winning a grand total of $49,406 in cash, prizes, and “scholarships” (a label designed to make parents believe the pageants were contributing something to their child’s future besides emotional instability). Ray had done the math. If Miranda never spent another dollar on pageants, and Bailey won every competion she entered for the next twenty-six years, they would ultimately break even. Ray would be sixty years old and would have walked 109,287 miles, four and a half trips around the circumference of the Earth.
    Splashing water on his face, Ray looked at himself in the shatterproof mirror over the federally mandated handicapped sink and tried to remember the last time he shaved. Two days ago? Three? What day was it?
    “Nurse Miller. Please report to the ER.”
    “Jesus, I’m coming,” he said, and dried his face with one of the surgical masks someone had stacked in place of paper towels, which because of recent budget cuts were locked up tighter than the pharmacy. Again, the voice shrieked from the intercom, “Nurse Miller, report to the ER. STAT!”
    “Fuck off, Nancy!” Ray shouted back, then clipped his pedometer to his pants and shambled out