Pretty Ugly: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

the door.
    Walking quickly past the patients’ rooms, Ray kept his head down. Owensboro was a relatively small town, and if he wasn’t careful he might see someone he knew, and Ray didn’t really like anyone he knew. Somewhere, he imagined, there were people he might enjoy spending time with, people with similar interests, but he didn’t know where they lived or how to meet them. He reluctantly went online, dipping a toe into the social mares’ nest that is Facebook, but after a few months, Ray’s handful of Facebook friends were just the real-life friends he was hoping to replace. Ray had always held that the Internet was at best just an expensive porn delivery system and at worst the most loathsome thing ever created by mankind. So he gave up, abandoning his Facebook page like an office he never fully moved into, at a job he never really wanted.
    As Ray reached the ER, he felt the unmistakable signs of an impending erection. “Shit.” He sighed. The pills. Must be a new ED medication, he thought. I probably shouldn’t have taken two . Everyone needs a hobby.
    Working a code with a drug-induced erection was the worst, not that he hadn’t done it before, but Ray had been on his feet for twelve hours. He really wasn’t in the mood. Ducking into the men’s room, he darted past a waiting room refugee vomiting blood into a urinal and locked himself in a vacant stall where he tucked his penis into the waistband of his scrubs. He tightened the drawstring to hold it firmly in place, then stepped back out into the chaos that was the ER.
    Victims of a drunken boat race laid on gurneys as orderlies led equally drunken family members to the waiting area. Ray sighed without emotion and absorbed the too-familiar sights and sounds of avoidable tragedy.
    Once upon a time Ray enjoyed nursing, even though everyone he met assumed he was gay, which didn’t bother him nearly as much as the people who thought he became a nurse because he wasn’t smart enough to be a doctor, as if all nurses were just failed med students. It was particularly bothersome because in his case it happened to be true. Ray never wanted to be a doctor, but since the Civil War every firstborn male in his family had been one.
    “In fact,” his father, Dr. Benjamin Miller, once told him, “Dr. Sam Mudd, the physician who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after he shot President Lincoln, was your great-great-great uncle.” Ray wasn’t sure if it was pride or shame he heard in his father’s voice, but it didn’t matter. “My son is not going to waste his time playing music. You’re going to be a doctor.”
    So Ray struggled through premed at Western Kentucky University and graduated near the bottom of his class from an inexpensive, low-tier North Carolina med school. Thanks to his father, Ray landed an internship at a war-zone public hospital near downtown Detroit. Within six months, his substandard education and slow recall were at least partially responsible for the deaths of seven patients. Ray didn’t sleep much after that. Overwhelmed with guilt, he’d spent his nights studying, cramming, literally forcing too much information into a too-small space.
    “It was like a guy in a bad sitcom closing a door on an overfull closet,” he’d explained to Miranda. “And later someone opens the door, and everything comes spilling out all over the floor. That was med school for me. Everything was in my brain, but it was just all over the place.”
    The resulting wave of malpractice lawsuits eventually forced the ninety-eight-year-old hospital to permanently shut its doors. Ray knew it would have been impossible to defend his intelligence, so at his medical board hearing he tried defending his dead patients instead.
    “They were all very old and had been treated repeatedly by other doctors, hospitals, and clinics. One of them had been shot twice in the past three years. In my professional medical opinion, they had—at best—a combined twenty years