Taken

Taken Read Online Free PDF Page B

Book: Taken Read Online Free PDF
Author: Edward Bloor
tossed onto the table. Then she and Mickie hurried out.
             
    I got jolted back to the present by a sound directly behind me, the sound of the ambulance cab door opening. This was followed by a violent sound, like someone’s head had been pushed into the cab wall.
    I ventured a quick look past my feet. The dark boy was no longer there!
    I heard a gruff, accusing voice from inside the cab. “You were asleep!”
    Then I heard a weary voice. “No.”
    “Shut up! Don’t lie to me, or…”
    My whole body tensed. I pictured the evil face of Dr. Reyes.
    The weary voice protested, “I was right here. She could not get past me.”
    “You were asleep!”
    “Just for one second.”
    “You are to be awake every second!”
    “It is way past my shift. It is Monnonk’s shift now.”
    “I will tell you when your shift is over. Understand?”
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know what I will do if I catch you again?”
    The voice didn’t answer.
    Dr. Reyes continued, “You will never see it coming. One needle and it will be over. Do you understand now?”
    The voice whispered hoarsely, “Yes, sir. Yes, Doctor.”
    The door then slammed shut. Whoever was sitting in the front stayed completely quiet for five minutes. And so did I.
    At last I let myself relax. I lay back and stared at the ceiling. My heart was racing; my mind was racing. I had to do something right away or I might have a full-blown panic attack, like a wide-awake night terror.
    I rolled my head left and right, staring at the surrounding white walls of the ambulance. I pressed my hands against my temples, forcing myself to think about the white walls back at the satschool. What exactly did they look like? What was hanging on them? I remembered. Mrs. Veck’s posters were hanging on them—inspirational sayings beneath cute animal photos. A kitten clinging to a branch with the caption “Hang in there.” A grumpy bear looking out from a cave: “We all have bad days.” An eagle gliding in a bright blue sky: “Let your dreams soar.”
    I saw them all in my mind. And I was back in that classroom again, on that Friday morning.
             
    Mrs. Veck instructed us to gather our materials and to follow her out into the Square. She added, rather desperately, “Let’s all do our best to help Mrs. Meyers with her program.” That was an uncharacteristic slip of the tongue for Mrs. Veck, but it bothered me. I always resented hearing Mickie referred to as “Mrs. Meyers.”
    My mother, the real Mrs. Meyers, died when I was seven. She died during my first week in second grade. Back then, we lived in Lake Worth, Florida, about forty kilometers southeast of The Highlands. We lived in a regular housing development, not in an armed military compound, and I attended a real school, not a satschool.
    But my mother, who was a nurse, died of skin cancer, a melanoma lurking beneath her hairline that she never noticed. Neither did her husband, my father, a trained dermatologist. It all happened very quickly. From the first sign that something was wrong to her death was exactly 103 days. I counted them out on a calendar.
    I remember my father being totally devastated by her illness. I wasn’t devastated at first. I was just confused, and then numb.
    I remember my mother near the end actually urging my father, in front of me, to remarry. She told him, “Charity will need a mother. As soon as possible.”
    But my father, as it turned out, had another plan. He spent the three years following my mother’s death working at home, nearly around the clock. He threw himself body and soul into dermatological research. He became a hermit hiding in his room, scanning hundreds of content files for papers published in the field.
    Then, when I was in fifth grade, he emerged from his research cave to introduce a skin treatment called DermaBronze. When applied to the top two layers of derma by a trained physician during a ten-minute procedure, DermaBronze provided “a deep, medically
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