Read Online Code Orange by Caroline M. Cooney - Free Book Online

was
shivering or trembling, as in the chill preceding a fever
.
    This is what happens when you do your homework, Mitty decided. It makes you sick.
    He went into the kitchen to get a soda.
    Mitty could understand the theory behind school: every citizen had to read and write. But he had conquered reading and writing in elementary school and did not want to hone his skills. Everybody said that
USA Today
was written on a sixth-grade level, and since Mitty could totally cruise through the sports section, why go on?
    He yearned to quit school.
    How could they ask him not only to write a huge biology paper but also to write an English paper and read
Beowulf
and do his math
and
world history, in which offhand he couldn't remember what continent they were studying right now, never mind what century?
    Mitty frowned. That was four subjects. Wasn't he taking five?
    He pulled the pop tab on a can of Pepsi, wishing he had gone to the medical library with Olivia. There were several aspects of his disease he wanted to look up.
    “It isn't
my
disease!” he yelled. “And you don't need a treatment for it because it doesn't exist!”
    He had a sudden vision involving towels. Almost blushing,he walked back into his bedroom. Yes. After his morning shower, he had draped his wet towel over a handy stack of books.
    Mitty had never gotten into the whole yoga/Zen thing where you solved your anxiety with deep breathing and peaceful thoughts. He preferred action, so he kicked the books under his bed, one at a time, and hard. They could live in the dark indefinitely, because the maid refused to clean under there.
    Mitty went online and wandered around on the CDC site again, ignoring its little sidebars filled with warnings and its little hotlines for consulting staff if you perceived an emergency.
    They didn't use Mitty's favorite phrase,
hot agent. Lethal incurable disease
was their term. Then he went to the site run by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, abbreviated USAMRIID and pronounced “You-
sam
-rid,” which ran Maximum Containment Laboratories.
    There was something very comforting about USAMRIID. These were Americans who knew what they were doing, as opposed to Mitty, an American who did not have the slightest idea what he was doing, other than getting the shakes over homework. That was when you knew you had bottomed out.
    Mitty decided to look up North Brother Island instead of do homework. Those people who arranged walking tours in New York City (Lower East Side walks; jazz in Harlem walks; mystery book walks) could probably arrange a Typhoid Mary walk. That would be a terrific present for Olivia. Mitty happened to know that Valentine's Day was coming up. He knew this becausehis mother began mentioning holidays weeks ahead of time, giving his dad time to close in on a gift and arrange a celebration. Approximately forty-eight hours prior to the special day it was Mitty's job to ask Dad whether he was ready because if he failed, Mom would kill him again this year.
    It dawned on Mitty that if New York City had a typhoid hospital, it must have had a smallpox hospital. And if they isolated typhoid on an island, wouldn't they also isolate smallpox on an island? He loved online research and he was good at it, so it took only a minute to find that the island was Roosevelt in the East River and that the smallpox hospital, although in ruins, still existed.
    Mitty threw on a jacket and left the building. He had a great digital camera but didn't remember it until he was on Broadway, so he stopped at Duane Reade to buy a disposable one. Not too shabby, thought Mitty, ripping off the cardboard. For my disease, I'll have a mummified body part
and
photographs of a historic hospital.
    Why would a doctor save scabs, anyway? Pathologists saved stuff like diseased liver slices or brain tissue to study later in a lab. Had a doctor back in 1902 planned to study those scabs? And then forgotten about them? Or died of smallpox himself