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

his Spider-Man skills by scaling twelve feet of chain link covered with razor wire. He walked between low chain link to keep him safe from the East River and high chain link with more NO TRESPASSING signs.
    Darkness was closing in. The ugly grounds and the rough water, the lowering clouds and the shadows blended into one grim tapestry. Against the dusky sky he saw gothic towers, with windowless arches.
    His pace slowed.
    Trees grew inside the walls. The turrets were separating, trying to collapse, the way patients must have collapsed in smallpox agony.
    The hospital ruins were beyond hope. Like smallpox victims. Mitty felt as if he'd been thinking about smallpox for a century.
    He took two photographs of the gothic remains and a blast of light enveloped him. He was blinded like a deer about to be poached.
    Mitty flung an arm up to shade his eyes and ward off the enemy—but it was just floodlights coming on automatically to silhouette the romantic crumbling stones against the darkening sky.
    It looked like a movie setting.
    It
was
a movie setting.
    It was where Spider-Man and the Green Goblin fought to the death in the final confrontation.
    Mitty started laughing. He was so glad there had been no witness. Mitty Blake: scared of electricity. So glad he had not said out loud that New York City still had fences to prevent the spread of smallpox when in fact it had fences to keep movie fans from spidering up and down ruins that could fall on top of them and kill them.
    His cell phone rang and he answered, still laughing. It was his mother. Mitty didn't tell her that he was exploring little islands alone in the dark. She chattered excitedly about her day and they discussed dinner while Mitty headed back to the tram. She made her phone-kiss sound and Mitty phone-kissed back and boarded.
    Olivia had left him a text message. “Productive afternoon at the library. Am now walking past the nursing school about to get on subway.”
    The tram reached the peak of its short trip, where for one moment there was a spectacular view in each direction as Manhattan lit up for the night.
    Mitty loved Olivia's courage. It was not fashionable to have a productive afternoon at a library. It was not chic to thrive on knowledge. How easily the other girls could turn on Olivia; how readily the guys could scorn her. He thought of how she sat at the front of a classroom, where even Mitty, who liked her, would not go. She was there so she didn't have to see the contempt on the faces of those to whom school was a stupid waste of time, and so was Olivia.
    He hoped that the girl who had once been Bunny would never get tromped on, especially by him. But he didn't know how to say that, so instead, he called her andsaid,“Why'd you mention nursing school? You want to be a nurse?”
    “No. That was geographical detail. I wouldn't be good at nursing. I'm not actually that fond of individual people.”
    Mitty loved people. It was why he loved New York: all those people. He could watch anyone in New York and be satisfied. He loved their expressions and hairstyles and dogs, their tattoos and T-shirt slogans. Mitty's great skill was making friends. He was friends with doormen, janitors, pretzel vendors and police officers. He was friends with the jocks and the zeros, with people standing in line for coffee or movie tickets. He loved listening to other people's cell phone conversations. He loved what people would say out loud. When they spoke some other language and he couldn't listen in, he felt deprived. He was taking Spanish not because colleges required foreign language but so he wouldn't miss out on conversations that didn't include him.
    Spanish! That was his fifth subject! Mitty felt better now that he'd remembered.
    “I want research,” Olivia was saying.“Medical, historical or both. Right now, I'm interested in the concept of quarantine. That was the only medical recourse for thousands of years. But there are moral problems with how they handled Mary