Read Online Night Owls by Jenn Bennett - Free Book Online Page B

and move on to his own work, so I just listened.
    The actual lab with the bodies—the Operating Room, as Simon affectionately referred to it—was on the top floor, and it looked like a long, airy medical bay on a spaceship. Everything
was white and gray, with vibrant submarine-yellow doors. Cameras snaked from the ceiling alongside bright lights on long, curved necks, and big LCD screens hung next to wipe boards and rolling
medical monitors. Six life-size teaching skeletons—just like my own Lester, only these weren’t missing their arms—stood sentry along the walls.
    But the stars of the show were the bodies, which reclined on rolling gray metal tables, all of them covered by white plastic sheets. Just vague shapes. The effect was so sterile and cool there
might’ve been anything under there—bricks, clothes, CPR dummies. But the faint odor of formaldehyde told me other wise. Some of the bodies remained in the lab for an entire
year—kind of crazy. But there was a state-of-the-art ventilation system, and the unpreserved bodies were kept in a refrigerated room nearby.
    Simon briefly introduced me to his study group, who, like him, were all wearing blue hospital scrubs. I felt like a sore thumb in jeans and my glow-in-the-dark Mütter Museum
T-shirt—that’s the museum in Philadelphia that has all the preserved anatomical specimens, medical anomalies, and antique medical equipment—but Simon didn’t seem to
notice.
    “We’ll be working at the north end of the room,” he said as he walked me to the other end of the lab. “So I thought maybe you could draw on the south end.” He
stopped in front of a white sheet in the last row of tables and pointed to one of several metal stands, the kind used to hold sheet music. “You can adjust this and use it for drawing on, if
you need to. And here’s a stool. The mirror can be angled, if you need to get a magnified view from above.”
    “Great.”
    “We’re protective of our bodies—we get assigned one to study for months at a time. The one I picked out for you is assigned to my roommate, and I got his permission for you to
use her. I opened everything up for you, and I’ll take care of it when you leave.” I had no idea what that meant, but I nodded. “With this in mind, I just ask you to be respectful
and not touch or move anything on or near the body.”
    “Of course.”
    “Well, then. This”—he pulled back the sheet—“is Minnie.”
    I’d seen a lot of preserved specimens and even owned a few in small jars, but I’d never actually seen a dead human body.
    It was more unsettling than I’d expected.
    Minnie was stiff and nude, a white woman with brown hair, who, Simon informed me, was nineteen when she died. Her skin was thick, her face mottled and wrinkled like a pickled egg. Her torso was
split down the center, skin and muscles splayed, ribs removed, heart visible. And her inner arm was sliced from wrist to elbow, buttery, fat-covered skin spread like angel wings around the muscles
and veins.
    I thought the dissected areas would be red and vibrant, but her insides looked more like ash-pale rotten meat, glistening under the surgical light.
    “Mark sprayed her down before he left. They tend to dry out if they’re exposed to air for too long, but you should be okay for a couple of hours. The chemical smell takes some
getting used to. Sometimes it helps to take a break. Bathroom and soda machine is just outside those doors to the left. No food or drink inside here, obviously.”
    Was he freaking kidding? Who could eat in front of this?
    “You okay?”
    “Yeah,” I said, playing it cool. “Thanks.”
    “Shout if you need anything. Whenever you’re ready to leave, just give me a heads-up so I can wrap Minnie back up for the night.”
    He patted me on the shoulder before striding away toward his group, who were watching some surgery video on one of the monitors and comparing what they saw on-screen to the body in front of
them.
    I