The Select (7 page)

It hit him that maybe Quinn wasn't
familiar with the equations. Maybe she'd drawn a blank on Johann
Kleederman. Why else would she leave them unanswered?

And Christ, the Kleederman Foundation
was the pocketbook for The Ingraham. They might dump on anyone
missing those.

Tim looked around for the proctor. She
was standing by her desk now, arranging her papers, preparing to
collect the test pamphlets. Tim slipped his answer sheet inside his
exam book, replaced his shades over his eyes, and waited. When her
back was turned he rose and, in one continuous movement, leaned
over Quinn's shoulder, blackened the B and C boxes next to
questions 201 and 202, then straightened and strode down the
aisle.

My good deed for the
day
.

*

Quinn stared down at the two marks Tim
had made on her answer sheet. He'd blackened in choices on two of
the three questions that had completely stymied her. What on God's
earth was the Kleederman equation? She'd never heard of
it.

Obviously Tim had. Probably could tell
her the page and paragraph where he'd read about it. God, she
wished she had a memory like that. Wouldn't that be great? Like
having an optical CD-ROM reader in your head.

She stared at those little blackened
boxes. They weren't her answers. She felt queasy about handing them
in.

Instinctively, Quinn reversed her
pencil and moved to erase them. She had always done her own work,
always stood on her own two feet. She wasn't going to change that
now.

Almost of its own accord, her pencil
froze, the eraser poised half an inch above the paper.

Her whole future was at stake here.
This was real life. The nitty-gritty. Doing "good enough" wouldn't
cut it; there were just so many places the next class. Fifty, to be
exact. She had to score in the top fifty.

The Kleederman questions could mean
the difference between acceptance and rejection.

And she didn't have a clue as to how
to answer them.

But still...they weren't her
answers.

As she lowered the eraser to the
paper, the proctor's voice cut through the silence.

"Time's up. Pencils down. Any more
marks and your test will be disqualified."

*

Tim stood with Matt around the central
pond and waited for Quinn to come out of the class building. A
chill wind had come up, scraping dead leaves along the concrete
walks. He pulled his jacket closer around him. Winter was
knocking.

Finally she showed up, walking slow.
He wondered at her grim expression.

"How'd you do?" Matt asked.

Quinn shrugged. "You ever hear of the
Kleederman equation?"

"Sure," Tim said. "It's—"

"I know
you
did." The look she
tossed him was anything but friendly. "I want to know about
Matt."

That look unsettled Tim. He'd thought
he'd be her knight in shining armor. What was eating
her?

Matt scratched his head. "It has to do
with distribution of medical services among an expanding
population."

"You've heard of it too? You've both
heard of it?" She shook her head in dismay. "Why haven't I? Three
questions and I couldn't even guess at an answer."

"Cheer up," Tim said. "You got two of
them right, anyway. At least I hope they were right."

Her head snapped up. Her expression
was fierce. Her eyes flashed as she looked into his.

"No.
You
got two of them right. Not me. I
didn't have a clue. I don't hand in other people's work,
Tim."

He groaned. "Oh, no. You didn't erase
them, did you?"

There was pain in her eyes now. "No. I
didn't. And I'm not too proud of myself for that."

She turned and walked off toward the
dorm. Tim started after her but stopped after two steps. He wanted
to be with her but what was the use? She'd put up a
wall.

"You marked a couple of answers on her
sheet?" Matt said.

"Yeah. They were blank.
Thought I was doing her a favor." He didn't want to show it—didn't
even want to admit it—but he was
hurt
, damn it "Boy, I just can't win
with her."

"With 999 other people you'd be a
hero. But Quinn's got her own set of rules. You tested on her own
standards and she feels she failed."

Tim was jolted. "Jesus..."

"Didn't I tell you she's one of a
kind?"

"You got that right. Kind of
old-fashioned, though, don't you think?"

"Yeah," Matt said softly. "She's an
old-fashioned girl."

"I didn't think there were any of
those left."

To his dismay Tim realized he was
becoming enthralled with Quinn Cleary.

SPRING BREAK

Adrix (adriazepam), the new
non-habituating benzodiazepine with strong anti-depressant
properties from Kleederman Pharmaceuticals, has quickly become the
most widely prescribed tranquilizer in the world.

Medical World
News

CHAPTER FIVE

In what had become a daily ritual,
Quinn sat on her window seat in her cozy little bedroom, raised the
binoculars, and aimed them across the front yard toward the end of
the driveway. And with each new day the suspense grew. It had
swollen to a Hitchcockian level now.

The front yard wasn't much—a hundred
feet deep, rimmed with oaks and elms, filled with laurel and
natural brush, and a patch of winter-brown grass. Pretty drab and
lifeless now, but soon spring would bring the forsythia into
buttery bloom and then there'd be lots of color. The house was old,
the foundation even older—the first stones had been placed a
century and a half ago. The superstructure had been built and
rebuilt a number of times since then. The current structure had
been completed sometime in the Roaring Twenties. Over the years
Quinn had lined her little bedroom nest with photos, pennants,
posters, honor certificates, medals and trophies from her seasons
as a high school track star. And many a night she had spent
fantasizing about the children who had occupied the room before
her, where they were now, what they had done with their
lives.

They hadn't all stayed farmers, she
was sure of that.

The farm. The acres stretched out
behind the house. Lots of land. If this kind of acreage were
situated near the coast, or better yet, along the inner reaches of
Long Island Sound, they'd be rich. Millionaires. Developers would
be banging on their door wanting to buy it for subdivision. But not
here in the hinterlands of northeast Connecticut.

The farm had changed crops since Quinn
was a child, and that had changed the look of the place. Dad grew
hay, potatoes, and corn now, but back in the seventies the Cleary
place had been a tobacco farm—shade-grown tobacco, for cigar
wrappers. Quinn had helped work the farm then, feeding the
chickens, milking the cows, sweeping out the barns. All of that had
stopped when she went off to college. She no longer thought of
herself as a farm girl, but she could still remember summer days
looking out the door at acres of pale muslins undulating in the
afternoon breeze as they shielded the tender leaves of the tobacco
plants from the direct rays of the sun.

Thinking of those fields of white
triggered the memory of another color. Red...blood red.

It had been in the spring. Quinn had
just turned seven and she was out in the fields watching the hands
work. A couple of the men were stretching the wire from post to
post while the others followed, draping the muslin between the
wires. Suddenly one of the men—Jerry, they called him—shouted in
pain and fell to the ground, clutching at his upper leg. He'd
pulled the wire too tight and it had snapped back, gashing his
thigh. He lay in the dirt, white faced as he stared at the blood
leaking out from under his fingers. Then he fainted. And with the
relaxation of the pressure from his hands, a stream of bright red
sprayed into the air, glinting in the sun with each pulsating arc.
One of the men had already run for help, but the other three simply
stood around their fallen fellow in shock, silent,
staring.

Quinn, too, stared, but only for a
heartbeat or two. She knew Jerry would be dead in no time if
someone didn't stop his bleeding—you couldn't grow up on a farm
without knowing that. As she watched the spurting blood, the story
of the little Dutch boy flashed through her mind. She leaped
forward and did the equivalent of putting her finger in the
dike.

The blood had been hot and slippery.
The feel of the torn flesh made her woozy at first, but she knelt
there and kept her finger in the dike until Dad had come with a
first-aid kit and a tourniquet.

For a while people
referred to her as the gutsy little girl who'd saved Jerry's life.
The accolades faded, but the incident had a lingering effect. It
had swung open a door and allowed Quinn to peer through and view a
part of herself. She had
done
something. Because of her, life would go on with
Jerry around; if she had done nothing, he would have died. Up to
that time she'd had a vague image of her future self as a
veterinarian, caring for the livestock on the family farm and all
over Windham county. From then on there was never a question in
Quinn's mind that one day she would be a doctor.

Quinn shook off the memories and
focused the binocs on the mailbox where it sat on its post in the
afternoon sun. The red flag was still up. She lowered the glasses
and tapped an impatient foot.

Where is he?

"Is there no mail yet?"

Quinn turned at the sound of her
mother's voice, still touched with the lilt of her native Ireland.
She was standing in the doorway, a pile of folded towels balanced
in her arms. Quinn had inherited Dad's lean, straight-up-and-down
body type and Mom's fair skin and high coloring. How many times had
she wished things were reversed? Her mother was fair-haired, too,
but with a womanly shape, a good bust and feminine hips—she was
only in her mid-forties and she still turned heads when she was out
shopping. Dad was built like a beanpole but his skin type never
blushed.

It seemed to Quinn that she had wound
up with the leftovers of her gene pool.

"Henry's late today."

"He'll get here," Mom said. "A watched
pot never boils."

Yes it does, Quinn wanted to say. And
an unwatched pot boils over. Instead she nodded and said, "I
know."

No sense arguing with Mom's Old
Sayings.

"I'm very proud of you," her mother
said. "Who'd have ever dreamed when you were born that my little
baby girl would be in demand by the finest medical schools in the
world."

Sure. Great. She'd heard from Harvard,
Yale, and Georgetown. All acceptances. All wanted her. Which was
fine for her ego but didn't get her any closer to being a doctor.
Each called for twenty- to twenty-five thousand dollars a year. She
couldn't come up with even half of that.

Quinn said nothing. What could she
say? Her father broke his back every day working this farm and what
did it get him? He met expenses. Food, clothes, seeing to the cars,
repairing the machinery, insurance, mortgage payments pretty much
took it all. If she hadn't won a full ride at U. Conn, she'd never
even have come this far.

Dad's ego had taken a real beating
during the past dozen or so years, so she couldn't even hint at how
she'd die inside if she couldn't go to med school. It would crush
him.

But Mom knew. And although her mother
never said it, Quinn suspected she was secretly glad they couldn't
afford it. But not through any malice. She'd probably hurt for
Quinn as much as Quinn would hurt for herself. But Mom had her own
agenda, her own reasons for wanting Quinn home. And none of it made
any sense to Quinn.

"It's got to come today," she said,
raising the glasses again. She wished there weren't so many trees
out by the road so she could spot the white mail jeep as it rounded
the curve half a mile down. The way things were, she had to wait
until he was within a dozen feet of the box before she saw
him.

"Don't be forgetting the old saying,"
her mother said. "Be careful what you wish for—you may just get
it."

Quinn kept her face toward
the window so her mother wouldn't see her rolling her eyes. That
was Mom's
favorite
Old Saying.

"If I get what I'm wishing for I'll be
really, really careful," Quinn said. "I promise."

The phone rang.

"I'll get it," Quinn said.

She dashed down to the kitchen and
grabbed the receiver off the wall. It was Matt.

"Quinn! Did you hear yet?"

"No, Matt. No mail yet
today."

He'd called every day this week, ever
since he'd received his acceptance to The Ingraham. She wished she
could tell him to sit back and wait until she called him, but he
was pulling for her, almost as anxious as she.