Free An Uncommon Education by Elizabeth Percer Page B

budge. I was sweating. I pulled off my sweatshirt and draped it on my bed, setting the bottle beside me to study it. I could make my own label, tell Teddy how to get it to his dad without either one of his parents’ seeing where it had come from. But how? How to make sure that these oddly beautiful gems would work as I needed them to?
    I screwed my eyes shut and stuck the bottle under my shirt, pushing it up first to the left side of my chest, then farther up to the spot on my neck where I could feel my pulse beat against it. I said the Shema, the only prayer I had ever said on my own, the one my father had told me to say when someone died, the one I now whispered to myself whenever we passed roadkill: Hear, O Israel, the Lord is God, the Lord is One. Da Vinci and his pigs’ hearts swam before my eyes.
    I studied the effect on the bottle. It was impressively unchanged, but warm. I went to my desk and cut a rectangle from a piece of white paper, wrote “Heart Medicine” in bold print across it, then “ vena cava, atrium, aorta, ventricle, septum ,” in small, careful letters underneath before taping it over the printed pharmaceutical label. At that point it looked completely different; the only thing it had in common with what it had been was orange and white plastic.
    I tucked the bottle under my pillow that night and slept with it, bringing it down to breakfast in the morning. I always ate early, with my father. I saw him glance at my creation, but he didn’t mention it until after he’d prepared my cereal and juice and set them down before me.
    “What’s this?” he asked, gesturing toward the bottle as though he had just noticed it.
    “Medicine,” I said, shoving food into my mouth.
    He nodded. He picked it up and looked at the label, then set it back down. He studied it, trying to form another question.
    “Teddy’s father is sick,” I explained, helping him out. “Mr. Rosenthal. I think it’s his heart.”
    My father opened the bottle and looked in. “Are these jellybeans?” he asked.
    “They were,” I said. “I made them into heart pills.”
    My father nodded, swallowing, trying to take it all in. I felt vaguely sorry for him. “Heart pills,” he repeated, still nodding. He looked me in the eye. “You know, Naomi, people go to school for many years to make such things. You can’t just create such things overnight, ketzi .” He was looking at me like there was something very important I needed to learn, something he thought I wouldn’t want to know. His expression only made me more determined.
    I stood up. “They’ll work,” I said, taking my bowl and glass to the sink and dumping the whole meal down, the milk and cereal and juice mixing in the sink and making me feel vaguely sick. I was sweating again. I turned around. “You’ll just have to trust me, Dad.” He still looked like he had something to explain to me.
    I grabbed the bottle and ran out the door, though the sun was only just rising. When I reached Teddy’s back steps he was standing there in short pajamas, his knees standing out and looking at me. “Here,” I said, opening the screen and shoving the pills in his hand, “give these to your dad.” I ran back down the stairs before remembering. “Two in the morning, two at night,” I called over my shoulder. He nodded, his face a blur behind the screen.
    T hat night I dreamt of my mother’s last visit to the doctor: over two years earlier, the winter before the summer I turned seven. My father had brought her from her room and helped her into her coat after the babysitter had been called. They were trying to pretend that they were going to dinner instead of to the hospital, but I saw the number they left for the babysitter by the phone. I wish my hunger for information had known better boundaries, but I was too young to make the connection between nosing outside my business and learning things I might one day want to forget. The nightmare brought back every detail.
    When