AFTER THE SAMPLE S. G. Hamilton You skip Urgent Care and take medications from the master bathroom. Antibiotics for bronchitis. Ciproloxacin for urinary tract infections. Silver nitrate sticks for when mouth ulcers get serious. It isn’t until you’re in your teens that you learn that most people need prescriptions for basic pills, but Dad brings them home from the oice, whether he’s supposed to or not. He brings his work home, too. He has established a nest in front of the living room television. A green chair, the cushion now imprinted with his behind. The too-small side table with the day’s local newspaper and a Diet Coke. On the evenings that he’s home, he turns on Bill O’Reilly and pecks at his work laptop with his foreingers. Sometimes he gets so fed up that he pays you ifty dollars to transcribe his notes for him. You’ve suggested Mario Teaches Typing. He says he’s too old to learn anything new, and besides, what can Mario do that you can’t? So, you transcribe notes on urinalysis results, prostate cancer, adult circumcisions, and testicular torsion. You come to understand the penis not as a sexual object but as an appendage to which many, many bad things can happen. What Dad normally accomplishes in an evening, you inish in thirty minutes, but this never turns into a daily routine. Hiring his teenage daughter to type his notes, even with patients’ names hidden, falls into a moral gray area. But more importantly, you’re a high school student with your own work to do. You have your own future that does not revolve around old men’s crotches. Someday you’ll realize that if Dad didn’t bring his work home, you would have hardly seen him at all. You’re seventeen now, and life is changing. You drive Dad’s old sedan. College application deadlines are fast approaching. You have your irst boyfriend, but you never kiss him. The male body is repulsive. You pack your own lunch in a brown paper bag, the same meal every time: two dinner rolls cut in half and stufed with provolone cheese and pepperoni. You throw a banana in there as well. The night before school, you place the bag on the top shelf of the refrigerator and go to bed. Now is the day of the big calculus test. It’s ifteen ‘til eight, and there’s no
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