Night Runner Read Online Free Page A

strawberry.
    â€œStop scratching your throat,” she said.
    â€œI can’t help it. It’s itchy.”
    She squeezed the gooey flavouring into the blender with the rest of my dinner and fired it up. Once it was good and frothy, she poured it into a tall cup and stuck in a straw. I always drank my meals. Solid foods just didn’t agree with me, so twice a day, it was bottoms up. My friend Charlie called these “brain cocktails.” He said they looked like they could bring a zombie back to life. They were the only thing I ever ate. I think they must have had the same thing in them that coffee has, because I got a real jolt from them. And they were filling, too. Nurse Ophelia never made more than two in a night for me. Any more than that and I would have exploded.
    My “brain cocktails” also had my meds in them. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was taking, but I remember when I was younger having to swallow a lot of different stuff—pills and syrups—andI got plenty of needles too, and lotions to put on my skin. They all had names that made them sound like they were made on the planet Mongo. Most of them made me sick. That might have been why the doctors kept changing their minds about what was wrong with me. Nothing really worked, and so they had to keep switching drugs all the time. After a while I stopped paying attention. It was too hard to keep track. To make things easier, Nurse Ophelia decided one day just to dump it all into my dinner. It was a pretty simple arrangement for me. She did all the work and I did all the drinking.
    The two of us sat in the dining room with the lights dimmed. Nurse Ophelia was very quiet. There was something in her manner that was sort of off. She seemed irritated one minute and sad the next. Her eyes didn’t seem comfortable unless they were fixed on the floor.
    â€œWhat is it?” I asked. I was feeling a lot better with food in my stomach.
    â€œYou’re looking more like Robert every day,” she said.
    Robert Douglas Thomson was my father. Just like me, he’d used his middle name, so everyone called him Doug, or Doc, or Dougal or Dr. Thomson. And some of his students used to call him Dr. T. But Nurse Ophelia was the only one who used his first name, Robert. I always wondered if she was right. Did I really look like him, or was she seeing a resemblance that wasn’t really there? Since she was the only one on the ward who had known him before he died, I never got a second opinion. I sometimes thought she must have been in love with him, because whenever she mentioned his name, her tone of voice would soften just a bit and the words would come out a little slower, like they were heavy or something. And she would smile differently, too. Like it was nice to think about him, but it was sad at the same time. I guess that’s why we rarely talked about him. I don’t even know how they met. The most she ever told me was that he’d gotten her out of some trouble when I was just a baby, but I never got the details.
    Tonight, she was wearing the same sad smile she always did when she talked about him. Her finger traced a little circle just in front of my mouth. “The nose and chin especially,” she said. “Anyone who knew him would recognize you in an instant.”
    I smiled. As much as I missed my father, I liked it when Nurse Ophelia talked about him. But then she added something strange.
    â€œYou look just like him. That’s one of our problems . . .” She took a deep breath and shook her head.
    So I looked just like my father. She’d told me that before. Big whoop. Didn’t most kids look like their parents?
    â€œThat must be how that man recognized you,” she said. “He must have known your dad.” She spoke slowly, as though she was trying to convince herself. Her eyes were staring past me into space.
    â€œI don’t understand what the problem is,” I said.
    Nurse