Cole

Graduation

Neither Manda or I were about to graduate because I was finishing my sophomore year and Manda was finishing her freshman year but we always wanted to attend to see Lance, Stacey, and a few of the football players finish off their high school careers. The ceremony was only a week away and at first I was not sure if we could make it because of what Gold did to us.

As it turned out I had to spend two days with Manda in the hospital before she became stable enough to come home. I could only imagine how horrible it must have been for her in Gold's house. I only saw a small part of it, but it was enough for me. I was delighted to dispose of the two demons that did bad things to her and I had not the slightest regrets.

I was afraid of Officer Richards for a while and eventually I had to go downtown to the police station to talk to him but was surprised when it went pretty easy for me. Richards was very happy to have gotten the credit for taking down the big drug ring in town that was hurting the high school kids as well as others. I made sure to heap my own praise on him and told everyone I could that he did a great job. I think in the end Richards regarded me as a friend and I never had any trouble with him again. Because it went great for him he never pursued looking into the incident at Gold's house in fine detail. One thing I was worried about was if they would question why two people died of drug overdoses that had essentially no needle tracks in their arms. They were not users, so it looked weird that they died of overdoses. It appeared that that was okay with Richards. He did not want to muddy the waters. He was fine with the simple message that the bad guys were gone, the school was safe, and he was there at the scene and leading the police effort when it ended. He was awarded a special commendation. Tom was arrested, and both Lance and I gave statements that would help put him away.

Manda's parents were thrilled to get her back and were ever more grateful for me saving Manda's life again. Manda again told me that she totally belonged to me because I saved her. This time she said I owned her four times over and she would do anything for me. I already knew that and would do anything for her.

One thing that bothered me, though, was that the reason I kept needing to save her was that my presence in her life kept putting her in danger, with the only exception being the first time I saved her. I wasn't sure what to do about it, though. I knew I could never leave her. Trying that once was a disaster for both of us. I decided to do everything possible in the future to keep Manda safe even though I was not sure what that was.

One idea was to scrap the neurosynth project altogether. It had cost the life of my adoptive mother, who I really did love, and it almost took Manda. I was at the point where the Neurosyn hormone secret was under wraps again and I could kill the whole project if I wanted to. I decided to just put everything on hold until I grew up a little more. I was going to eventually go on to medical school again and see what would happen.

I talked to dad about what Gold was planning in using the two DaVinci surgical robots. Dad was really good with understanding medical equipment, as that was what he sold for a living. Both of us went out to the vicinity of Cherry Street to see if we could discover the clinic Gold was planning to use. It was about five miles from the house where Manda and I were held captive. There was never any police report about it so it appeared that the police never discovered it or even looked for it. Had they found it they would have been confused. They would not know why a drug dealer had an operating room. If anyone were to ask me I would deny everything. The World did not know about neurosynths.

When Dad and I drove to Gold's clinic we found that Cherry Street was in a pretty run down area of town. Gold did not want to attract attention. We were able to get an exact address for the clinic from Gold's laptop. It took a while to get the address, but dad was good at finding a way to hack into Gold's computer and find notes that revealed the exact address. One other thing about dad, he never questioned how Gold or Rick died with me. I guess he was a bit like Officer Richards and glad they were dead and gone and did not care how.  Maybe he suspected me, but did not care.