Godplayer by Robin Cook

door in order to get a good look at the tape. It had not changed its color. Having gotten so little sleep the night before and having cheated that afternoon with a fruit yogurt snack, she wouldn’t have been too surprised to see a little sugar. Cassi was pleased that the amount of insulin she was giving herself and her diet were in balance. Her internist, Dr. Malcolm McInery, talked occasionally of switching her to a constant insulin-infusion device, but Cassi had demurred. She was reluctant to alter a system that seemed to be working. She did not mind giving herself two injections a day, one before breakfast and one before dinner. It had become so routine as to be effortless.
    Closing her right eye, Cassi looked at the test tape. There was just a vague sensation of light as if she were looking through a wall of ground glass. She wished that she didn’t have the problem with her eye because the idea of blindness terrified her more, in some ways, than the idea of death. The possibility of death she could deny, just like everyone else. But denying the possibility of blindness was difficult with the condition of her left eye there to remind her each and every day. The problem had happened suddenly. She’d been told that a blood vessel had broken, causing blood to enter into the vitreous cavity.
    As she washed her hands, Cassi examined herself in the mirror. The single overhead light was kind, she decided, giving her skin more color than she knew it possessed. She looked at her nose. It was too small for her face. And her eyes: they curved unnaturally upwards at the outer corners as if she had her hair pulled back too tightly. Cassi tried to look at herself without concentrating on any single feature. Was she really as attractive as people said? She’d never felt pretty. She had always thought that diabetes was indelibly stamped in bold letters across her forehead. She was convinced that her disease was a major flaw that everyone could see. It hadn’t always been that way. In high school Cassi had tried to reduce it to a small aspect of her life. Something she could compartmentalize. And although she was conscientious about her medicine and diet, she did not want to dwell on it. Yet this approach made her parents, mostly her mother, understandably concerned. They felt that the only way she would be able to maintain the discipline the disease required was to make it her major focus. At least that was the way Mrs. Cassidy had dealt with the problem.
    The conflict came to a head at the time of the senior prom. Cassi came home from school beside herself with excitement and anticipation. The prom was to be held in a fashionable local country club, followed by a breakfast back at the school. Then the entire class was to head down to the New Jersey shore for the rest of the weekend.
    Unexpectedly Cassi had been asked to the prom by Tim Bartholomew, one of the more popular boys in the school. He’d talked with Cassi on a number of occasions following a physics class they shared. But he’d never asked Cassi out, so the invitation came as a total surprise. The thrill of going out with a desirable boy to the biggest social event of the year was almost too much for Cassi to bear.
    Cassi’s father was the first to hear the good news. As a rather dry professor of geology at Columbia University, he didn’t share the same enthusiasm as Cassi but was pleased she was happy.
    Cassi’s mother was less enthusiastic. Coming in from the kitchen, she told Cassi that she could go to the prom but had to come home instead of going to the breakfast.
    “They don’t cook for diabetics at such affairs,” said Mrs. Cassidy, “and as far as going to the shore for the weekend, that is completely out of the question.”
    Not expecting this negative response, Cassi was ill-prepared to deal with it. She protested through tears that she’d demonstrated adequate responsibility toward her medicine and diet and that she should be allowed to go.
    Mrs.