Anton's Odyssey Read Online Free Page B

copy for you and one for your brother. Be sure to tell your mother if she doesn’t take her drug test by T minus one hour, she will be escorted off the ship.”
    “What’s all this for?” I asked, “I think we had our regular doctor sign a form that said we’re not contagious or nothing.”
    “Standard procedure,” she said, “required by law for continuity and portability of medical care for all minors during prolonged star travel.”
    We worked on Cotton’s form first. Most of it I didn’t understand such as whether or not Cotton was menstruating. I answered all questions I didn’t understand in the negative. A few I could comprehend. “Do you have blood in your stool?” I asked.
    “What’s that?” Cotton asked.
    “Do you make bloody poops?” I clarified.
    Cotton giggled. “Let’s say I do to play a joke on the doctor.”
    “You sure?” I asked. It didn’t seem like a good idea to me.
    “Yeah ,” he snickered, so against my better judgment I checked, “yes.”
    I handed the tablet back to the medical assistant. She asked us for our pocket modules and downloaded our medical records onto the clinic’s computer system.
    I gave Mary my mother’s document. She read it and rolled her eyes. “Tell your mother she need not bother with the drug test,” she croaked. “She pretty much has all her bases covered.”
    We sat back down, and within ten minutes Mary told me to follow her. It was the shortest wait I ever had at a clinic. Usually, I waited hours. Cotton followed like a loyal puppy. “Just Anthony!” she snapped at Cotton. “The doctor will see you one at a time.”
    Mary made me take off my shoes and sit on a chair built onto an elevated podium. A med-bot wheeled over, squeezed my arm to take my blood pressure, and pressed a soft probe against my temple to get my pulse and temperature. Billy once told me that in the olden days they used to stick a hard glass thermometer up your butt, and I was really glad they didn’t do that anymore. The chair recorded my weight. The robot scanned me with a laser, adjusting my weight for the clothes I was wearing and estimated my standing height. Mary herded me into an exam room and told me the doctor would be with me shortly. I sat on the exam table for about five minutes wondering if the doctor was going to ask me to take out my dong and turn my head and cough. The door opened as someone knocked on it. The doctor entered. “Hello,” he said, “I am Doctor Zanders.”
    His attire reaffirmed the derogatory comments made earlier by the two crewmembers outside the ship. Though short and wimpy, the doctor was obviously a space marine. He had an unfashionably short hairdo and wore forest green camos as if some commanding general had ordered him to go out into the woods to search for my long lost mother as she rocked back and forth and cried in her red jumpsuit-pup-tent. He had a little pin on his front pocket with the same coiling snakes that were on my mother’s medical document, which I guessed authorized him to do doctor stuff like ask to see your dong.
    He looked at me, frowned, and said, “You are supposed to have a parent or legal guardian with you during the examination.” He walked over to a desk, turned on a small computer and swiveled the video monitor around so that he could look at me and at the display at the same time.
    “Ye s, I know,” I said. “All the doctors tell me that.”
    “Your p arents do this often?” he asked. “Send you to the doctor all by yourself?”
    “Pretty much every time,” I said.
    “You have a brother, right?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I said, “he’s in the waiting room right now as we speak.”
    “When your brother is sick, does he go to the clinic all alone?”
    “No, usually I take him.”
    Th e doctor scratched his chin and was silent for a while as he contemplated a thought. “How would you like, in terms of medical care and medical care only, to be an emancipated minor with durable power of attorney