Abby looked down and nearly tripped over a white plastic ten-gallon bucket. It was sitting on the floor and overflowing with gray fetuses. They were pressed from the same mold: skin smooth, eyes closed, mouths open, tiny hands bunched into fists. Piled in the bucket without rhyme or reason, they looked like hairless kittens, heavy and sleek.
When we were in tenth grade our biology class took a field trip to the gross anatomy lab at the local medical school. I’m not sure who thought this was a good idea, but we loaded up in buses and before you knew it we were standing in a room with 14 partially dissected human cadavers on tables listening to an old doctor make cracks about peeling off faces and fiddling around with corpse fingers. It was intense. At one point, I backed up to put a little distance between myself and the guy laid open from his chin to his pubic bone in front of me because it’s one thing to see a dead body in a movie and another thing to see their thick toenails and the hair in their nostrils up close, and I tripped over something on the floor. It was one of those ten gallon plastic buckets and inside were about a dozen fetuses. That moment always stuck with me, and when I got to the part of the book where Gretchen had to do something to frame Abby and discredit her in front of everyone, my editor and I got in a fight. At first I had Gretchen use a severed arm stolen from a grave, then I tried a head, and a few other bits and pieces. I had a great, and sick, idea about desecrating the corpse of Major’s mother and using it as part of a Halloween display on his front yard, but my editor kept rejecting it. “These aren’t right,” he told me, over and over again. “It needs something better. I’ve seen this all before.” I got pissed off and I thought, “You want something you haven’t seen before? How about a bucket of dead babies?” He loved it. That’s when I realized he was the right editor for me.
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When I read this I thought to myself “this is a weirdly specific thing, I’m willing to bet he went to a morgue and for some reason they had a bucket of fetuses.”