- Code Orange (novel)
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Code Orange (ISBN 0385732597, 2005) is a young adult novel by Caroline B. Cooney. It is about a teen boy who lives in New York City by the name of Mitchell "Mitty" Blake who is care-free, and does not worry much about his grades or school. His biology teacher Mr. Lynch assigns a report on an infectious disease. Mitty has no idea what virus he should research, but when his parents take him to their home in the countryside of Connecticut and find old medical books from 1899, Boston, he discovers something that will change his life forever. He finds an old envelope containing scabs from variola major (a severe form of smallpox) from an epidemic in 1902. He inhales dust from one of the scabs which have crumbled as he handles them, without thinking about the consequences. In the next chapter he finds out that he has lost one of the scabs that he was going to use as part of his project to improve his grade. Through the course of the book he begins to think that he has actually acquired smallpox and has the symptoms, which leads to him posting questions online about smallpox. Consequently this interests the wrong sort of people and he is kidnapped, after attempting suicide to make sure he doesn't start the smallpox epidemic all over again, by terrorists who want the precious scabs to infect the U.S. He then fakes the symptoms of smallpox in order to bring the terrorists to his room so he can trap them. In the end, Mitty is rescued, and finds out that he does not have smallpox, but must be put in the hospital after the injuries he suffers from the assault his kidnappers placed upon him. But everything works out all right and at the end of the book the author implies that Mitty and his close friend Olivia will get together and be a couple.
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