Code Orange (novel)

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. Mitty 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 then his parents take him to their home in the countryside of Connecticut. There he finds old medical books from 1902, Boston and 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 him knowing it. Later, 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. 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. After he attempts suicide to make sure he doesn't start the smallpox epidemic all over again, Mitty is kidnapped by terrorists who want the precious scabs to infect the U.S. He then fakes the symptoms of smallpox to bring the terrorists to his room to trap them. In the end, Mitty is rescued and finds out that he does not have smallpox. Even so, he must be put in the hospital for the injuries he suffers from the assault his kidnappers placed upon him. Still, everything works out all right, and at the end of the book it is implied that Mitty and his close friend Olivia will get together and be a couple.