Extraordinary Means (13 page)

“He gets like that sometimes,” Nick told me. “He’ll snap out of it in a day or two and won’t stop bothering us to listen to whatever new song he’s written.”

So Nick and I went up to his room and played this vampire-killing game that I, uh, sucked at. I suggested we play something else, but Nick insisted I just had to get the hang of it.

“Are you really getting dressed up for the thing tonight?” he asked as his avatar loaded a crossbow.

“If we’re all doing it,” I said with a shrug.

“You just go along with everything Sadie wants, don’t you?” Nick challenged.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

On the screen, his guy killed three vamps at once. I had a theory there was some extra button he pressed to do that, but I didn’t want to ask.

“You could have your pick of girls at Latham, you know,” Nick said angrily.

“Whatever,” I said, because he couldn’t be serious. But apparently he was.

“Come on. Any one of those girls in our French class would let you butter their croissant.”

“‘Butter their croissant’?” I repeated.

“Whatever you want to call it,” Nick said. “Any of them would be interested. Except you’re only interested in Sadie. It’s fucking unfair.”

I was about to say,
Unfair to whom?
and then I got it. Maybe
Sadie
was just friends with Nick, but the feeling wasn’t mutual.

“I thought you two were just friends,” I said.

Nick killed another vampire before answering.

“For now. That’s how it always starts out with me. It’s a long con.”

Except we both knew it wasn’t.

“Do what you want,” Nick said. “I’m just saying, there are other options, and probably more likely ones, if you want to get laid.”

“But none of them are Sadie,” I said.

“No, none of them are Sadie,” Nick said.

And then one of the vampires got to me, and my avatar fell to the ground, twitching, as Nick smirked.

I DIDN’T KNOW
why my mom had packed a tie and dress shirt, but she had, and thankfully, it wasn’t too wrinkled. Despite his complaining, Nick put on a tweed vest with a watch chain, and I found him in the hall bathroom frantically combing pomade into his hair and muttering. Even Charlie got into it, wearing a blazer and a scarf and eyeliner, which Nick called “a sad tribute to David Bowie.”

“You can David Blow Me,” Charlie retorted. “At least I’m not cosplaying as Professor Slughorn.”

I tried not to laugh. We were on the porch with pillows under our arms and blankets shoved into our backpacks, waiting for the girls.

“Who’s cosplaying?” Marina asked, waving.

“Well, if it isn’t Audrey Hepburn,” Charlie said, and Marina struck a pose.

She was wearing this black dress and long white gloves, and she looked fantastic. But then I spotted Sadie, and I
almost forgot how to breathe.

She had on this green dress that was like something from an old photo, and her hair was curled, and she was wearing heels. She looked like one of the models from those pictures she scrolled through on the internet, girls too perfect to be real.

Except she was real. And she was walking toward me. She stared at me, this wonderful smile rising to her lips, and I don’t know that I’d ever seen someone so beautiful.

“Wow,” I said.

And then she whacked me with the pillow she was holding. I went to hit her back with mine, but she squealed and ducked away, begging me not to ruin her hair. While we walked over to the gym, I kept jokingly raising my pillow, and she kept saying, “Don’t do it!” And I kept teasing, “I’m gonna do it!” and I’m sure we annoyed the hell out of everyone.

I’d never been in the gym before. It was your average high school gymnasium. The bleachers had been pushed back, and everyone was in their pajamas and sweats, with blankets and pillows spread on the floor.

A bunch of people gave us odd looks about our clothes, but Sadie just laughed.

“They wish they thought of it,” she whispered to me.

And I wished I was wearing a T-shirt instead of a tie, but I didn’t say that.

We spread our things in the very back, making a patchwork out of our blankets and pillows. A nurse I didn’t
recognize came by and smiled at us.

“Don’t you all look darling,” she said, and then she gave us packs of organic fruit snacks and chocolate milk cartons, like we were five.

I stared down at the fruit snacks in dismay.

“No popcorn?” I asked.

“You wouldn’t be able to hear the movie over all the coughing,” Marina said. “Although check out the water bottles.”

She was right. There were a lot of suspicious-looking Nalgene bottles being passed around.

“Speaking of,” Nick said, unzipping his backpack and pulling out a bunch of apple juice boxes. It was one of the annoyingly healthy snacks that they sold in the commissary, and I’d never understood why anyone would want them.

The juice box Nick passed me had been tampered with; there was a piece of tape over the hole. I stared at him questioningly, and he rolled his eyes like it was obvious.

“I modified them,” he said.

I poked my straw in and cautiously took a sip of what turned out to be vodka apple juice. Very strong vodka apple juice. I coughed, not expecting it.

“You’ll get used to it,” Charlie told me, laughing.

I took another sip, and now that I was prepared, it wasn’t half-bad.

“Stop moving, you’re ruining it.” Sadie pouted at Nick.

She’d brought her camera, and she kept taking pictures
of us, then giggling and showing them to Marina. She told me to come over to where she was sitting, so I did.

“Smile,” she said, putting her face next to mine. And then she held the camera at arm’s length, snapping a selfie. She turned the camera around so I could see.

It was a perfect close-up of the two of us, Sadie smiling wide in her fancy dress, and me in a shirt and tie, my hair on point for once. In the background, you could just make out the wall of the old gym, with its faded pennant from when Whitley Prep had qualified for some basketball league. It was exactly like the photos everyone from my high school had put up. Exactly like Hannah’s picture, come to think of it. We looked like we were having a great time, and we could have been anywhere. Even at a homecoming dance.

“This is great,” I said.

“I thought you could put it on Facebook. To document your new life after being evicted from your old one.”

“It’s perfect,” I said. And it was. The joke of putting it online was too good, of it looking like something it wasn’t. Of us looking like something I wanted us to be. Or, I guess, a lot of things I wanted us to be.

“That’s why I had everyone dress up,” she said, except she grinned like she was kidding, so I couldn’t quite tell. “The whole thing was just an excuse for a photo I wanted you to have.”

A nurse I didn’t recognize finished setting up the projector, and the lights dimmed and the movie started.
Ferris
Bueller’s Day Off.
It was a good movie, and I’d seen it before, so I didn’t have to pay attention too closely.

We all snuck sips from our juice boxes. I’d had a few beers at some of the Model UN overnights, but never hard alcohol. I hadn’t exactly pictured my first time drinking vodka to be at a pajama party, out of a juice box, while wearing a shirt and tie, but I guessed it was a good story. I didn’t have a lot of stories, but ever since I’d arrived at Latham, it seemed I was collecting them.

I wasn’t used to drinking, and the vodka kept making me cough. If we’d been anywhere besides Latham, we probably would have been busted. But that night, whenever one of us would cough, we all grinned like it was a private joke.

I was lying on my stomach with my elbows in my pillow. On the screen, Ferris Bueller claimed he was Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago, and everyone laughed. The room was spinning gently, I supposed from the alcohol, and even though it was a dumb chaperoned event full of sick kids in their pajamas, it was one of the best nights I’d had in a long time.

I was there with the right group of friends, and we were up to a small, ridiculous act of mischief, and I never once worried that I should have been at home studying instead of out watching a movie.

About halfway through the film, Sadie scooted her blanket closer to mine.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi,” I whispered back.

“Mind if I watch from here?” she asked, and then she put her pillow right next to mine and settled in.

It was dark in the gym, and it was just the five of us, sitting apart from everyone else. Something about Sadie lying there felt more intimate than any of the other times we’d watched a movie. I was mesmerized by the curve of her bare back in that dress, and she was so pretty that I didn’t know where to begin.

I propped myself on one elbow, facing her instead of the screen, and she copied me.

“Sorry it’s not a real dance,” she whispered.

“That’s okay, it’s a real gym.”

“And you didn’t stand me up.”

“I’d never do that.”

Sadie smiled at me, and it felt like she was holding the universe together.

“I know,” she said.

After the movie ended, we walked back to the dorm. Nick was sulking and had polished off at least three juice boxes. I could feel Marina silently cheering as Sadie and I walked together and I carried both of our pillows. Charlie kept moaning about how he’d had to pee for, like, half the movie, and how it wasn’t funny, and could we please not make him laugh unless we wanted to be personally responsible for the consequences, which would be pee.

There were twenty minutes before lights-out, hardly
enough time for anything, but I’d consumed a juice box full of alcohol while wearing a shirt and tie, so the weirdness of that night was already out of my hands.

Charlie beelined for Cottage 6, and Nick followed.

“Um, I’ll see you later,” Marina said with a yawn, heading back toward the girls’ dorm.

And then it was just Sadie and me standing on the grass, with me awkwardly clutching our pillows.

“Why don’t we put these down?” Sadie suggested, so I dropped them on the porch swing, and then we stood there wondering what came next.

Everyone streamed around us in their pajamas, talking and laughing in this excited but exhausted way, and it felt so strongly like we were at summer camp. Like we’d never left but had grown old there separately, and had only now found each other again.

“Wanna take a walk?” I asked.

“A promenade,” Sadie said, giggling. “Come, fair gentleman, let us take a turn about the garden.”

She rested her hand on my arm, and we walked toward the gazebo.

“Nope,” I said, steering her away. “That’s a sad place. We don’t go there.”

“That’s okay, I have a better idea.”

“You always have a better idea,” I teased.

“I can’t tell if that’s a compliment,” she said, and then she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the woods.

The moon wasn’t quite full, but it was still bright enough to see by. It had been a long time since I’d been in the woods at night, and they seemed to twist around me, to chirp and hum and vibrate from every direction.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Shhhh, we’re time traveling.”

Sadie bent down to take off her heels, and then she stepped ahead of me, in that green dress with the achingly low back, her spine pale in the moonlight as she pulled me deeper into the woods.

“We’re here,” she said, stopping suddenly.

“Where?”

“Camp Griffith, four summers ago. The night of the dance.”

Behind her was an enormous rock, like the legendary one from camp. I laughed at the reference.

“You brought the rock all the way here?” I joked.

“Yes, I did,” she said seriously. “Because I’ve considered it and have concluded that the make-out rock is the most romantic place in the world to have a first kiss.”

“Well,” I said. “Who am I to argue with the world’s most romantic time-traveling rock?”

I was awestruck by my good fortune, and by this profoundly gorgeous girl who was staring at me in the moonlight. And then she stepped forward, and her lips parted mine, and nothing else mattered. Not that we were sick and might never get better, not that we’d missed so much and
would miss more still, and not that the band around her wrist wasn’t a corsage but a med sensor.

The world melted, and it was just us, in the woods, our mouths pressed together as we found the kiss that had been waiting for us since we were thirteen.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” I said.

“I guess now I have your TB,” she joked.

“I guess now I have your first kiss.”

“Took you long enough,” Sadie said, biting her lip and staring up at me. “There’s a second kiss with your name on it, too, but it’ll have to wait or we’ll be late for lights-out.”

And even though I could have stayed there forever, her hand grabbed mine, and we hurried back through the woods toward the soft, warm glow of the cottages.

I COULDN
’
T SLEEP
after we got back from the woods. I lay awake under the too-warm covers, my whole body thrumming in the aftermath of that kiss. I felt the ghost of where his lips had been, and remembered the pressure of his hand on my back, the smell of his soap, the way his mouth had tasted faintly of apples.

I didn’t care that I’d promised myself I’d stay away from Latham boys, that I’d rolled my eyes whenever I saw other couples sneak off toward the woods or duck behind buildings to engage in Latham’s favorite pastime. I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted to tiptoe over to Cottage 6 in my pajamas, and push open the door to Lane’s room, and crawl under the covers with him so the feeling of our lips touching never had to end.

Kissing Lane was like the first time you hear a song that you’ll listen to on repeat a hundred times. It was like the first spoonful of ice cream of the whole cup. But mostly, it was
the strange and lovely experience of something being even better than I’d imagined.

What were the odds that out of the 150 of us at Latham, there’d be a boy whose smile did flippy things to my stomach, and who liked me back, and who made jokes about Harry Potter? And what were the odds that it would be a boy I’d known, and had wrongly despised, for years?

I’d been at Latham long enough that I no longer quite believed in second chances, but in the moments before I drifted off to sleep that night, I wondered if maybe Lane was the miracle Latham had promised, and if that miracle would be big enough.

Lane was waiting on the porch the next morning. He bounded out of the glider when he saw me, this big, goofy grin on his face. His hair was wet from the shower, and he was wearing these horrible athletic shorts with a giant Aeropostale logo on the leg.

“Really?” I said, making a face at the shorts.

“Hey, you already kissed me. No take-backs,” he joked, and then he leaped down the porch steps two at a time.

It was just a small thing, but it struck me how much healthier he looked than when he’d arrived. How the nurse never seemed to stay in his room very long when we hid our phones during lights-out, and how he rolled his eyes after a coughing fit, instead of struggling to catch his breath.

I wondered what I’d do if he left,
when
he left, without me. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to him, since I never seemed
that sick. And I wasn’t. Month after month, my X-rays and blood tests came back the same. And I didn’t know which change would be more terrifying, the death sentence I’d been dreading since sophomore year, or the ticket home to a life I’d missed far too much of to ever fully recover, and a world that would always treat me as an outsider if they knew.

All I knew was that Lane was smiling at me, and even if it wasn’t too late to back away, I wouldn’t have been able to.

“So, can I walk you to breakfast?” Lane asked.

He looked so earnest, and so excited about walking with me to the dining hall that I had to laugh.

“This plan of yours will never work, you know,” I told him.

“What plan?”

“This plan to fatten me up and feed me to the circus elephants.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “In the meantime, pancakes?”

“In the meantime, pancakes.”

And then I took the porch steps two at a time, copying him, and pretending it didn’t make my chest ache.

I HADN
’
T THOUGHT
that breakfast would be weird or different that morning, but I could feel people staring as Lane and I waited in line. Staring at
us
. At first, I thought something horrible must have happened, but Nick and Charlie
were at the front of the line, and I’d seen Marina in the bathroom ten minutes ago, trying to even out her gel liner.

“What’s going on?” Lane whispered, confused.

“Your shorts are just that terrible,” I said, reaching for the muffin tray.

“I’ve got it.” He held it out to me with a flourish.
“Mademoiselle, quelque chose du sucre?”

I melted into a puddle, and when I was done melting, he was still there, and still smiling at me from behind the platter of lopsided cafeteria muffins.

“I can’t ever tell if the droopy ones taste better or worse,” I said.

“So much better,” Lane said. “Droopy muffins for the win.”

“That would be an awesome insult,” I said. “‘Don’t go out with her, she has a droopy muffin.’”

We laughed, and behind us, someone huffed impatiently. It was Angela. She narrowed her eyes at me.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Take your time,” Angela said, smiling sweetly. “I just wanted to remind you both that it’s impossible to walk with the Lord when you’re lying down.”

For a second, I had no idea what she was talking about, and then I burst out laughing.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “Thank you for calling me a slut in New Testament. That’s super nice of you.”

I glanced over at Lane, who was still holding the muffin
tray and trying so hard not to laugh that he was red in the face.

Angela spluttered but didn’t say anything else. I made sure to take extra long in the line just to annoy her. I caught some of the other girls from French class staring at us as well, and then I realized.

Everyone had been at the movies last night. They’d all seen Lane and me flirting and holding hands and lying next to each other in our blanket nest, and they’d watched as we’d disappeared into the woods together. I hadn’t considered what it looked like—like we’d done much more than we actually had, and like we were being obvious about it, wanting everyone to know what we were up to. And I hadn’t realized quite how many girls had been set on Lane until they were glaring at us from behind their yogurt bowls, eyes narrowed in resentment.

When Lane and I got to our table, he hesitated, then switched to the empty seat next to mine. He kept bumping my leg under the table with his, which was the cutest thing ever.

I expected Nick to sulk about it, like he’d been doing ever since the Starbucks trip, but thankfully, he was too hungover to do anything besides groan and attempt the world’s tiniest forkfuls of eggs.

“You need to drink some water,” Charlie told him.

Nick, who appeared not to have heard, swallowed thickly and lifted a forkful of eggs toward his mouth like
someone had dared him to eat a snail.

And then Marina rolled her eyes and imitated him, sending us all into hysterics.

IT WAS GORGEOUS
outside that morning. Indian summer. The sky was a cloudless blue, and it felt like the school year was almost over, instead of just beginning. It would have been a shame to go inside and waste one of the last warm days, so we stood around on the grass, trying to figure out what to do.

“We should go to the hill,” Marina finally suggested, so we did.

The hill was this slope on the far side of the lake with a view of the grounds. It wasn’t quite a hill, but that didn’t matter. Charlie brought his portable record player, and Marina brought a deck of cards, and we all had books in our bags, although Lane and I were the only ones who actually tried to read them.

We sat there all morning in the soft, warm grass, listening to Charlie’s collection of psychedelic pop records and teaching Lane how to play Egyptian Ratscrew.

Nick, who was apparently in agony, put his cardigan over his face and went to sleep. Charlie and Marina took turns dropping handfuls of grass onto his stomach and laughing when he finally woke up and noticed.

It was so wonderful, the five of us sitting there, and I wanted every day to be like this. To be us, in the sunshine,
in no hurry to be anywhere else.

After a while, Lane and I took a walk down to the lake. There was a single paddleboat at the water’s edge. It was chained there, half-sunken and rotting away.

“That is one sad metaphor of a boat,” Lane said, pointing at it.

“You’re right. It’s a metaphor, which is like a simile,” I joked, and he playfully shoved me.

“You’re going in the lake,” he warned.

“You’re coming with me,” I promised, even though he was so much taller he could probably pick me up and toss, like I was a Frisbee.

“I’ll take my chances,” he said, menacing toward me, and I shrieked and ran up the little slope to the nearest bench, trying not to cough.

He sat down next to me, looking contrite.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wouldn’t really throw you in the lake.”

“Except as a metaphor.” I couldn’t resist.

“Oh, you’re really gonna get it.”

And then Lane was kissing me again, his hand cupping the side of my face. They say your skin is the largest organ in your body, but I’d never really appreciated that before, the way his fingertips slowly tracing the curve of my jaw could travel down the entire length of my body, covering me in goose bumps. The way he could make me feel flushed with
something that wasn’t a fever.

“Listen,” Lane said. “I want to ask you something.”

He cleared his throat nervously, and I was so afraid of what he might say that all sorts of terrible questions flashed through my brain.

“Would you go on a date with me?”

He looked so nervous about it, like he thought there was a chance I’d refuse.

“I think that would be okay,” I said.

He grinned triumphantly and scooped me onto his lap, and he was so tall and messy-haired and perfect, and he really was asking me out this time, it wasn’t some mean prank by the girls in my cabin.

“So, where are we going on this illustrious date?” I asked. “The dining hall? The library?”

“I was thinking Fall Fest,” he said. “Next Friday night?”

I had no idea what he was talking about. Latham didn’t have a Fall Fest. We had, like, decorative gourd painting and a screening of
Hocus Pocus
. And then I realized.

“You mean in Whitley?” I asked.

Lane nodded, holding back a grin.

“I remembered the flyers from when we were there last time.”

“What happened to Mr. There Are a Hundred Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Go to Town and I Will Stubbornly Stand Here Listing Them All?” I asked.

“Well,” Lane said, “I realized that was no way to impress a girl.”

THE REST OF
the week was the way summer camp should have been. The way my life should have gone four years ago, if only either of us had been brave enough or bold enough to say hello back then. It was a week of board games on the porch, and frozen fruit bars from the commissary, and trading flash drives full of music. We read paperbacks on our stomachs in the grass after dinner, and watched the sun set over the lake, and ducked into the woods to kiss.

Every night on the phone, we’d read each other the funny parts from our books, or talk about the TV shows we’d watched as kids, or what we would do if we were really there in each other’s beds, except mostly joking. We said absurd things, like how I’d suck the back of his knee, or he’d run his toes through my hair, and pretended they sounded amazing.

The warm weather was gone by Friday, and that evening was foggy and cold. I had to abandon the cute dress I was going to wear in favor of jeans and my green parka. When Lane picked me up, he was wearing this black fleece jacket zipped up to his chin, and I joked that he looked like a Dracula.

“A Dracula?” he asked. “Like, one of the many Draculas?”

“Shut up.”

“I vont to suck your . . . type A blood. The other Dracula, over there, he is interested in type B,” Lane went on, in this ridiculous Count Chocula voice.

“Oh my God, I’m gonna kill you!” I said, laughing.

We set off into the woods. I was in charge of navigating us down to Whitley, and at one point Lane looked around, confused.

“I remembered it being that way,” he said, pointing.

We’d veered a little farther west than I’d thought and were almost at the place where I usually met Michael. He was pointing even more west, which wasn’t right.

“It’s this way,” I said, and explained where we were.

“So, you just picked a random point in the woods to meet some strange dude?”

“
I
didn’t pick it,” I said, and I explained about how Phillip had run the black market before Nick. I inherited it, and anyway, he and Michael were like half cousins or something.

We were almost there, and I took out my bag of cough drops and passed one to Lane.

“Do these actually work?” he asked.

“Yes, and you’re cured now,” I teased. “You’re welcome.”

“How can I ever thank you?”

Lane got this mischievous grin on his face and pulled me toward him for a kiss that tasted like cherry medicine. And then his hands were in my hair, and his tongue was against mine, and I accidentally swallowed my cough drop.

It wasn’t much farther into town, and when we got there, the main street looked so festive with lights in the trees and all the shop windows decorated for fall. The street was blocked off to traffic, and crowded with booths, and a jazz band of old dudes was playing in the old gazebo.

There were rides, too, a miniature Ferris wheel, and a giant slide, and a chair swing. It reminded me of the county fair, and how I used to go with my mom and sister, enviously watching as other girls my age roamed around in friend groups.

“Reminds me of my school carnival,” Lane said with a lopsided grin.

“Fancy school,” I teased.

He shrugged.

“I never went to the thing, anyway. They always had teachers in the dunking booth.”

I didn’t know what he meant at first, but then I remembered how he’d said his dad taught at his school.

“Then we have to make up for all the carnivals you missed,” I said, dragging him toward the line for ride tickets.

Everything was pretty expensive, so we just got tickets for the swing ride.

“You have to try and grab my hand while we’re in the air,” I said. “That’s the rule.”

“What do I win if I do?” Lane asked.

“A wish,” I promised.

It was exhilarating going on the ride and lifting into the
air, my feet dangling beneath me. You could see a lot from up there, the road that led to Latham, the bell tower through the trees, and the neat yards of the houses in town. It was strange seeing both worlds at once: mine, and the real one.