Extraordinary Means (15 page)

I HATED THAT
there was a voice in the back of my head telling me it wasn’t true, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t quite believe that protocillin was real. All I could think about were the last two times scientists had claimed they’d created a serum that cured tuberculosis:

The first time, one of the guys on Nick’s hall had found it on the internet and printed out the
Daily Mail
article, and it was all over Latham by dinner. Except it turned out to be a hoax. A researcher in Korea had faked the data, and the next morning there were at least a dozen articles accusing him of fraud. That was during my sixth month at Latham House. And then, a few months later, rumors had spread about a new super drug. I’d let myself hope, only to be disappointed again when it failed miserably in lab testing.

So I didn’t want to get my hopes up for protocillin. Even if it did seem real this time. Even if it was all over the news that afternoon.

I stood around the common room with everyone else, glued to the television as reports trickled in that a group of scientists at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania had developed a first-line treatment for the previously total-drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. That this was the first new tuberculosis treatment in fifty years, and the first major medical breakthrough to treat an infectious disease in what doctors were now definitively calling the post-antibiotic era.

Someone would switch the channel, and it would be another report, about how patients and carers at long-term treatment facilities would receive the initial course of protocillin, and how vaccinations were being developed for the general public.

They were the first news reports about tuberculosis that I could remember where the correspondents didn’t look worried as they explained that the contagious illness known as TDR-TB had been declared an epidemic by the CDC two years ago, with more than 280,000 active cases reported across the United States alone this year. If anything, they looked hopeful, like the disaster was behind us, and the scare was almost over.

October was coming to a close, and I’d been at Latham House for seventeen months. I’d missed the end of my sophomore year of high school. I’d celebrated my sixteenth birthday in the hospital playing Uno with my mom and sister while they wore surgical masks, and I’d been at Latham for almost a year and a half, longer than nearly everyone.

I wasn’t sure I knew how to leave Latham. I’d never let myself think for certain that I would, or when that might be. Except now everyone was saying we’d be home by January. I didn’t know how to feel about any of it, or even what I was feeling, just that I was overwhelmed.

No one said much of anything at dinner. We were all too busy thinking about what had just happened, and what it meant to have our futures slip back into place while we were sitting quietly at our desks, trying not to cough all over our notebooks. We were no longer incurably ill, and for so many of us that had been our defining thing for so long.

It had hurt to accept what was wrong with me, but it hurt even more to have hope.

I didn’t want protocillin to be real because I didn’t want to go home to the dreary, unappealing life I’d left behind. I wanted Latham to stay Latham forever, for us to have a million more days of playing cards in the sunshine, and a million more nights of whispering into the phone and knowing that when I woke up, Lane would be waiting on my porch, his hair still wet from the shower.

Latham was my Hogwarts, and protocillin was the cure for my magic. It would turn me into a Muggle again, one who had to worry about standardized testing and mean girls and tardy slips.

After we bused our trays, Lane and I walked down to the lake. He kept glancing at me shyly, like he thought I wouldn’t notice, and then he reached out and grabbed my
hand. We walked like that down to the far edge of the lake, with the sunken boat, and lay on our stomachs in the grass.

I looked over at Lane, at the nearly invisible white hairs that dusted his earlobes, at the freckle on the center of his neck, at how absolutely thrilled he seemed, and I told myself to quelch this weird darkness that was twisting inside of me. So when he smiled and nudged me with his sneaker, I nudged back, forcing away my traitorous despair.

We had the perfect view of Latham across the water. The half-moon of the cottages, the collegiate-looking classrooms, the dining hall with its stained-glass windows, the bell tower atop the gymnasium, and just a white corner of the medical building.

“Do you think Latham’s going to shut down?” I asked.

“Probably,” Lane said. “Maybe it’ll become a boarding school again and the students will tell ghost stories about the kids who died here.”

“Maybe it’ll become some terrible artists’ colony with a bunch of nude ladies painting fruit,” I suggested, not entirely kidding.

Lane shook his head, smiling.

“We’ll have to visit and check,” he said. “We can get butterbeer lattes and everything.”

I tried not to let my smile falter as I told him that sounded great.

“You live where again? Calabasas?” he asked, and I nodded. “That’s, like, eighty-five miles. It’s nothing. I’ll be
at your doorstep with bagels every Saturday morning.”

“I didn’t know you had a car.”

“Oh, yeah. My dad’s old Honda. It’s covered in a million political bumper stickers, but it has spirit.”

I smiled at the thought of him pulling up outside our condo, and us driving to the beach or one of the canyons to have a breakfast picnic. It sounded so wonderful, like something I’d dreamed up. But part of me was afraid it wouldn’t work. That he’d make the trip once or twice, to be polite, and then he’d make excuses.

“I can’t believe we’re talking about this,” I said. “About being home two months from now, and you showing up at my door.”

“Well, I’d text first,” he said.

The absurdity of having phones again, and being able to text each other, made me giggle.

“It’s so weird to think about any of it. About going back to high school,” I said.

“Well it’s even weirder to think about college,” Lane said. “I hadn’t really wanted to get my hopes up, you know, before.”

He went on to explain how he’d been afraid that Stanford wouldn’t grant him housing, and that Dr. Barons might say he wasn’t fit for full-time study, and that he’d get sick again and have to drop out. But protocillin would change all that. Our lungs would suck, so we’d never be marathon runners or anything, but we’d live.

I wished I was more excited about it, but all I could think was that I was going home for what should have been my last semester of senior year, to a school I’d left as a sophomore. I was pretty sure I’d be held back, since I doubted I could keep up with kids who’d taken precalc and chemistry. I’d be remedial, when I used to make the honor roll. I didn’t have my driver’s license, or even a permit. I hadn’t taken the SATs, or even started to study for them.

None of those things had been a part of my world for so long that it was terrifying to find them rushing back toward me.

My mom’s new boyfriend, whom I’d never met but who my sister said was nice, apparently stayed over all the time. It weirded me out to think that there was some guy around who wasn’t Dad. That the world hadn’t been put on hold, and things had changed, and an accountant named Drew had filled our fridge with protein shakes.

Lane and I had only a few more weeks together before everything changed. A few more weeks to be the Latham versions of ourselves. And I was determined to make them count, to enjoy the last scraps of happiness while I could still pick them out of the rubble.

I was certain that I wouldn’t be cool and offbeat the way I was at Latham. The girl with the red lipstick and tough boots, who talked back to the French teacher and made a joke out of the cafeteria rules. The girl with the camera and contraband, always sneaking away with her friends like they
were up to no good, always laughing the loudest and giving the impression that even alone in my room I was doing something interesting. All of that would be gone, whoosh, and I’d be the weird new girl who’d been out sick for so long that everyone had forgotten about her, even her family.

MY MOM CRIED
, although I could hear her smiling through the tears. She told me that my room was waiting for me, and that she’d wash the sheets before I got home, like my sheets had gotten up to all sorts of nefarious business while I was away. She said we’d go for tacos, and she couldn’t wait for me to meet Drew, and Erica had a gymnastics meet right before Christmas, and I just
had
to see her floor routine. She sounded so happy that I went along with it, because from the way she was rambling, I had the impression that she’d prepared herself a long time ago never to need to wash those sheets.

I HAD AN
appointment with Dr. Barons on Thursday, so he could change the battery in my med sensor. It needed to be swapped out every couple of months, and the whole process made me feel like a robot. I’d had the sensor for so long that for the few moments when it was off my wrist, I felt untethered, like something was missing.

When I was younger I’d had this star necklace I used to wear, which I never took off, not even to shower. My dad had given it to me. I’d unclasped it the night my parents
told me they were getting a divorce, and I overheard them whispering about the truth; that my dad loved some woman from his office, apparently more than he loved us, because he’d rather be with her than his family. For the next week, I’d reach up to grab my star necklace, forgetting not just that I’d taken it off, but that I was no longer my father’s North Star, and he no longer wanted to find his way home.

Apparently, I’d been lost in thought, because Dr. Barons was like, “I’m going to need to put that back on you, sweetheart.”

“Oh, sorry.”

I held out my wrist, watching as he took out a tiny wrench and screwed on the plate that kept it shut. He smiled at me reassuringly, fiddling with the clasp. He screwed the back panel into place, but the green light didn’t turn on, and he made a face.

“Hmmm. Let me reset it,” he said, taking a paper clip out of his pocket and inserting the end of it into one of the tiny holes on the side of my med sensor. He held it there until something clicked, and then the green light flicked on.

“These things shut off sometimes,” he explained. “Just need a reset to get them going again.”

“Yep, Gatsby should be able to spot me now,” I said, and Dr. Barons smiled at me distractedly.

“All set.” Dr. Barons took out his tablet, making sure I was back online. But then he furrowed his brow at the data.

“Everything okay?” I asked, hopping off the exam table.

“Your temperature’s a little high,” he said, scrolling down his tablet screen. “Heart rate, too.”

He swiveled toward the computer and typed something in, pulling up a series of X-rays and tabbing between them.

“Are those mine?” I asked.

Dr. Barons nodded, then pivoted toward me on the stool.

“Is anything wrong?” I asked.

Dr. Barons smiled at me.

“No, no . . . nothing that a dose of protocillin won’t fix.”

LATHAM HAD NEVER
felt more like a summer camp than it did in those first few days after news of the cure. Suddenly everyone was talking about the future and making jokes about adding each other on Facebook. Camp Latham was almost over, and everyone was getting overly nostalgic about even the smallest things.

Halloween was that Friday, and although Sadie had been joking about decorative gourd painting, I hadn’t quite believed her. But it turned out she hadn’t been kidding. The nurses set up tables outside the cottages and taped down about a million trash bags so we wouldn’t make a mess.

Charlie’s was a masterpiece, and Marina’s was a Dalek, which Nick flipped over and tried to copy while she glared at him. Of course mine, a lopsided ghost-thing, came out so badly that Sadie joked it was lucky I’d never taken an art class.

“Take that back!” I insisted, brandishing my paintbrush.

“Nope. The grade still stands. D-minus. Good-bye Stanford.”

I swiped my paintbrush at her, landing a dot on her cheek. She squealed and tried to wipe it off, but only smeared it bigger.

“You’re gonna get it now,” Sadie said, leaning over and painting an orange stripe down my nose.

And suddenly the five of us were in the middle of a paint fight, or, I guess, the four of us, while Charlie hovered protectively over his gourd, begging us not to wreck it.

His gourd, like many civilians in war, was a casualty.

“Exterminate?” Marina said innocently, holding her still-dripping paintbrush.

“Oh, I am going to
kill
you!” Charlie said, staring at his mauled gourd. And then he picked up his paintbrush and joined the fray.

When it finally ended, everyone was staring at us like we were crazy. And maybe we were. We were covered in paint and surrounded by smashed and sabotaged gourds. One of the nurses came over and got really angry about it, and I could still feel flakes of paint in my ear that night while we watched
Hocus Pocus
in the gym.

“This movie is so lame,” Sadie whispered, shaking her head.

“I loved it when I was little, though,” Marina said, and we all agreed that yeah, we’d loved it when we were kids.

Nick had booze for us again, but he said that was the last
of it until they restocked on Friday.

“We need some serious boozage for my birthday next Saturday,” Marina said, and Nick promised he had it covered.

Charlie had fallen asleep, and maybe it was the way he was curled around his pillow with his head thrown back, but his breathing sounded pretty ragged.

Is he okay?” I asked, nodding toward Charlie.

Nick peered over at him. “He’s fine. He always falls asleep during movies.”

“I think he stays up all night writing in that notebook,” Sadie said.

Nick nudged Charlie with his foot, and Charlie shifted, coughing a little in his sleep.

“Don’t eat the walrus, it’s poisoned,” he muttered, his left foot twitching.

“Yeah, he’s good,” Nick said.

We went back to watching the movie, which was pretty cheesy. It gave me flashbacks to the Year of the Gorilla Suit, which I couldn’t believe I’d told Sadie about. Way to seem cool, Lane. Way to make a girl fall in love with you.

Up ahead of us, these three girls in pajamas and drawn-on cat’s whiskers giggled at the screen, actually enjoying the movie. A group of boys eyed them. The boys were from Charlie’s floor, and they passed around a Nalgene bottle, coughing like they were swilling straight alcohol.

Next to me, Sadie sipped her juice box, our bare feet
tangled together. Her toenails were painted blue, and her hair was down and wet from the shower, and she was so beautiful that I didn’t know what I’d do when I couldn’t see her every day, when I had to fall asleep catching up on my AP coursework instead of catching up with her.

Sadie caught me staring and grinned.

“Hey, trick or treat?” she asked.

“Trick?” I said hopefully.

“Too bad, I only have a treat.”

She pressed the last fun-size Twix into my hand. I tore it open, and the chocolate oozed out, getting everywhere.

“It’s all melty,” I complained, and Sadie smiled sadly.

“Not even chocolate lasts forever,” she said.

CHARLIE REFUSED TO
hang out with us on Sunday night. He didn’t have the bridge right on his new song, he said. It wasn’t working, and no, he couldn’t just leave it, he’d lose the momentum.

So it was just Nick and me. Nick still wasn’t happy about my dating Sadie, but he was getting better about it. I guess it didn’t bother him as much now that we’d get out of here so soon. He talked constantly about how the girls back home would think he was so deep, and his biggest problem was going to be keeping up with all his ladies. I didn’t want to ruin his fantasy, so I nodded and said, yeah, totally.

That night, in a fit of nostalgia, Nick insisted that we play Mario Kart. Except he’d loaned his disc to Carlos from
the second floor, so we went down to try and get it back.

But Carlos couldn’t find it. We stood there in the doorway while he sifted through the endless crap in his drawers, looking for the thing.

“I swear I had it, like, this week,” he said. “Hold on. There’s only five places it would be.”

Carlos opened his wardrobe and started tossing stuff onto his bed, like he thought maybe he’d hung up Nick’s disc by accident.

Nick rolled his eyes over it.

“We could play something else,” I said. “You could show me the crossbow trick on that Blood Stakes game.”

And then we heard a shrill electronic beeping from another room. It sounded like an alarm clock, or a timer. Except louder, and somehow more foreboding.

Beep-beep-beep beeeeep! Beep-beep-beep beeeeep!

Nick and Carlos stiffened immediately.

“Shit,” Carlos said, letting the sweatshirt he was holding fall to the floor.

The beeping continued, and I wondered why no one turned it off, and why everyone was reacting so strangely.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Med sensor,” Nick said grimly.

My eyes met Nick’s. He looked afraid.

“Come on,” he said, yanking me into the hall.

The beeping continued. Other doors started to open, the residents of the second floor looking around. Some guys
from the third floor had come down the stairs and were poking their heads over the banister.

“Who is it?” someone asked.

An Asian kid in a towel pushed open the door to the bathroom, shampoo still in his hair.

“Chandler?” he called.

“Not me, dude,” a heavyset kid said.

“Shit,” Nick whispered. “The nurse is coming!”

Most of us were in the hallway at that point, rubbernecking, and Nurse Monica had to wade through it.

Med sensors went off only if your vitals spiked pretty badly, if you needed immediate medical attention. Most of the time anyone that sick was already staying in the medical building.

“Move!” she snapped. “You know better!”

“Where’s Charlie?” I said.

“Oh God,” Nick said, going pale.

The beeping was coming from Charlie’s room.

Nick and I started pushing to the front, and I couldn’t remember being more terrified. My heart was hammering, and I felt like I was going to throw up. It couldn’t be Charlie. It couldn’t be.

Nurse Monica banged open the door.

And there was Charlie, hunched over his desk, while two naked dudes went at it on his giant cinema display. From the huge bottle of lotion and his lack of pants, it was obvious what he was up to.

The entire hallway was in hysterics.

“Oh-oh,” Nurse Monica said. Clearly she’d been expecting a different kind of disaster.

“Fuck!” Charlie gasped. “Shut the door!”

“Yo, that’s dude on dude,” this guy Preston called out, thinking he was very astute.

“Gross! Turn it off!” someone yelled.

“More like turn it
on
!” someone else said.

“That’s enough!” Nurse Monica scolded. “Go away! Back to your rooms!”

And then she barged into Charlie’s room and shut the door.

I could hear her in there, trying to calm him down while he yelped, “Get away, oh my God, I’m fine!”

“That,” Nick said, “is probably my greatest fear.”

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.

“Oh, he’ll never live it down,” Nick said gleefully, and then he saw the look on my face. “Yeah, dude’s fine. He just jerked off so hard he triggered his med sensor.”

“I thought that was an urban legend.”

I mean, I’d never had that problem? And I’d assumed from the, uh, general activity on my hallway that it wasn’t a usual thing. I’d heard some guys joking about it, but I’d figured it was just one of those freak-out-the-new-kid things.

“Nah, it happens sometimes, if you’re, like, really going at it. The thing is not to rush. You’ve gotta get your heart rate down
just
enough—”

“Shut up,” I said.

“You’ve gotta do, like,
yoga
breathing,” he continued.

“Seriously, shut up.”

“Hey, I’m just giving you some free advice here,” he said. “So you don’t wind up being the next victim of the med sensor.”

“No offense, but I don’t want to think about you when I’ve got my dick in my hand.”

“Aha!” Nick accused. “Aha! So you and Sadie
haven’t
yet made the tiny little love muffins!”

I didn’t even know what to say in response. Or why Nick thought our love muffins were so tiny. Maybe we had massive love muffins. How did he know?

“This really
is
the darkest timeline,” I said, shaking my head as we walked back upstairs.

“Of course it is. We’re all sick virgins. Except for Charlie, who’s a sick gay virgin dumb enough to tilt his computer screen right at the freaking door,” Nick said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t want to be him tomorrow.”

FROM THE WAY
Charlie slunk into the dining hall the next morning, it was obvious he wanted to disappear. And I didn’t blame him. The guys in our dorm were still laughing over his misfortune, and I was pretty sure the story was about to make the rounds, if it hadn’t already.

“What’s going on?” Marina asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes at us.

“Nothing,” I said, shrugging. But Nick must have smirked, because Marina stared us down until he told her.

“Um, Charlie’s sensor went off last night,” Nick said, and then quickly took a huge bite of toast so he didn’t have to say anything else.

Marina gasped.

“Charlie, are you okay?” Sadie asked, looking concerned.

Charlie sank even lower in his seat, until his chin was level with the table. He looked awful, like he’d been up all night.

“Dontwannatalkboutit,” he mumbled.

That guy Preston sailed past our table.

“Hey, homo, hands where we can see ’em,” he called, laughing.

“Hey, Preston, you’re an asshole,” Nick called back.

Charlie put his head down on the table and sighed.

“Nick,” Sadie said, sounding stern. “Tell us right now.”

And so, laughing the entire time, Nick told them.

When he was finished, Marina was grinning, and Sadie was having a hard time keeping it together.

“Just one of the many reasons why it’s better to be a girl,” Sadie said, which just about killed me, thinking of her doing that.

“The entire floor saw?” Marina said. “Like,
all
of them?”

“Seventy-five percent. Plus Lane and me,” Nick said.

“It isn’t funny!” Charlie wailed. “And it wasn’t even
Nurse Jim, it was Nurse Monica! She’s like a mom!”

“She
is
a mom,” Nick said. “Her kids are adorable. I’ve seen pictures.”

“Oh, shut up,” Charlie said. “I hate this stupid sensor. I wish I could just disable it.”

“Actually . . . ,” Sadie said, and we all stared at her.

“You know how to turn it off?” Charlie asked eagerly.

Sadie shrugged, exactly the way she did when she tossed a bag of contraband candy onto the bed, or got held after class by Finnegan. Like it wasn’t a big deal, and she was trying to play it cool. But the hint of a smile gave her away.

“Of course I do,” she said. “Dr. Barons was changing the battery, and mine glitched, so he reset it.”

“Can you show me?” Charlie sat up, his eyes wide with excitement.

“It’s easy. You just poke a paper clip into the middle hole until it clicks,” she said.

“That’s amazing.” Charlie grinned.

“Great.” Nick rolled his eyes. “You’ve created a monster.”

“Hey, I just want to make the most of having my own room,” Charlie said. “I share with my kid brother at home, and he’s
nine
.”

“You think
your
life sucks? I have to go to an all-girls’ Catholic school,” Marina complained. “With uniforms and nuns. And I’m the only black girl.”

Another guy from Charlie’s hall walked by the table,
snickering. Charlie sighed, then burst out coughing. It sounded terrible, and at the end of it, he was gasping for breath. He shoved his handkerchief back into his pocket without bothering to look at it, even though it sounded like he’d coughed up blood.

“I’m going back to my room to channel this crap into my music,” he said, standing up to bus his tray.

“We have class in ten minutes,” I pointed out.

Charlie let out a ridiculously fake high-pitched cough.

“I’m too sick to go,” he said, smirking.

ON TUESDAY, MR.
Finnegan was waiting for us in French class with a paper bag on his desk and a bowl of mini Halloween candy. He grinned at us when we filed in.

“
Bonjour, classe
,” he called, still smiling.
“Ça va bien? Vous avez passé un bon Halloween?”

I shot Sadie a questioning look, and she shrugged as if to say she didn’t know, either. I’d never seen Finnegan so chipper. And the bowl of candy on his desk was totally bizarre. It was like something in him had woken up, a part of him that remembered that he was a teacher, and we were a French class. Or maybe it was the promise of the protocillin, which, if Sadie’s theory was correct, would cure his employment problem.

“We’re going to do something different today,” Finnegan said. “A game. And the winning team gets this leftover, half-priced Halloween candy. I have a bag of French tongue
twisters. Each of you will pick one and read it aloud. If you get it right, your team gets a point. If you get it wrong, your team loses a point.”