Extraordinary Means (17 page)

“Keep bongo!” I insisted, a bit tipsy.

Lane started drumming again, a soft patter.

“I mean it,” he said. “We mourn the future because it’s easier than admitting that we’re miserable in the present.”

The combination of his pattering on the drum, and the intensity with which he said that, made it sound like a spoken-word poem, and I thought about it for a moment, probably more seriously than I should have.

“Then maybe we’re not mourning the future,” I said. “Maybe we’re mourning ourselves.”

“Okay, no more rum for you,” Nick said, taking the bottle away from me and sloshing it. “Crap, it’s almost out.”

The woods were still spinning, even though we weren’t anymore, and we were all pretty drunk. And I wasn’t sure if it was the rum or the late hour, but I was suddenly so cold, and so exhausted, and so ready to be in bed, as opposed to just bedsheet.

“Is Charlie really not coming?” Marina asked.

“He probably fell asleep,” Lane said, yawning.

But yawns, like tuberculosis, are contagious. And soon everyone had caught his.

“Lane!” I accused.

“Sorry,” he said. “It’s the rum. Clearly I’d be a terrible pirate.”

We packed up our things, and Nick kicked dirt over our fire.

“Should we take these off?” Lane asked, motioning toward his toga.

“Leave them on,” Marina said, so we did.

“No one takes off their togas until we’re back at the dorms,” I warned. “Or you are a suckbeast. Nick is already a suckbeast because his is a cape.”

“You never said toga, you just said to wear your bedsheet,” Nick complained.

“Yeah, to a
toga party
,” Marina said.

We set off in the direction of the cottages, exhausted and still wearing our togas.

Lane slipped his hand into mine.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi back,” I said, smiling at him.

He looked so amazing in his toga, with his floppy hair and the crown of leaves, like he’d walked out of the Greek Acropolis, or whatever it was called. Like there was a statue of him somewhere, in marble, missing its private parts.

“You’re cute,” I said.

“You’re drunk,” Lane said.

“Which is the only time you’re cute, otherwise you’re a potato.”

I giggled. God, I really was drunk.

To my left, a twig snapped loudly. My heart sped up, and I swung my flashlight beam around, but it was just one of those silver rabbits the woods were full of, its eyes luminous in the dark.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I wish Charlie had come,” Lane said.

“I do, too.” I squeezed his hand, and we squelched through a particularly muddy pile of leaves. Our sheets were going to be ruined.

Marina and Nick had veered a little off course, and I called out to them.

“Hey, is it muddy over where you are?”

But they didn’t answer. They were stopped, still as stone, and in the beam of my flashlight, they were the ones who looked like statues.

“Hello?” I called, shining my flashlight at Marina.

The look on her face was devastating.

“Sadie—” she choked out.

Something was wrong. I knew it as Lane and I ran toward them, our togas dragging and ripping on rocks and branches. We coughed as we ran, but we didn’t stop running. I guess that’s what people mean about racing toward
disaster, how in the last moments before everything comes crashing down, you never walk.

And then I saw what they were staring at.

Not what, who.

It was Charlie, his body unnaturally splayed in the leaves.

IT WAS AS
though we’d stepped into a nightmare. We shone our flashlights down on Charlie’s body, barely registering that it was real. The white fabric of his bedsheet was tangled around him, splattered with bright-red arterial blood. There was blood smeared around his mouth, and he was so still, lying on the carpet of rotting leaves.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I stood there in horror, not fully processing the enormity of what had happened.

“Charlie—” Sadie wailed. She got to her knees, shaking him. “Come on, Charlie! You’re okay, come on. Please!”

He wasn’t okay, though. Any of us could see that.

“Is he . . . ?” Marina asked, but she already knew. We all did.

Nick went pale and staggered away, and we could hear him vomiting.

We were drunk, and cold, and covered in mud, with
bedsheets pinned over our clothes. And until that moment, it had all seemed so silly. The sneaking out, the woods, our trips into town, the nurse barging in on Charlie with his pants down. We’d been playing a game where we hadn’t quite believed the stakes. But I believed them then, staring down at the first corpse I’d ever seen, the first person I’d known who had died.

“He can’t be dead; his sensor would have gone off!” Sadie insisted. She reached for his wrist, and at first I thought she was taking his pulse, but then she pushed up his sleeve.

The light on his sensor wasn’t green, or flashing yellow in warning. There was no light on his sensor at all. It was just a black silicone band.

“That’s why no one came,” Sadie said. “Because Charlie had his sensor off!”

The enormity of what that meant washed over me, and I felt my stomach sour and twist, like I might be sick as well. We’d joked about Charlie’s sensor in the dining hall, laughing at him when it had gone off, instead of being concerned. And now it was too late to be concerned. Now it was too late to be anything except sorry.

While we’d danced around the fire in our togas, and beat our drum, and thrown back our booze, Charlie had lain there dying. Alone. In the woods.

I didn’t realize I was crying until I tried to put a hand on Sadie’s shoulder to steady her, and found that I was
trembling as well. I swallowed thickly and glanced over at Marina, who looked as distraught as I felt.

Nick staggered back, pale and sweating.

“Fuck, Charlie, you don’t turn off your sensor! You don’t ever do that, you hear me?” Nick said.

But of course Charlie didn’t hear him. The dead never listen when you want to tell them anything.

Charlie wasn’t supposed to be dead. None of us were. Not now that they’d announced a vaccine, and what we had was curable. We were supposed to be cured, all of us, with medication that would be ready in four short weeks.

It hadn’t occurred to me that some of us might not have four weeks left.

“This is my fault,” Sadie said, blinking back tears. “I showed him how to shut off his sensor. I didn’t think anything would happen.”

“None of us did,” I said, wondering how Sadie could think that.

“Charlie was really sick,” Nick said. “We all knew he was doing the worst of any of us.”

“Having the worst symptoms doesn’t mean anything,” Marina said. “We never saw his charts or his X-rays. Sometimes people seem really healthy, and then they die. And sometimes they seem sick, and then they just
go home
.”

I’d had too much to drink. We all had. The woods were spinning in this uncomfortable, dizzying way, and I tried to steady myself by putting my hand against a tree, but it was
slick with sap. The woods no longer felt like our sanctuary. They were dark, and twisted, and full of phantoms. Now I knew why everyone else stayed within the narrow confines of Latham, only venturing up the well-marked path on afternoon nature walks.

The whole night had taken on this strange, nightmarish tone, and I struggled to believe any of it. Any moment, I expected to wake up back in my dorm room, my heart pounding and my T-shirt clammy, wondering what the hell was wrong with my subconscious.

“If we’re the only ones who know, we have to tell someone,” I said. “A nurse. Someone who’ll know what to do.”

Everyone stared at me like I’d suggested calling the police.

“We
can’t
,” Nick said, his voice cracking.

“Nick’s right,” Sadie said. “No one can know we found him here.”

There was a terrible silence where we were all thinking the same thing.

“So we just go back inside?” Marina asked.

“Yes,” Sadie said. “We go back inside, and climb into bed, and in the morning, when Charlie isn’t at breakfast, they’ll look for him.”

“We can’t just leave him here,” I said.

“Yes, we can.” Nick’s expression dared me to argue. “Unless you can think of a better option?”

“Maybe a nurse would understand,” Marina said.

“Understand
what?
” Nick said angrily. “Do
you
want to tell Dr. Barons that we all decided to sneak out and get super drunk in the woods, and oh yeah, Charlie turned off his med sensor and died, but we weren’t with him or anything, which we can’t prove, but we found his body and can take you to it, and please don’t punish us for breaking, like, every rule at Latham House that actually matters.”

When he said it like that, it sounded terrible. Like we’d been up to something awful. Like it was our fault.

“But they can’t really punish us, can they?” I asked.

They all stared at me like they couldn’t believe they had to spell it out.

“Are you
kidding?
” Nick said. “We get kicked out of here, we’re out of the drug trial.”

The drug trial. It was one of the reasons my parents had sent me to Latham, after all, instead of one of the cheaper, public places. Instead of the holistic hot springs, or the homeopathic place where everyone slept in yurts and farmed their own kale. Latham gave us med sensors, and sent that data to researchers, and it put us at the top of the treatment list for any experimental drug trials. Like the one for protocillin.

Nick was right, and we all knew it.

“Okay,” Marina said. “So we walk away.”

“We walk away,” I agreed.

“Like we were never here,” Sadie said hoarsely.

“Like we have no idea Charlie isn’t asleep in his room,”
Nick said. “None of us gets in trouble, and in a couple of hours, it will all be over.”

Except that’s the thing about dying, or experiencing death. It happens, but it’s never over. So we stood there one final moment together. And then, slowly, regretfully, we walked away.

I WOKE THE
next morning convinced it had been a bad dream. And then I looked down at the tangle of mud-streaked sheets, and at my filthy sneakers, and was horrified to realize it had actually happened.

It was early, and Sunday, which meant breakfast began slightly later than usual. My head was pounding, and my mouth tasted terrible, but I dragged myself out of bed. I put my sheets down the contaminated laundry chute and rinsed my sneakers in the shower.

Breakfast was an ordeal. I don’t know how any of us managed to act normally. We were all pale and gray from the alcohol, and just the sight of pancakes and eggs made my stomach churn unpleasantly. But I piled my tray high, because I didn’t know what I’d do if Linda made me go back through. And then the four of us sat around our table, wan and silent, while the rest of the dining hall talked and laughed and hummed with energy.

Nick stood up early to bus his tray.

“We should head back,” he said, staring at me. “We have to do that thing.”

I followed him over to the tray return, and across the grass, and back into Cottage 6. He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t have to. I knew what we were doing—cleaning up before the lockout.

One night in the dorms, Nick had been talking about how, in the army, when a soldier dies, the other soldiers wipe all the porn off his computer before it’s returned to his family.

“You’d do it for me, right?” Nick had said. And we’d all agreed that yeah, we’d do it for each other. It had seemed like a joke, the way everything did then, when we did what we wanted because nothing bad ever happened. But now the joke was on us.

It felt wrong going into Charlie’s room without his permission, like the room was still his, instead of just filled with his things.

“You check his computer, I’ll see if I can find his stick,” Nick said.

I told him that sounded good, and then I went over and woke up Charlie’s computer. The whole thing had been restored to the original settings, with the generic outer space background.

“Nick?” I said.

Nick was holding a shoe box, an unreadable expression on his face.

“I’ve got everything,” he said.

“That fast?”

“It’s all here. Let’s go,” Nick said.

We went back to his room and set the box on his bed. It had
PROPERTY OF NIKHIL PATEL
written across the top in black Sharpie, but I recognized it as Charlie’s handwriting immediately.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

Nick lifted the lid. Inside was a stack of Moleskine notebooks, a bag of peanut butter M&M’s, an iPod, and two USB sticks. One was suspiciously titled “Math Homework,” and the other was labeled “Gone to His Narrow Bed—Charlie Moreau.”

Nick picked up the second USB stick and popped it into his computer.

It was an album. Charlie’s album. With hand-drawn and meticulously inked cover art. He’d finished it.

Nick pressed play, and for a moment, nothing happened, and then a familiar melody drifted from Nick’s speakers. I’d heard Charlie play this song so many times, but the finished version sounded different. It was darker, and richer, and full of anguish.

He sang about getting sick, and about making art, and about time, how we never had enough of it. I closed my eyes and listened, my heart breaking with each track.

“I am a grave man, children play in my graveyard/skipping stones on headstones/It’s time to rest these too young bones/If anyone asks, I’ve gone to my narrow bed.”

The last song finished, and when I opened my eyes, I
was crying, and Nick was, too.

“Fuck,” he said, sniffling. “All that time I thought he was writing love songs to One Direction.”

I laughed, and then felt horrible about it. But there was something about the box that was bothering me. Charlie had spent the last few weeks working almost constantly on his music, with an intensity I hadn’t understood. He’d skipped class, barely left his room, hardly eaten anything. . . .

“Do you think Charlie knew?” I asked.

“That he didn’t have much time?”

I nodded.

“Yeah,” Nick said finally. “I do. I just think he didn’t want us to worry about him, since we’d all started talking about going home and stuff.”

We were silent a moment, considering it.

“He left that box right there, on his bed,” Nick said. “So we’d find it when we went into his room for our army mission. It’s like he wanted to make it easy for us.”

“Then why the notebooks, and the music?” I asked. “Why wipe his computer if he kept all the X-rated stuff on a stick?”

“Haven’t you ever thought about it?” Nick asked. “What you want to leave behind, and what you don’t?”

“Not really.”

It had never occurred to me that I had anything to leave behind at all. Everything I’d done had been focused on the future, on impressing college admissions officers, but it was
just empty paper. Just numbers and letters on a transcript and a list of clubs I’d belonged to.

I remembered what Charlie had said about shutting down his Facebook, as a preemptive strike against it turning into a memorial wall. About needing to finish his music. About trying to create a legacy, because if he didn’t record his songs, he’d have nothing to leave behind.

“If he knew he was that sick, why didn’t he just stay in bed last night?” I asked.

“Would you?” Nick said, and for a moment I didn’t understand what he was saying. And then, horribly, I did.

Charlie hadn’t wanted to pass away in the hospital ward, wasting his last days waiting to die instead of spending them living. And he hadn’t wanted to die in his bed, beeping, while the whole dorm woke up and crowded the hallway to see what was going on.

We’d gone into the woods, and he’d known that, but he didn’t have anyone else. He’d turned off his sensor so he wouldn’t get caught, and he’d gone to find us. He just hadn’t made it.

There was nothing we could have done. No way we could have known. Because he hadn’t wanted us to know, not until right at the end, and then, it had been too late.

“You’d think if there was a god that Charlie would have had five more minutes to come find us,” I said.

Nick shook his head. “It makes me so sad that I’m not even sad anymore, I’m just angry. Dr. Barons said we’d be
cured. He didn’t say we’d be cured
if
we all lived six more weeks, but heads-up, guys, some of you might not live that long.”

Nick was sitting on the floor, his back against the wardrobe, and he pulled his knees and arms in, curling himself into a ball.

“Maybe he thought it was the right thing, giving everyone hope,” I said.

“Maybe he’s just an asshole,” Nick muttered. “I knew it was too good to be true that we’d all go home and have fucking
Skype chats
. Four weeks till the cure, a hundred and forty-nine of us to go.”

Nick got up, pulled a water bottle of vodka out of his desk drawer, and took a swig.

“Want some?” he asked, coughing.

I shook my head, and Nick lifted the bottle in salute.

“To Charlie,” he toasted. “For finishing his art.”