Extraordinary Means (18 page)

I WATCHED FROM
my window as the nurses and doctors scurried back and forth in the overcast morning, frantically searching for Charlie. I tried to pretend I was backstage at a play, watching the chaos as everyone scrambled around before curtain, but part of me knew that I wasn’t. That all our games and jokes had finally twisted into something serious and terrible.

I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d just sat there watching the sky and listening to this one bird that didn’t understand it was night, and wondering if I’d ever sleep again. I was terrified of what I’d dream, of whose corpses I’d conjure up when I closed my eyes.

It was all my fault. Charlie was dead because of me. I hadn’t meant for it to happen, but that didn’t make it any less true. I’d just wanted to show off about the med sensor, but if I’d thought about it, I would have realized it was a terrible idea.

Charlie had always been sicker than the rest of us. We’d never made a big deal about it, because that sort of thing could change in an instant. Any week, one of us could have come back from an appointment with Dr. Barons, our face ashen as we moved our things to the hospital wing for round-the-clock care, and our parents were summoned, and we were given a pain pump instead of an aspirin. Any week, one of us could have come back from the same appointment with a copy of our latest chest X-ray and a release date.

I’d been waiting for the latter to happen. For the people I cared about to leave me behind, one by one, like I was an imaginary friend they’d outgrown. I wasn’t prepared for any of us to leave the other way, with the doors locking behind us, and a hearse driving quietly through the back gate.

We were the ones who got dressed in the morning, who stole internet and staged photo shoots in the woods during naptime, who hid phones in our beds after lights-out and snuck into town to get coffee. We weren’t the ones who died here. We couldn’t be.

Everyone in the dining hall stared at our table during lunch. They all knew, or they guessed. Charlie had missed two meals, and the nurses had been running into the woods all morning, and where Charlie Moreau had once sat, there was now a definite ripple.

I stared down at the sandwich and fruit cup and salad on my plate, because I knew I should eat them, even though I wasn’t hungry. I could feel Charlie’s empty chair at the
edge of my vision, and I wanted so badly for him to sit there bent over his notebook, scribbling away. I wanted to hear the high strum of a ukulele coming from his window as I walked back to the cottages. I wanted him to play me a record with this huge grin on his face, delighted by the antiquated technology. I wanted him to dress up in eyeliner and velvet again, and to do his spot-on impression of Dr. Barons, asking us to rate our pain on a scale from one to ten.

Except right now I didn’t want to rate my pain. I wanted to rate my grief. And there wasn’t a number high enough.

I left lunch early and went back to my room, collapsing onto my bed in tears. I cried until it made me cough, and when I took my handkerchief away from my mouth, it was stained with blood. I was surprised, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t been taking care of myself. None of us had. We’d rolled our eyes and skipped rest periods and stayed up late and drunk Nick’s booze.

It was no wonder Charlie had gotten so sick. Oh God, Charlie.

The memory of last night seared through me, and I curled up in a ball, clutching that horrible handkerchief, and cried some more. I knew Natalie Zhang would be able to hear it through the wall, but I didn’t care. I cried for the way Charlie had died, and I cried that I hadn’t gotten a chance to say good-bye, and I cried that the last thing I’d said to him was, “You better not oversleep.” I cried because, while Charlie was dying alone in the woods, I was so close, pressed
up against a tree with Lane, kissing him like nothing else in the world mattered except how the two of us felt about each other, and naively thinking how wonderful it was that all of us had so much time.

DR. BARONS CAME
into the dining hall that night to make an announcement: med sensors were not to be turned off or tampered with. To make sure that our sensors were working properly, nurses would periodically access our data throughout the day and night. Furthermore, all ground-floor windows in the dormitories would be fitted with bug screens.

There was a collective groan as Dr. Barons exited the dining hall. It felt like everything had fallen apart, like I’d blinked, just for a moment, and when I’d opened my eyes I was surrounded by ruins.

I stalked off to bus my tray, and Lane followed me.

“Sadie, wait,” he called.

He looked terrible. We all did, I guessed, except now it worried me in a way it hadn’t for weeks. I couldn’t tell if the dark circles under his eyes were serious, or if his cough sounded worse. And I hated that I wasn’t looking at Lane with a melty feeling in my stomach, that instead I was scanning him for symptoms.

I slotted my tray into the return.

“What?”

“I haven’t seen you all day,” he said.

“I haven’t wanted to see anyone all day.”

“Not even me?” he asked, biting his lip and staring at me adorably.

I wished he wasn’t so cute when he did that. I wished he’d already gone home and left me behind without calling. I wished I didn’t have a fever, and he didn’t look so tired, and we hadn’t just eaten dinner while brooding over a friend’s death.

I hated that I was in love and grieving, because I didn’t know how to be both. It was just too much. Too many things that could go wrong. And there was too much potential pain for us to keep going.

I don’t know what made me do it, except some combination of sorrow and anger and the stupid fever I couldn’t get rid of, and the feeling of everyone at Latham staring at our table in that awful hushed way, but I sighed and shook my head.

“Sorry,” I said. And then I fled the dining hall.

FINNEGAN HAD GIVEN
us homework, but I’d completely forgotten about it. We were supposed to write a poem or something, and I felt so embarrassed when everyone else took out theirs. I’d been out of school so long that it felt strange having homework. I wondered if bereavement was an excuse, although at Latham, probably not.

And then Finnegan came in, looking as miserable as I felt. Wordlessly, he set down his coffee, picked up
a whiteboard marker, and scribbled an assignment.
Chapter 15, exercises 8 and 9
.

“You can leave when you finish, no need to hand it in,” he said.

With a sip from his mug, he was out the door.

“What the heck?” Nick muttered. “I thought we were doing poems.”

“I did, too,” Marina said. “Whatever happened to ‘you need to be prepared for high school’?”

“What do you think?” I said bitterly. “Homework adds unnecessary stress. Finnegan wouldn’t want any of us accidentally getting sick from his French assignments.”

Lane sighed. He was staring at me again in this pleading, can-we-talk way, but I pretended I didn’t see.

I didn’t know what to say. Now that there was news of a cure, everything at Latham felt different. It wasn’t the same “we can treat the symptoms but not the disease, so if you’re feeling tired, how about a rest” bullshit that Dr. Barons had always pushed. No doctors would ever say that again. Now there was this frantic new undercurrent of “let’s just keep everyone alive until the protocillin arrives,” as though any of us could keel over at any moment, and it would somehow be fifty times more tragic than if we’d done it a month ago.

GRIEF IS A
strange thing. I’d thought, for the longest time, that being at Latham was a constant grieving for an answer.
Live or die. Return home or succumb. But it wasn’t grief at all. It was fear.

I knew at least that much after Charlie died. Because I could hardly breathe through the pain of thinking about what had happened, but underneath that, I was so, so scared that there were more casualties to come. That I’d gotten too attached to the idea of us, of Nick and Lane and Marina and Charlie and me as being untouchable, while the invisible hand of tuberculosis hovered there, drumming its fingers impatiently.

I remembered the look on Dr. Barons’s face when he’d pulled up my X-rays, and the way Lane’s cheeks had seemed flushed at dinner, and how Marina sometimes walked away when she had a coughing fit, so we couldn’t hear how bad it was, and how I knew Nick skipped the contraband collections because he often went to the nurse’s station for narcotics.

The saying at Latham was “Welcome to the rotation,” but the unspoken second half of that phrase was “you can exit through either of two doors.” I’d always had a theory which door would be mine, but I’d been careful not to make predictions for anyone else.

Lane called me every night, and every night I ignored him, turning away from the ringing phone and turning up the volume on my music. I knew it was a bad plan, but I didn’t know what else to do. The idea of giggling and flirting after what had happened struck me as horrible. It was
like something in me had snapped. I could feel my emotions floating there, just beneath the surface, but I couldn’t access them. All I could get was numb, and horrified, and occasionally angry.

But I couldn’t avoid Lane’s calls forever. You can’t end a relationship by ignoring it, you can only hurt the other person’s feelings and make the inevitable breakup even worse. It was like Lane had said that night so long ago in the gazebo: being someone’s ex isn’t an existing condition you find out about later, it’s something you know about the moment it happens to you.

And so, on Thursday, I called him.

“Hello?” he said after the third ring, his voice uncertain.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I’m so glad.” I could hear his smile, and I wished he didn’t do that. I wished he could just talk to me without sounding like I was the one person he wanted to talk to more than anyone. Without making me feel so guilty.

I took a deep breath, trying to summon my courage. I didn’t want to do this. I hated myself for doing this. But I had to.

“Lane,” I said softly, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Lane waited, unsure.

“Do what?” he said.

“We can’t be together,” I explained.

It was very, very quiet on his end.

“We can’t, or you don’t want to?” Lane finally asked.

“Both,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” I asked, confused.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t accept your breakup. Meet me in the gazebo of sadness and breakups.”

“It’s almost—”

“We have twenty minutes, so you better hurry,” he said, hanging up.

I put on a coat over my pajamas and smoothed my ponytail, and when I got to the gazebo, he was already there, slouched on the stairs.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I sat down next to him, and we stared out at the woods, and I felt sick over them, like they were full of corpses. I glanced over at Lane, and he looked so beautiful, his cheeks pink in the cold, his hair in need of a trim, the way he sat with his fingers curled, like he was clutching something tiny and secret in his palm.

Latham felt like a shipwreck, and I didn’t know how many places there were in the lifeboats. I wanted both of us to be okay if we turned around and found we had the last seat. So I was shutting us down preemptively, before the pain became too much to bear.

“We can’t be together,” I said, trying not to cry. “We hooked up, and it was great, but it’s like summer camp. These things never work in the real world.”

Lane was quiet a moment, and still.

“I thought I was going to drive to your house with bagels when we got out. And we’d text. And we’d make it work,” he said.

“But it
won’t
work,” I said angrily. “You’ll go home and want to catch up on your schoolwork so you can graduate on time, and it won’t be worth driving for hours to see me when you’re going away to college in the fall.”

“Of course it will be worth it,” Lane said.

“You’re just saying that because you’re nice.”

“I’m saying that because it’s true,” Lane insisted.

“What, so we can have breakfast? So I can tell you about how fun it is being the oldest person in my classes and the only one who doesn’t know how to drive?” I asked.

“It wouldn’t be like that.”

“It might be. You get your life back, but I don’t.”

“But I don’t
want
my life back,” Lane said. “I wasn’t even using it. I was just . . . waiting for everything to be different. Except I was the same me when I got to Latham that I’d always been. I didn’t want to change, but I did. And now I want to figure it out as I go. But I know that I want you to be in it.”

He looked so earnest in the moonlight. Like he really believed the world was this place where good things happened to good people, and anything to the contrary was an accident.

I wished I’d never let it get this far. I’d always been fine on my own. And I’d be fine on my own again. Now, if we
broke up, it would just be that. A breakup. You don’t mourn a breakup. At least, I didn’t think you did, having never personally experienced one.

“Well, I don’t want you in my life anymore,” I said, feeling myself crumble. I was crying because it wasn’t true, and because it was. And because I’d been right to be skeptical of happy endings and love stories where no one got hurt. Someone always gets hurt. But what no one ever tells you is that you can get hurt more than once.

So I stood up and walked back inside, away from the one boy who made me feel like I wasn’t alone, because he was the one person I couldn’t stand to lose, or disappoint, or watch fall out of love with me when I stepped out of Latham and transformed back into a potato.

SADIE IGNORED ME
the next day. We sat at the same table in the dining hall and everything, but with just the four of us, there was lots of room to space out, so it was me and Nick, and Marina and Sadie, with the empty chairs between us. We’d been a group once, but Sadie’s and my breakup had thoroughly wrecked that. The awkward, thick silence that had settled over our table since Charlie’s death seemed to close up, sealing us inside in permanent misery.

I spent that weekend alone in my room, reading old books from the library. I was on this Vonnegut kick, which seemed to fit my mood. He had this dark, awful sense of humor that was just about perfect, and he wrote about war and death and tragedy in this irreverent way, like misery was inevitable. I’d never properly wallowed before, but I did it then, listening to the most depressing music on my iTunes with my eyes closed, and wearing two-day-old T-shirts and not shaving, even though it gave
me this weird, French-looking mustache.

What was the point anymore? Charlie was dead, and Sadie had decided to shut herself off from the world, and Nick was medicating away his sorrows, and Marina sat there writing fan fiction like if she tried hard enough, she could pretend she was at Hogwarts.

So I sat and read Vonnegut, and listened to the Mountain Goats, and slept a lot, and spent too long in the shower. It was Latham House the way Latham was supposed to be, without illicit trips to town, or girls snuck into the dorm, or classroom pranks. And I couldn’t stand it, any of it. The loneliness, or the fear, or the grief.

I wondered what Sadie was doing. I wanted to call her. A couple of times I picked up the phone, but I always put it back down. Cowardice, through and through.

She didn’t come to Wellness anymore, and I didn’t blame her. Really, what was the point? Latham had become exactly what I’d wanted it to be before I’d known better: something to get through before we could go home.

And every time I saw Sadie walking back to the cottages after dinner, or tapping her pen against her notebook and staring out the window in French class, I ached in a way that wasn’t a symptom of being sick. It’s strange how we can lose things that are still right there. How a barrier can go up at any moment, trapping you on the other side, keeping you from what you want. How the things that hurt the most are things we once had.

And I wanted Sadie. I wanted our relationship back, for us to try and stay together. Even if it was a bad idea, and even if she didn’t want a reminder of this place, because I did. I wanted to remember who I’d been when we were together, because I liked the Latham version of me so much better than the Lane I’d been before. I wanted to be the Lane who kissed a girl in a bedsheet toga and stole internet and wore a tie to a pajama movie night. I wanted to be Sadie’s Lane, not the Lane who ran the Carbon Footprint Awareness Club just so I could put “club president” on my college résumé.

And I was scared that I couldn’t be Sadie’s Lane without Sadie, that I wouldn’t be brave enough to put down my books and go on an adventure if she wasn’t beckoning me toward the woods, a smile on her lips promising that everything would be okay.

I STARTED TAKING
walks around the grounds at night, thinking about everything. About Sadie, and Charlie, and about what I wanted to leave behind in this world, when the time came. I was tired of being an empty box, of maintaining a checklist instead of a passion, of having skipped so many rites of passage that were lost to me now.

One night, I stayed out a little later than I’d meant to, and it was almost lights-out when I came back inside. As I walked across the deserted common room, someone called my name from the nurse’s station.

I walked over to investigate. Nick was in there, alone,
lying on one of the cots. He was reading
A Storm of Swords
in his pajamas and bathrobe.

“Hey, thought that was you,” he said.

“Is everything okay?” I asked, concerned.

“Fine,” Nick said. “I’m almost out of vodka, so I was thinking what to do about that, and then I realized . . . oh man, my chest
really
hurts.”

He rolled his eyes while he said it.

“So you wanted to come down here and lie on the cot?” I asked, not understanding.

“Codeine, dude. They don’t even question it. I just have to stay here, is all.” He grinned, pleased with himself. “It’s awesome, I’m all floaty.”

“Well, have fun,” I said.

“Hold on,” Nick said, pushing himself up in bed. “You okay?”

“I’ll live,” I muttered. I hadn’t meant it ironically, but Nick snorted.

“Look, I’m sorry about you and Sadie,” he said.

“Really?” It shot out of my mouth before I’d thought about it.

There was an awkward pause.

“No, I’m secretly glad, I want all my friends to be as depressed and lonely as I am,” Nick said sarcastically. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Sure you don’t want some codeine? It’s great. The room’s spinning like a trampoline.”

“Trampolines don’t spin,” I reminded him.

“Well, they should. And Sadie shouldn’t have done that to you. Shit, why are girls so impossible?”

“I don’t know,” I said, sighing. “Everything was going great with us, and then Sadie preemptively dumped me because she thinks we won’t last.”

“You probably won’t,” Nick said.

“Thanks a lot.”

“Nothing lasts,” he said. “Even this awesome floaty feeling. We all reach for whatever we think is going to dull the pain, and sometimes we don’t even want whatever it is, we just want to
not
be miserable, you know? So anyway, I’m sorry I was a dick.”

“It’s fine,” I said.

“No, shut up, I’m atoning. We have seven more weeks at Latham, and then all this is over. It’s like the end of senior year. It’s the last chance to go for things. Otherwise you always wonder.” He shifted on the bed, coughing a little. “I want us to be cool, so we can all keep in touch. That’s all we’re going to have left, you know? Each other.”

He was right. Latham would close down, and TDR-TB would be curable, and it would be hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t gone through it what it had been like at a sanatorium, and what it was like to have this weird past that was filled with blood tests, instead of standardized ones.

“We’re cool,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Did I already ask if you want some codeine? Because it’s awesome, like a trampoline. . . .”

“Think I’ll pass. But thanks.”

I went up to my room thinking about what Nick had said, even though he was pretty out of it. I didn’t want to wonder about Sadie, I wanted to be with her. But I’d never given her a reason to think I really meant it.

I’d never asked her to be my girlfriend, not officially. And I’d never said that I loved her. I’d taken the coward’s path, telling her that I adored her, and that I was crazy about her, using every other phrase that I could instead of the one that I meant.

And now, even if I did muster the courage to say it, she wouldn’t want to hear it. She might not even believe it.