Extraordinary Means (4 page)

“I’m supposed to give you this,” she said.

It was a note, folded into one of those footballs, with my name on the front in cramped boys’ handwriting. I unfolded
it. The note asked if I would go to the dance with him, and if yes, he’d pick me up at my cabin. It was signed Lane Rosen, from 8B.

I couldn’t believe it.

“Well?” Meghan asked.

“Did you read it?” I asked.

“Duh, I don’t have to. He likes you. Or maybe he just waited too long and you were one of the few girls left.”

I put the note into my pocket, trying not to grin.

“And he said to give you these,” Meghan told me, producing a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of her hoodie.

They were Lane’s Ray-Bans, the red ones he’d been wearing in the pool. I couldn’t believe he remembered. Bethie had “accidentally” stepped on my sunglasses at the lake the other day and had broken them.

Lane had seen. Everyone had. And now he wanted me to have his sunglasses. He’d been watching me in the woods because he liked me. Maybe, if he thought I was cool, the girls in my cabin would finally leave me alone.

The night of the dance, I got ready early and sat on my bed reading while everyone else jostled for the mirror. Finally, the first boy arrived. It was this buzz-haired guy, Zach, who’d asked Bethie. She sashayed off with him, and the rest of the girls rushed to make last-minute touch-ups before their dates arrived.

And their dates did, in a trickle, the boys wearing short-sleeved button-ups and khakis and looking underdressed in
comparison to the girls in their strapless dresses. I was the last one left, so I took my book out to the porch to wait.

I waited a long time, and Lane never came.

Just as I was about to go inside, this girl Sarah came back to the cabin.

“Note for you,” she said, handing me a folded thing with my name scrawled across the front.

I tore it open.
Sorry,
it said.
Changed my mind.—Lane.

Something in my face must have given it away.

It had been a joke all along. A cruel prank he wanted to play on me to show everyone he wasn’t interested in the weird, nerdy girl who kept asking about him.

“God, I’m so stupid,” I whispered, half forgetting that Sarah was there.

Sarah sighed.

“News flash,” she said, “boys suck. It’s why our cabin sticks together. It’s like, we’ve known these boys for years, and they’re all pigs. Most of them have girlfriends back home.”

I could feel the tears bubbling up, my chest constricting so tightly that it hurt to breathe. Wordlessly, I turned around and ran back into the cabin, and for the first time that summer, I let myself cry.

Standing in Latham’s dining hall with him, four years later, had made time melt away. I was back there again, thirteen years old and sobbing in my best dress, alone on my bunk with the meanest note a boy had ever written.

And I didn’t want to be. I’d spent a long time walking away from that summer, that loneliness, that version of myself. And then Lane Rosen had found me by the tray return, and it turned out all the walking I’d done had been in a circle.

AFTER DINNER, AS
I walked across the grounds back toward the cottages, I had to admit, Latham was beautiful. The dorms looked like fairy-tale ski lodges, and the lake glittered, and the classical revival buildings felt exotically collegiate. Even the stone benches along the pathways were charming. We might have been anywhere. Any place where grades mattered and students had bright futures, instead of, well . . .

I’d thought Sadie would be happy to see a familiar face, but she’d reacted as though I was a ghost. I supposed the fact that I’d almost impaled her with a cafeteria tray hadn’t made me particularly endearing. I’d only wanted to say—well, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like I knew her. But I wanted to. Sadie and her friends seemed interesting, and anything was better than sitting at Genevieve’s table, which I was starting to suspect was a faction of an overeager prayer group I
really didn’t want to join. I mean, it’s not like you can pray for something to un-happen.

I touched my med sensor to the scan pad outside my dorm, but it flashed red and beeped, refusing to open.

“Come on,” I muttered, scanning again.

It stayed locked.

I scanned again, and again. Still locked.

“You’ve got to be kidding!” I cursed, banging my fist against the scan pad.

I don’t know why, but that stupid red light got to me. I couldn’t do anything right. I’d been ditched by my tour guide, and then Sadie couldn’t wait to get away from me. I’d failed breakfast, and now I was going to fail the goddamned front door.

Suddenly, everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours came crashing over me in this horrible wave. I gave the door a frustrated tug, but it was no use.

“Dude, calm down. We’re locked out,” someone said.

It was the punk kid from the woods. He was sitting on the porch, his back against the railing, a Moleskine notebook propped over one knee. He looked frail and exhausted up close, not so tough after all.

“What?” I asked.

“Locked out,” he repeated, gesturing toward the crowd of people standing around.

I’d been so lost in my own misery that I hadn’t realized. No one had gone inside. It looked like half the dorm was
congregated around the porch, their expressions ranging from resigned to upset.

“What’s happening?” I asked. “Fire alarm?”

The punk kid snorted.

“Someone checked out. They’re doing housekeeping.” He said it darkly, like he’d deliberately chosen the wrong words. When he realized I didn’t get it, he sighed. “You know, cleaning out his room for the next lucky occupant.”

“Someone
died
?”

“Oh, you get used to it. Just wait until they bring the body out.” He nodded toward the front door.

I must have looked freaked, because he laughed, coughing a little.

“Nah, I’m messing with you,” he said, and then added, “They have tunnels for that.”

I didn’t know whether I believed him.

“So we all have to stand around until his stuff is removed?” I asked.

“Pretty much.”

He went back to scribbling in his notebook while I stood there in shock. Someone had died. I mean, I knew it happened at Latham, but I hadn’t expected it on my first day. It felt so . . . sudden. Like I was being thrown headfirst into the deep end of tuberculosis before I’d even gotten used to the water.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Grant Harden,” a wiry, mustached kid said. “Wasn’t
at breakfast. Went to the medical building and never came back.”

I couldn’t believe it. Grant. He was supposed to show me around.

My tour guide hadn’t ditched me. He’d died.

After the nurses let us back into the dorm, I watched in shock as people staked out places in the common lounge, turned on the television, and set up board games like nothing had happened.

I went back to my room and collapsed onto my bed, listening to the noises in the hall. The walls of my room felt so close, so claustrophobic. And so thin, like there was nothing between me and the hallway except a flimsy sheet of cardboard, and I had no privacy at all.

I was shocked that everyone could bounce back so fast, that Grant’s death had been cleared away as quickly as his belongings. All I knew was that I didn’t understand Latham, and I wondered if I ever would.

“
Start as you mean to go on
,” my father was fond of saying, but I certainly didn’t mean for my life at Latham to continue like this.

No, not my life. Just the next few weeks. Latham was temporary. A vacation. A place to stay while I was contagious, so my parents wouldn’t get fired, and so my mom wouldn’t panic every time I coughed.

The whole Grant thing was an anomaly. A weird twist in the fabric of the universe. But then, so was my being sick.
I’d caught TB somewhere. It was random and unfair, and if I’d just taken Spanish instead of science, volunteered at the clinic on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays, seen a different movie, taken a different seat, I’d be at home, eating pizza for dinner and working on my Stanford application.

Thinking of it like that helped. As long as I was here, the plan was not to care. To keep my head down, do my work, and get through it.

I didn’t need to play nice, or to make friends. I needed to stay on track, get better, and go home. I took a couple of deep breaths, which actually sort of hurt, put on some appropriately gloomy music, and started to unpack.

My mom had packed my suitcase for me, and even though I’d made pretty specific requests, she’d still grabbed the wrong jeans and, like, five of these polo shirts I never wear. Instead of my favorite T-shirts, I had a stack of every unwanted Hanukkah gift, my name freshly scrawled across each label for the laundry. Fantastic. I put all of it into the wardrobe, and then I stacked my Harbor coursework, my college guides, and my SAT books on my desk.

I tried to unpack slowly, so I could avoid the inevitable phone call home, but calling your parents is just one of those things you can’t put off forever.

It was seven thirty, and they were probably sitting on the sofa grading papers, with the news on in the background. I could picture my father with his herbal tea and Chapman sweatshirt, my mother in her purple slippers and
reading glasses, sipping decaf, the careful way my parents used coasters, as though they were guests in someone else’s home and didn’t want to offend. They were big believers in routine, in getting things done.
“When you feel like quitting, do five more,”
my dad always said. Most of his catchphrases were motivational insults.

I stared dubiously at the ancient landline on my desk, knowing resistance was futile. And then I picked up the thing and dialed.

Of course my mom answered on the second ring, sounding way too concerned.

“Lane, sweetie, how are you?” she cooed. I said I was fine, and she plunged on, talking about how Dr. Barons had uploaded my new X-ray so she and dad could see it, and how she thought it looked much better than the last one, and my dad agreed.

The thought of them staring at a picture of my insides on their iPads was pretty embarrassing, and I tried not to imagine the two of them discussing it over dinner like they’d done with my SAT scores.

There was an awkward silence, where I guessed my mom was waiting for me to say something about my doctor’s appointment, but I had no idea what.

“How was the drive back?” I asked instead, trying to change the subject.

“Oh, fine,” Mom said. “Not too much traffic.”

An uncomfortable pause again.

“Hold on, let me get your father,” my mom said. “I’ll put you on speaker.”

Then she and my dad took turns asking Concerned Questions about what I was eating, and if there were enough pillows on my bed because they could always send more, and if I was running a fever, and how I was sleeping, and how were the nurses, and did the doctor say anything at all about how he thought I was doing. It went on forever.

“Did you ask your teachers if you can do the AP work you brought with you instead?” my dad asked.

“Um,” I said, glancing at the stack of textbooks and assignments on my desk. It was more like a tower, actually. I’d meant to ask, but I’d been so thrown by everything that I hadn’t gotten the chance.

“It doesn’t matter,” my mom said soothingly, and my dad cleared his throat like he disagreed. “I mean it, sweetheart. I don’t want you to tire yourself out.”

“No, I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “I’ll ask them tomorrow.”

Then my dad told me to “Hang in there, bud,” and I said, “You too,” which was completely the wrong thing. But too late. There was an awkward chorus of “I love yous,” and, thankfully, it was over.

I felt entirely removed from my old life in that moment, a million miles from the band posters on my walls, and from Loki, my black Lab, and from everything that had defined me for so long. My parents never used to worry how I was sleeping, or if I wanted more pillows. They never used to tell
me not to tire myself out back when I was pulling all-nighters over my physics exams. They’d just ask if I felt prepared, and then, after I got my grade, they’d ask what I could do to improve my score on the next one.

I was used to my parents. To our cadence, and our lives. I just hadn’t realized quite how much my getting sick would turn us into strangers, our usually predictable conversations becoming distant and unfamiliar.

I picked up the phone one more time and called Hannah, which was my reward for talking to my parents. Hannah and I had been together for five months, since the Model UN trip to San Francisco. The amount of time surprised me. It sounded so significant, when in actuality we’d barely even started.

“Hello?” she said tentatively.

“Congratulations, you’ve won a romantic trip for three to Sea World.” I tried to disguise my voice.

“Lane?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Sorry about the weird number.”

“It’s fine, although I’m devastated I won’t be taking my two favorite lovers to Sea World.”

“Wait, you have more than two?”

“You don’t know me.” Hannah giggled.

It felt so good to talk to her, to joke about things that didn’t matter. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, for a moment letting myself pretend that I was somewhere, anywhere else.

“So what’s going on in the Harborverse?” I asked.

“Oh God, everything.”

Hannah had this wonderfully energetic voice, which always reminded me of a steam engine, barreling full force ahead. So I listened as she talked about the weekly quizzes in AP Bio, and how freaking unfair it was that six of them got picked at random to count for most of her grade.

“If I fail, like, one quiz and then do perfectly on the rest I’d still get, like, ninety percent. It’s precarious. I’m going to stress eat an entire pizza over this every Thursday night, I can just tell.”

“You’ll do fine,” I said.

“Maybe.” She sighed. “Except it’s on a curve, and everyone’s fighting for second now that . . .”

She trailed off, embarrassed.

“Now that I’m out of the picture?” I supplied.

Hannah didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

“I’m coming back, you know,” I said.

“I know,” Hannah said quickly. “Forget I said anything.”

We lapsed into silence for a moment. I wasn’t used to talking on the phone. Not with Hannah. We texted, sure. And we stayed on Skype for hours sometimes, leaving it running in the background while we reviewed for exams. But this was different. This wasn’t keeping each other company. It was keeping in touch. Being long-distance, as opposed to past tense.

“How is it there?” Hannah asked. “Really?”

“Fine.”

“And you’re feeling okay?” She said it in this mom-ish voice, and I shut my eyes a moment, as though that would erase it.

“Yeah, I’m great,” I said. “There’s only four classes. We mostly get to lie in bed and watch movies.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Well, I’d say ‘wish you were here,’” I joked.

“Lane?” she said tentatively. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything.”

Although she hadn’t asked me much of anything recently. It was like she was afraid. Afraid of answers she didn’t want to hear. That was why she acted so cheerful and talked about her classes, the ones I should be in. It had to be.

“You know how I’m applying early action to Stanford?”

Almost everyone in our group was applying early action to Stanford, so I said yeah.

“I was wondering if you’d read over my admissions essay?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

“Just to proofread and see if I’m on the right track, or if it’s obvious that I used a thesaurus. That kind of thing. You were always better than me in English, so . . . ,” she trailed off, waiting for me to respond.

I knew I was supposed to agree to it no problem. Because that was what we did, Hannah and me. Back in sophomore year, I’d outscored her on every English quiz, and she’d
beaten me on every precalc, so it only made sense to partner up in chem. And, eventually, in other things. I used to joke that we were “lab partners in crime,” because instead of staying nemeses, locked in a battle over class rank, we’d become a team, fighting to succeed at the same thing.

“I just started it, but can I send a draft this weekend?”

“Sure,” I said hollowly. “Email it over whenever.”

My voice caught in my throat, and I started coughing. I pressed the receiver against my jeans, so Hannah wouldn’t hear how bad it was.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said hoarsely.

“Promise?”

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

“You’ll get better soon,” Hannah said, like she had some authority on the matter. “And then everything will go back to normal.”

“Right,” I said. “Normal.”

Except Latham was my normal now. And being healthy, being okay, wouldn’t feel normal at all. It would feel incredible.