Extraordinary Means (8 page)

“It’s
une feuille de papier
,” I said, trying to play it off. “It’s idiomatic.”

“Is it now?” Sadie grinned. “Well. I think we’ve got ourselves a new substitute teacher.
Levez-vous.
”

She motioned for me to come to the front of the room, and I shook my head. No way was I getting up there while we were supposed to be working quietly in our seats. What if Finnegan came back? What if everyone hated me and started yelling for me to shut up and sit down? The ways in which this could go wrong were endless.

But Sadie held out the marker, waiting. The whole room was watching. Even the kids who’d been gaming on their tablets. I wished I could take back my stupid grammar comment, and possibly disappear. But Sadie and her friends were staring at me, and I realized with a sudden jolt that this was it. My chance to join their rebellion. My way into their circle. I’d been hoping for something more subtle, like making witty conversation in the lunch line, possibly about the milk cartons, but too late now.

So I sighed and stood up, hoping I wouldn’t regret it.

“
Classe
, say
bonjour
to substitute teacher Lane.” Sadie pressed the marker into my hand with a smile.

“
Bonjour, Lane
,” Sadie’s friends called back, enjoying themselves immensely.

And then she went back to her seat and left me there.

I stared down at the textbook that was old enough to buy beer, trying to muster my nerve. I never did this sort of thing. I volunteered to pass back exam booklets, and I went to school sick so I wouldn’t lose out on the perfect attendance award. I followed the rules because that was why rules existed, to be followed.

At least, that’s what I’d always believed. And now I was standing at the front of the room, not because the teacher wanted me to, but because Sadie had dared me. Because it was worth getting in trouble if it meant I didn’t have to sit at Genevieve’s table anymore.

There was no such thing as an honor roll here, and no clubs that the teachers liked best. So I set my textbook on the desk and did an impression of my dad.

I’d been stuck in his history class in the ninth grade, along with the other kids in the honors program, who couldn’t stand him. He was strict, and a tough grader, and he didn’t let anyone pee, even though his class was right after lunch. But mostly, he did this thing where he hit the board with the marker to stress his point, making eye contact with a specific student while he did it. No one whispered in his class. He was that terrifying.

“
Répétez, plus vite,
” I insisted, smacking the board with the marker and glaring at Angela.

She giggled nervously and gave the correct answer.

“
Exactement
,” I said coldly, writing it down.

Angela sank down in her seat, pouting, and Genevieve shot her a sympathetic look. Sadie and her friends were in hysterics. Some of the other students were grinning. I went on, encouraged, and somehow managed not to break character. In middle school, I’d taken a drama class where we played improv games and acted out two-page scenes. I’d wanted to sign up again in high school, but it would have ruined my class rank if I didn’t take a weighted elective, so I’d picked up AP Art History instead.

I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed stuff like this, how fun it was to step outside myself. I was on the second-to-last
question when the laughter went totally quiet. Something was wrong, I could feel it. I turned.

Finnegan stood in the doorway, staring at me, unsure what was going on. And to tell you the truth, I hardly knew, either.

It wasn’t like the room was in chaos or anything. Far from it. The board was filled with neatly numbered corrections, and everyone was in their seats, quietly marking their answers, while I ran the class like Professor Snape was my spirit animal.

“
Qu’est-ce qui se passe là?
” Finnegan demanded.

“
Rien
,” I said, putting down the marker. “Sorry.”

I hurried back to my seat, my heart pounding. Finnegan had caught me goofing off, and now I was going to catch hell. I expected him to yell, or send me to some administrative office, or kick me out, but he just shook his head, like he wasn’t paid enough to deal with this kind of thing.

He stared at the uncapped marker I’d left on his desk, and at the board, with Sadie’s cursive scrawl and my neat printing, a pinched expression on his face like he didn’t want to touch anything we might have used.

“Someone erase this,” he said, motioning toward the board. “Genevieve.”

Genevieve flounced to the front of the room and started wiping the board.

“Everyone pass forward your work,” he said. “Then go to lunch. Sadie, stay behind, please.”

I tore my assignment out of my notebook and passed it forward, glancing over at Sadie. She shrugged, like it was no big deal, and I wondered why Finnegan hadn’t asked me to stay behind as well. I’d been the one at the board, the one screwing around instead of working in my seat. On the grand list of detention-getters, my name should have been at the top.

I was thinking about this while I packed my bag, and then I looked up and found Nick, Charlie, and Marina standing around my desk. They were all staring at me like I’d gotten away with the biggest prank ever, which I suppose I had, since Finnegan had let me go without even a warning.

“Dude,” Nick said. “That was terrifying. I was having flashbacks to my geometry teacher.”

“Thanks, I guess?” I shouldered my bag and stood up, following them into the hall.

“I thought you were going to start taking points from Ravenclaw,” said Marina.

“Gryffindor, and don’t tempt me.” I gave her my look of doom.

Marina giggled.

“You’re the one who ran interference for us with the librarian, right?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah.” I was surprised she remembered.

“That was really cool of you,” said Nick. “Thanks.”

“It wasn’t a big deal,” I mumbled, a little embarrassed.

But something about the way they’d phrased it stuck
with me. They thought I’d done it for them, when the whole time I’d been so focused on the librarian catching Sadie that I hadn’t thought about anyone else. It was strange to realize they’d all been there.

“Do we really have to wait for Sadie?” Charlie asked, glancing impatiently down the hallway.

“Well, that
would
be the nice thing to do,” said Nick.

“Good thing we’re not nice.” Charlie grinned.

“No, we really aren’t,” Nick said mock-seriously.

“Speak for yourself, because I’m darling,” said Marina.

“You’re the worst,” Nick told her. “You steal everything clever we say and use it in your fan fiction.”

Marina shot him a look.

“It’s not stealing, it’s recycling,” she said. “And whatever, you love it.”

“You know what
I
love? Beating the line,” said Charlie.

“Dude, there are, like, five hundred better ways to phrase that.” Nick laughed.

I’d never heard anyone talk the way they did, like you got a gold star for each clever remark. It was smart, but not show-offy smart, like the guys from Model UN, who always tried to prove that they knew more than you about some obscure topic they’d Wikipedia’d. This was more like seeing how self-deprecating you could be while still making everyone laugh.

They all began to walk away, toward the dining hall. I hesitated, unsure if I was supposed to follow, and after
a couple of steps, Nick turned back around.

“Aren’t you coming?” he asked, like he’d expected me to join them all along.

“Yeah,” I said gratefully, catching up. “Of course.”

THE WHOLE THING
was Nick’s fault, really, so if Finnegan should have kept anyone after class, it was him. But Nick got away with everything, while I always got caught. I could hear him and Charlie and Marina laughing out in the hallway as I approached Finnegan’s desk.

“You wanted to talk to me?” I asked.

Finnegan sighed, looking all martyrish, like he deserved a medal for spending more time with one of us than he absolutely had to.

“Yes, Sadie, I did,” he said. “I know you were the one responsible for today’s . . . excitement.”

He actually called it that—excitement. Way to be overdramatic.

“What’s so exciting about grading our work?” I asked.

And then he launched into this totally bullshit speech about how correcting the assignments in class puts unnecessary pressure on everyone, and doing your best was enough
without stressing over your grade, and how I’d been at Latham long enough to know that.

“I don’t want anyone getting sick because of the French homework,” he said.

“You mean dying,” I corrected. “Because we’re already sick.”

Finnegan gave me a watery sort of smile, like he preferred tiptoeing around the subject.

“Yes,” he clarified. “I mean dying.”

The word floated there in silence, neither of us knowing what to do now that he’d actually said it.

“Wow, thanks for protecting us from dying of French homework,” I said sarcastically. I was already in trouble, so what did it matter if I kept going? “It’s supercool of you to care so much.”

“Sadie—”

“I mean it, thanks for teaching us how to tell the doctors in Paris that we think we might have a cough. That’ll be useful, when we’re not even allowed to get on an airplane.”

I hadn’t planned to go off on him, but I’d been up half the night listening to Natalie Zhang’s crying through our shared wall. She did that sometimes, but never as badly as last night. I should have asked the nurse for a sleeping pill, but I’d stupidly suffered through it and had been in a terrible mood all morning. Sometimes I got so tired of Latham House that I wanted to scream.

“You know that scientists are working on—” Finnegan
began, but I didn’t want to hear it.

“Developing a cure,” I said flatly. “Yeah. So I’ve heard. Twice. And each time we get excited over rumors about some new medication, and then it turns out the doctors faked the data, or the drug doesn’t work. So I’m not exactly getting my hopes up.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Sadie. I want a cure as much as you do, and one day it’ll happen. But until then, we’re all stuck here.”

I couldn’t believe he’d said that. The “we” part.

Nick had this theory that our teachers were all exposure-positive and couldn’t get hired anywhere else, even though there was, like, a 90 percent chance they’d never get sick. I’d always told him that was just a rumor, but something about the way Finnegan talked about being stuck made me think it might be true.

“But you’re
not
stuck here,” I said, “because at the end of the day, you get to go home, and go to restaurants and movie theaters and airplanes and not have anyone get worried that
French homework
might kill you.”

He didn’t deny it.

“I’m late for lunch, and the line’s going to suck,” I said. “And for the record, the grading papers thing? Nick started it. Not me.”

“I very much doubt that,” he said, shaking his head. But he let me go.

It was so annoying. Nick never got in trouble. He was
too geeky, too eager, too out-of-his-way friendly with the adults. They never understood that he was making fun of them, pushing them to be nice and make conversation when they’d rather back away. No one believed that I wasn’t dragging him feetfirst into our misanthropy, that actually, we egged each other on.

Of course my friends hadn’t waited for me after all. They’d taken advantage of the early dismissal and had gone through the line before it was enormous. Meanwhile, I was stuck at the back of it. I picked up my tray and glanced toward my table with a sigh. Everyone was already there.

But something was different. I looked again, and sure enough, Lane Rosen was sitting at my lunch table. I’d been gone for, like, two minutes, and somehow, in that amount of time, my friends had adopted him.

It was strange, seeing him there, laughing at something Nick was saying, which was no doubt juvenile and only half as funny as he thought. But it wasn’t a bad kind of strange, just different. I hadn’t thought ahead to his finding a group and making friends.

After we’d talked that night in the gazebo, sitting in the dark and splitting a side order of existential crisis, everything had felt different. He wasn’t this grown-up version of a thirteen-year-old nightmare anymore, he was the new kid, with the perfect handwriting and clever remarks and sheepish grin, who never left his room and barely talked to anyone. I’d seen him sitting at Genevieve’s table, looking miserable,
and had considered inviting him over, but I hadn’t known what to say, or how my friends would react.

And now they’d gone and casually invited him over for me. Or, I guess, not for me. They’d just gone and become friends with the guy who’d created a diversion in the library and taken my dare in French class, which, to be honest, I was still surprised about. I hadn’t thought he had it in him. And now there he was, sitting at my table.

Oh God, what if they were talking about me? What if he was telling them embarrassing stories about our summer camp days? I fretted over it while I was stuck in the endlessly slow lunch line, behind a couple of sophomores who couldn’t make up their minds whether they wanted potato wedges or sweet potato fries.

And then, finally, I was through. I’d been so impatient that I’d grabbed a normal, boring lunch, and Linda got all smug about it, congratulating me on “making healthy choices.”

When I got to my lunch table, it was like arriving late to a party. Not like I’d ever been to a real one, seeing as how I’d been Lathamized in the spring of my sophomore year, but it felt like everything had started without me.

Charlie had already finished his lunch and was scribbling furiously in his notebook. Marina was leaning back in her chair, nibbling on a fry while she eavesdropped on the clique of overly dramatic girls at the next table. And Nick was busy carving his veggie burger into some sort of art
piece while Lane shook his head over it.

“Hi,” I said.

Lane looked up at me with this huge smile, and I wished I’d said something cooler than “Hi,” but too late.

“Sadie.” He said my name like I was exactly the person he wanted to see most. “Sorry if you got in trouble with Finnegan.”

“It’s not a big deal.” I shrugged, playing it off. “Although, Nick, you know your theory on the teachers being exposure-positive?”

Nick was concentrating so hard on carving up his burger with the dull plastic knife that he was like, “Mmmn?”

“Are you even listening?” I grumbled, putting down my tray.

Lane had taken the seat across from mine, which was usually empty. I was used to us being four people, with plenty of room to spread out. The table felt fuller with him there, and more cramped, with just the one empty seat.

“What?” Nick whined.

“Forget it,” I said. “You suck.”

He did, too. I still hadn’t forgiven him for backing out of our collection with Michael on Saturday night. At least he’d distributed his half, but still.

“You say that, but only because you haven’t yet feasted your eyes upon the genius of my latest invention,” Nick bragged.

He held up his tray in triumph. It didn’t look all that impressive to me. Basically, he’d cored his veggie burger.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I call it the nutburger! It’s a portmanteau.”

“It’s portmanterrible,” I said, snorting.

“I
told
him that,” said Marina. “It’s twenty percent less burger and twenty times more pretentious.”

“Whatever, it’s awesome,” Nick said, taking a bite.

Mustard and ketchup oozed out the middle of his nutburger and plopped onto his plate.

Marina giggled.

“Your prototype needs work,” Lane said.

Because he was sitting across from me, we kept accidentally making eye contact. He’d smile a little and then glance away. It happened, like, five times, and whenever it did, I felt all fluttery. Lane’s eyes flicked up and met mine for a sixth time, and then he grinned into his lunch tray.

I’d remembered his eyes as hazel, but they were actually green ringed with brown. He had those long, thick eyelashes, too, the kind that I couldn’t even get with mascara. There was color in his cheeks, and he looked less exhausted than he had last week. Now that I wasn’t still seething over the summer camp debacle, it was easy to see why the girls in my French class were so interested.

Of course he’d had a girlfriend back home. I bet he was one of those drama club guys the girls all secretly had crushes on. Or maybe class council. I couldn’t place him. There was
the flawless French, the preppy clothes, and the neat handwriting, and then there was the easy way he laughed, the witty comments, and that evil substitute teacher impression. It was like he thought he should be one thing but secretly was another.

Ugh, I wasn’t this girl. This blushy girl who couldn’t handle sitting across from a boy. Admittedly, a cute boy. Who was staring at me like he thought I could read Morse eye contact. I took a bite of my burger, hoping that would quelch the flutter.

“So, Lane,” I said, “how come you’re not sitting in the Bible Belt anymore?”

He made a face.

“I was sort of dying over there.”

“Well, now you can be sort of dying over here,” Charlie said dryly.

Lane laughed, and then looked embarrassed about it.

Charlie went back to writing again, and Marina tried to read it over his shoulder, being super obvious.

“Stop,” Charlie muttered, edging his notebook away.

“Ugh, you’re no fun.” Marina pouted for a moment, and then her face lit up. “Lane, you knew Sadie from before, right?”

“A little,” he allowed.

I tried to shoot Marina telepathic signals to shut up, but it didn’t work, probably because I don’t have superpowers.

“So, what’s the story with you two?” she asked. “Sadie won’t tell us anything.”

If I could have kicked her under the table, I would have.

“There’s nothing to tell,” Lane said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “We were thirteen and went to the same summer camp. I pretty much thought girls had cooties back then.”

“I
do
have cooties,” I said, and Marina almost choked on her juice.

“Can we
please
call it that from now on?” asked Nick.

“Sure,” I said. “I can just picture the final Facebook statuses. ‘She fought a heroic but ultimately unsuccessful battle against a grave case of cooties.’”

“Our little angel has gone on to a better place, a place free from cooties?” Nick suggested.

“Oh my God, stop.” I was cracking up. We all were. But it wasn’t funny. Not really. Being at Latham had warped our sense of humor, until there we were, calmly eating our burgers while composing fictitious final Facebook statuses for hypothetically deceased teens.

“That’s why I deleted my Facebook,” Charlie said. “Preemptive strike.”

None of us knew what to do with that. Charlie was the sickest of anyone in our group, and he was both the most and the least sensitive about discussing the future, and the possibility of not having one.

“I’m surprised Latham doesn’t block the site,” Lane said, and we all stared at him in horror. “My high school blocked almost everything good on their computers.”

“Shhh, don’t let them hear you!” said Nick. “Here, toss some salt over your shoulder.”

Nick held out the saltshaker, and Lane took it, playing along.

“There,” he said, throwing a pinch over his shoulder. “Happy?”

“The internet gods require more sacrifice,” said Nick. “Quick, hop on one leg and touch your nose.”

“The internet gods require a sobriety test?” Lane asked, and everyone laughed.

It was interesting the way he changed the dynamic of the table. How much louder our laughter sounded, and how the five of us seemed to fill the space more. Watching him and Nick was fascinating. There was something that clicked about the two of them, like they’d been friends forever. Watching them goof around made all the ways that Nick annoyed me somehow seem entertaining. But Lane added another element I hadn’t expected. Suddenly, our group felt disastrously coed.

When I went to bus my tray, Lane followed me.

“Can you try not to kill me this time?” I teased.

“Even if it gives you an awesome final Facebook status?”

I laughed.

“I deleted mine, too,” I admitted.

It had been too depressing, getting all those messages from classmates who had always ignored me, and it had been even more depressing a month later, when they’d forgotten me again.

“You’re all crazy,” he said. “I’m keeping mine for bragging rights. And for torturing ex-girlfriends.”

“So how’s that going?” I asked, finding a slot for my tray.

“It’s weird,” he said, pausing to gather his thoughts. “I’m not sure. I haven’t seen her for a month, so it feels like I’m brooding over something that happened forever ago.”

“The Latham Time Warp,” I said. “Sometimes a day lasts an hour, and sometimes it lasts a year.”

“That must be it. We’ve fallen through a hole in the space-time continuum.”

And then Genevieve sashayed over to the tray return with this sweet yet evil smile on her face.

“Lane,” she whined. “Where were you?”

“Oh,” Lane said sheepishly. “Um. I sat with Nick.”

I tried not to be disappointed that he hadn’t said he’d sat with me.

“Angela and Leigh were so worried that something had
happened
when you didn’t sit at our table.” She said it so dramatically that I snorted, and she shot me a glare.

She had to have noticed Lane sitting at our table, didn’t she? I wished she’d leave the whole thing alone, since it was clear Lane couldn’t wait to get away from them.