Extraordinary Means

“Où est-ce que vous avez mal, monsieur?” I asked.

“Alors, j’ai toussé depuis une semaine,” said Lane.

Ugh, he was being so flowery about it. So show-offy. We could do the whole thing in present tense, but he was conjugating in the passé composé.

“Et vous avez de la fièvre aussi?” I asked, a plan begi

Lane confirmed that yes, he coughed and he had a temperature.

“Have you coughed up any blood?” I asked, in French.

Lane paused, staring at me in panic.

“Et voilà,” I said, pointing at his shirt. “A spot of blood!”

“No, no, that’s . . . ketchup,” Lane said, trying to deny it. “I think I have the flu.”

“L’infirmière a déjà fait une radiographie, n’est-ce pas?” I demanded.

And Lane, looking resigned, had no choice but to agree that yes, the nurse had taken an X-ray.

I pulled an imaginary X-ray out of my notebook and pretended to hold it up to the light, enjoying myself immensely. The whole classroom was silent, waiting.

“It’s only a little tuberculosis,” I said, somehow keeping a straight face.

“Un peu de tuberculosis?” Lane repeated, glaring at me.

And that was when I did it.

“Luckily, monsieur,” I said, “this is simple to treat with the excellent drugs we have. You are very lucky that you are in France.”

That was when Fi

“Sadie, what was that?” Fi

“I read about how they treat tuberculosis in France with medication that worked on the older strains,” I said.

“Is that true?” someone asked.

Fi

“No,” he said firmly. “Not for two years.” He paused, considering it, and then allowed, “Well, only in desperate cases, when the patient requests it. But it was deemed an extraordinary means of preserving life.”

“What does that mean?” Angela asked.

Fi

“The treatment for the other strains didn’t work the same on TDR-TB,” he explained. “Doctors couldn’t figure out why, but too many patients who were given the medication died from it. And a lot of those people might have gotten better on their own, or at a sanatorium.”

Fi

“But it worked on some people, right?” Angela asked.

“The odds of dying from the treatment were higher than the odds of being cured by it,” Fi

“Like pneumothorax,” said Charlie. “When doctors collapsed people’s lungs.”

“Sort of,” Fi

“Doctors collapsed people’s lungs?” Genevieve sounded horrified. “Like, inside their bodies?”

Fi

“This is a French class,” he reminded us.

“Inside their bodies?” Genevieve echoed, scandalized.

“Enough talk!” Fi

And then, like he’d been doing more and more lately, he left the room.

WHEN CLASS WAS over, I watched Lane approach the teacher’s desk.

“Excuse me,” he said tentatively. “Monsieur Fi

“Not now,” Fi

“Sorry,” Lane apologized. He shuffled out of the room, looking dejected.

“Dude,” Nick whispered, shoving his French exercise book into his bag. “That TB is curable thing was genius.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Too bad it isn’t true.”

“Too bad you’re not really pregnant,” I shot back.

He laughed as he sailed out of there.

I was the last one left in the room, and Fi

Of course Lane was waiting for me in the hallway. He was actually pacing. And he looked furious.

“Sadie,” he said, the moment I opened the door.

“Need something?”

“You threw the assignment!” he accused. “On purpose!”

I wasn’t expecting that, or the way he seemed to mean it. He looked genuinely distraught that we hadn’t been the best in the class.

“It’s not a big deal,” I said.

“It is to me!” Lane fumed. “You may not care about your grades, but I do. I can’t believe you did that to me on my first day!”

“I thought yesterday was your first day,” I said.

Lane glared.

“You know what I mean. We failed that exercise, didn’t we?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said slowly, wondering why he still didn’t get it. “None of this is real. The teachers wouldn’t dare to give anyone less than an A. So you can stop worrying about your stupid grade, okay?”

And then I stomped away, toward the dining hall, putting enough distance between the two of us that we wouldn’t have to wait in line together, because I didn’t know if I could stand it.

CHAPTER SEVEN

LANE

AS FAR AS first weeks go, I was pretty sure my first week at Latham contained a record-setting quantity of suck. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to get it right.

Everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing and where they were going. Everyone else seemed to have mastered the art of blending in. Except for Sadie and Nick’s crowd, who made it their business to stick out.

I only had one class with them, so I began to watch for them in the dining hall and around campus. Nick lived on my hall, and Charlie was on the floor below, but I rarely saw either of them in the dorm. My only interaction with Charlie was the frantic ukulele strumming and angry falsetto that occasionally drifted out his window.

The four of them spent a lot of time in the woods, slinking off into the birch trees in a way that was almost secretive, with bags over their shoulders that seemed too full to be carrying textbooks. In the dining hall, they created small amounts of havoc with the nutritionist. One afternoon, when a plate of freshly baked cookies was set out, they ate them while waiting in line, before their trays could be checked.

Which isn’t to say that I was overly preoccupied with them. I wasn’t. I kept mostly to myself, studying in my room, or in the library, which was unexpectedly amazing; a holdover from when Latham was a real boarding school. The selection was largely classics, but the study alcoves were fantastic, and I never saw anyone using them.

Everyone else seemed to treat Latham like a vacation. The TV lounge was constantly crammed, and the DVD collection in the library was so heavily checked out that at first I’d thought it had been removed. Graphic novels, magazines, and popular books they didn’t carry in the outdated library were passed around like contraband in the dorms. Board game tournaments took over the common room, with Post-it note warnings stuck on top of in-progress games, saving them. The guys on my hall even turned showering into an extracurricular activity, spending so long in there every night that it was lights-out by the time a stall would open up, the water ice cold and the floor slippery.