Extraordinary Means

“Well?” Sadie asked, after I took my first sip.

I was having a religious experience. Caramel and cream and sugar and caffeine and I didn’t know what else, but I didn’t care.

“The look on your face,” she said. “I bet you’re glad we came now.”

“Of course I’m glad,” I said. “I just had to protest, for the principle of the thing.”

“Uh-huh, sure.” Sadie smiled into her straw.

Charlie and Marina weren’t back yet, and after the second time Sadie checked the time display on her med sensor and sighed, I asked if she thought they’d wanted some time alone.

“Charlie always wants time alone,” Nick said. “It’s why he always skips Wellness.”

“I meant, um, with Marina,” I said.

Sadie giggled.

“They’re just friends,” she said. “I mean, Charlie’s adorable, but so are the boys he likes.”

“Boys?”

“I know,” Sadie said with a wry smile. “The entire female population of Latham was upset over that one.”

I hadn’t pictured Charlie as being gay, but now that Sadie had said it, I could see it easily. Suddenly, the One Direction poster above his bed made a lot more sense.

Marina and Charlie came back from the thrift store then, both of them carrying bags. Charlie looked much better, which was a relief.

“What did you get?” Sadie asked, peering excitedly into Marina’s bag. “Oh my God, that dress is amazing. We have to use it in a photo shoot.”

“Four dollars!” Marina said. “And it has a matching belt.”

“I found the theme song to Cops on vinyl,” Charlie said proudly.

I thought he was kidding, but then he held it up, and sure enough.

We walked back toward the woods, sipping our sugary coffee concoctions, and I was suddenly glad that I’d come, and that they’d invited me. Back home, no one would have thought to include me in something like this, and I probably would have made an excuse if they had, not because I didn’t want to, but because I thought I shouldn’t.

It occurred to me then how much I’d missed. I’d always told myself that there was plenty of time to goof around later, after I’d gotten into Stanford. But if the past month had taught me anything, it was that the life you plan isn’t the life that happens to you. And I was begi

I glanced over my shoulder toward the town one last time, wondering when I had gone from feeling out of sync with Latham to belonging there, because I was relieved to be heading back. Sadie consulted her little compass, and we set off toward Latham. She walked up front, navigating, and I decided to join her. The woods were beautiful that afternoon, the leaves just starting to turn. There were shades of orange and gold and pale yellow, colors I’d seen in movies and photographs but wasn’t used to in real life. Some of the leaves had already fallen, and they crunched under our feet.

For a while, Sadie and I didn’t say anything, just walked through the woods together, crushing leaves with our sneakers. I kept glancing over at her, in her tight black sweater and jeans, with wisps of hair loose from her ponytail. She was so short that I could see down the front of her sweater, to the little bridge where her pink bra stretched across her cleavage. I swallowed, forcing myself to look away and think about something else, since my heart was already racing from the caffeine.

The woods reminded me so much of camp, of being thirteen and self-conscious about everything. Sadie looked so different than she had back then. But I’d grown eleven inches and could no longer stick a raisin in the gap between my front teeth, so I guessed she could say the same thing.

And then she looked over at me and asked what I was thinking about.

“The last time we were in the woods,” I said.

“You mean thirty minutes ago?”

“No, at summer camp. I used to play badminton with Scott . . . Canadian Scott, not creepy Scott who lit worms on fire.”

“I was hoping it was the worms one,” she joked, and I shot her a look.

“Anyway, he kept hitting the shuttlecock into the woods. And I kept having to go get it. Which sucked. And then one day, when I was looking for the thing, I saw you in the woods taking pictures.”

What I didn’t add was that I’d been fascinated, and that occasionally I’d missed on purpose so I could chase the shuttlecock into the woods and see if she was there.

“I still take pictures in the woods,” she said.

“Can I see them?”

“Lane!” She pretended to be shocked. “You can’t just go asking a girl if she’ll show you her pictures!”

“Oh, sorry, what was I thinking?” I teased.

“I totally knew you were there, at summer camp,” Sadie said. “You weren’t very subtle about it. You were like—”

She did an impression of me standing and gawking, and I felt my face heat up.

“Why didn’t you say anything if you knew I was there?”

“Why didn’t you?” she challenged.

I shrugged, not wanting to confess that I’d been ridiculously intimidated by girls when I was thirteen. They’d pranced around torturing me, these magical creatures with tangled hair and wet bikinis and long, ta

The woods started to thin out, and when I had the impression we were almost back in what passed for civilization, Sadie unzipped her backpack and took out a pen.

“What’s your extension?” she asked, and I stared at her blankly. “Your room phone?”

“Um, 8803?”

“Write it down for me?” She gave me the pen and held out her hand.

I took her hand in mine, and as gently as I could, I inked my number across the back of it. She smiled up at me, and then she grabbed my hand and wrote down her extension. I stared at the four neat numbers nestled in my palm, feeling like Sadie had given me more than just her phone number.

And suddenly, we were back behind the cottages, in the same spot where I’d seen them sneaking out of the woods on my first day. Except this time I wasn’t watching from my room. I was there, a part of it. A part of everything, I guessed.

The grounds looked the same as always. Peaceful and picturesque and frozen in time. It was a place where there wasn’t a point to technology, and a place that ironically existed because we didn’t have enough of it to cure us.

It looked like no one had noticed our absence at all. We’d really done it. We’d gotten away with a trip into town. For Starbucks.

“Lane?” Sadie said tentatively.

She smiled at me and tucked the loose strands of hair behind her ears.

“Yeah?”

“We’re all going to skip Wellness today.”

“Oh.” I’d thought she was going to say something else. “How do you skip Wellness?”

“It’s easy. You just don’t go.”

“I think I can manage that,” I said.

And then I went up to my room and climbed into bed with a P. G. Wodehouse novel I’d gotten from the library. I tried to concentrate on the book, but I kept flipping it closed to read Sadie’s number on my palm. The thrill of Sadie holding my hand in hers while she wrote down her extension hadn’t yet faded. So I stared at my palm, gri

It was Friday afternoon, and I was supposed to be walking laps in a pair of gym shorts and sneakers, but I wasn’t. And I didn’t care. Maybe it was just the caffeine coursing through me, but I felt better than I had in weeks, as though instead of walking those laps, I could have run them.

CHAPTER TWELVE

SADIE

THE FIRST TIME Lane called me, it was Saturday night and almost lights-out. I’d been in the boys’ dorm earlier, where we’d watched The Princess Bride after Nick had mutinied and insisted on something that wasn’t (a) animated, or (b) in Japanese, with subtitles.