Extraordinary Means

“I do, too.” I squeezed his hand, and we squelched through a particularly muddy pile of leaves. Our sheets were going to be ruined.

Marina and Nick had veered a little off course, and I called out to them.

“Hey, is it muddy over where you are?”

But they didn’t answer. They were stopped, still as stone, and in the beam of my flashlight, they were the ones who looked like statues.

“Hello?” I called, shining my flashlight at Marina.

The look on her face was devastating.

“Sadie—” she choked out.

Something was wrong. I knew it as Lane and I ran toward them, our togas dragging and ripping on rocks and branches. We coughed as we ran, but we didn’t stop ru

And then I saw what they were staring at.

Not what, who.

It was Charlie, his body u

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LANE

IT WAS AS though we’d stepped into a nightmare. We shone our flashlights down on Charlie’s body, barely registering that it was real. The white fabric of his bedsheet was tangled around him, splattered with bright-red arterial blood. There was blood smeared around his mouth, and he was so still, lying on the carpet of rotting leaves.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I stood there in horror, not fully processing the enormity of what had happened.

“Charlie—” Sadie wailed. She got to her knees, shaking him. “Come on, Charlie! You’re okay, come on. Please!”

He wasn’t okay, though. Any of us could see that.

“Is he . . . ?” Marina asked, but she already knew. We all did.

Nick went pale and staggered away, and we could hear him vomiting.

We were drunk, and cold, and covered in mud, with bedsheets pi

“He can’t be dead; his sensor would have gone off!” Sadie insisted. She reached for his wrist, and at first I thought she was taking his pulse, but then she pushed up his sleeve.

The light on his sensor wasn’t green, or flashing yellow in warning. There was no light on his sensor at all. It was just a black silicone band.

“That’s why no one came,” Sadie said. “Because Charlie had his sensor off!”

The enormity of what that meant washed over me, and I felt my stomach sour and twist, like I might be sick as well. We’d joked about Charlie’s sensor in the dining hall, laughing at him when it had gone off, instead of being concerned. And now it was too late to be concerned. Now it was too late to be anything except sorry.

While we’d danced around the fire in our togas, and beat our drum, and thrown back our booze, Charlie had lain there dying. Alone. In the woods.

I didn’t realize I was crying until I tried to put a hand on Sadie’s shoulder to steady her, and found that I was trembling as well. I swallowed thickly and glanced over at Marina, who looked as distraught as I felt.

Nick staggered back, pale and sweating.

“Fuck, Charlie, you don’t turn off your sensor! You don’t ever do that, you hear me?” Nick said.

But of course Charlie didn’t hear him. The dead never listen when you want to tell them anything.

Charlie wasn’t supposed to be dead. None of us were. Not now that they’d a

It hadn’t occurred to me that some of us might not have four weeks left.

“This is my fault,” Sadie said, blinking back tears. “I showed him how to shut off his sensor. I didn’t think anything would happen.”

“None of us did,” I said, wondering how Sadie could think that.

“Charlie was really sick,” Nick said. “We all knew he was doing the worst of any of us.”

“Having the worst symptoms doesn’t mean anything,” Marina said. “We never saw his charts or his X-rays. Sometimes people seem really healthy, and then they die. And sometimes they seem sick, and then they just go home.”

I’d had too much to drink. We all had. The woods were spi

The whole night had taken on this strange, nightmarish tone, and I struggled to believe any of it. Any moment, I expected to wake up back in my dorm room, my heart pounding and my T-shirt clammy, wondering what the hell was wrong with my subconscious.

“If we’re the only ones who know, we have to tell someone,” I said. “A nurse. Someone who’ll know what to do.”

Everyone stared at me like I’d suggested calling the police.

“We can’t,” Nick said, his voice cracking.

“Nick’s right,” Sadie said. “No one can know we found him here.”

There was a terrible silence where we were all thinking the same thing.

“So we just go back inside?” Marina asked.

“Yes,” Sadie said. “We go back inside, and climb into bed, and in the morning, when Charlie isn’t at breakfast, they’ll look for him.”

“We can’t just leave him here,” I said.

“Yes, we can.” Nick’s expression dared me to argue. “Unless you can think of a better option?”

“Maybe a nurse would understand,” Marina said.

“Understand what?” Nick said angrily. “Do you want to tell Dr. Barons that we all decided to sneak out and get super drunk in the woods, and oh yeah, Charlie turned off his med sensor and died, but we weren’t with him or anything, which we can’t prove, but we found his body and can take you to it, and please don’t punish us for breaking, like, every rule at Latham House that actually matters.”

When he said it like that, it sounded terrible. Like we’d been up to something awful. Like it was our fault.

“But they can’t really punish us, can they?” I asked.

They all stared at me like they couldn’t believe they had to spell it out.

“Are you kidding?” Nick said. “We get kicked out of here, we’re out of the drug trial.”

The drug trial. It was one of the reasons my parents had sent me to Latham, after all, instead of one of the cheaper, public places. Instead of the holistic hot springs, or the homeopathic place where everyone slept in yurts and farmed their own kale. Latham gave us med sensors, and sent that data to researchers, and it put us at the top of the treatment list for any experimental drug trials. Like the one for protocillin.

Nick was right, and we all knew it.

“Okay,” Marina said. “So we walk away.”

“We walk away,” I agreed.

“Like we were never here,” Sadie said hoarsely.

“Like we have no idea Charlie isn’t asleep in his room,” Nick said. “None of us gets in trouble, and in a couple of hours, it will all be over.”

Except that’s the thing about dying, or experiencing death. It happens, but it’s never over. So we stood there one final moment together. And then, slowly, regretfully, we walked away.

I WOKE THE next morning convinced it had been a bad dream. And then I looked down at the tangle of mud-streaked sheets, and at my filthy sneakers, and was horrified to realize it had actually happened.

It was early, and Sunday, which meant breakfast began slightly later than usual. My head was pounding, and my mouth tasted terrible, but I dragged myself out of bed. I put my sheets down the contaminated laundry chute and rinsed my sneakers in the shower.