Extraordinary Means

Breakfast was an ordeal. I don’t know how any of us managed to act normally. We were all pale and gray from the alcohol, and just the sight of pancakes and eggs made my stomach churn unpleasantly. But I piled my tray high, because I didn’t know what I’d do if Linda made me go back through. And then the four of us sat around our table, wan and silent, while the rest of the dining hall talked and laughed and hummed with energy.

Nick stood up early to bus his tray.

“We should head back,” he said, staring at me. “We have to do that thing.”

I followed him over to the tray return, and across the grass, and back into Cottage 6. He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t have to. I knew what we were doing—cleaning up before the lockout.

One night in the dorms, Nick had been talking about how, in the army, when a soldier dies, the other soldiers wipe all the porn off his computer before it’s returned to his family.

“You’d do it for me, right?” Nick had said. And we’d all agreed that yeah, we’d do it for each other. It had seemed like a joke, the way everything did then, when we did what we wanted because nothing bad ever happened. But now the joke was on us.

It felt wrong going into Charlie’s room without his permission, like the room was still his, instead of just filled with his things.

“You check his computer, I’ll see if I can find his stick,” Nick said.

I told him that sounded good, and then I went over and woke up Charlie’s computer. The whole thing had been restored to the original settings, with the generic outer space background.

“Nick?” I said.

Nick was holding a shoe box, an unreadable expression on his face.

“I’ve got everything,” he said.

“That fast?”

“It’s all here. Let’s go,” Nick said.

We went back to his room and set the box on his bed. It had PROPERTY OF NIKHIL PATEL written across the top in black Sharpie, but I recognized it as Charlie’s handwriting immediately.

“What’s in it?” I asked.

Nick lifted the lid. Inside was a stack of Moleskine notebooks, a bag of peanut butter M&M’s, an iPod, and two USB sticks. One was suspiciously titled “Math Homework,” and the other was labeled “Gone to His Narrow Bed—Charlie Moreau.”

Nick picked up the second USB stick and popped it into his computer.

It was an album. Charlie’s album. With hand-drawn and meticulously inked cover art. He’d finished it.

Nick pressed play, and for a moment, nothing happened, and then a familiar melody drifted from Nick’s speakers. I’d heard Charlie play this song so many times, but the finished version sounded different. It was darker, and richer, and full of anguish.

He sang about getting sick, and about making art, and about time, how we never had enough of it. I closed my eyes and listened, my heart breaking with each track.

“I am a grave man, children play in my graveyard/skipping stones on headstones/It’s time to rest these too young bones/If anyone asks, I’ve gone to my narrow bed.”

The last song finished, and when I opened my eyes, I was crying, and Nick was, too.

“Fuck,” he said, sniffling. “All that time I thought he was writing love songs to One Direction.”

I laughed, and then felt horrible about it. But there was something about the box that was bothering me. Charlie had spent the last few weeks working almost constantly on his music, with an intensity I hadn’t understood. He’d skipped class, barely left his room, hardly eaten anything. . . .

“Do you think Charlie knew?” I asked.

“That he didn’t have much time?”

I nodded.

“Yeah,” Nick said finally. “I do. I just think he didn’t want us to worry about him, since we’d all started talking about going home and stuff.”

We were silent a moment, considering it.

“He left that box right there, on his bed,” Nick said. “So we’d find it when we went into his room for our army mission. It’s like he wanted to make it easy for us.”

“Then why the notebooks, and the music?” I asked. “Why wipe his computer if he kept all the X-rated stuff on a stick?”

“Haven’t you ever thought about it?” Nick asked. “What you want to leave behind, and what you don’t?”

“Not really.”

It had never occurred to me that I had anything to leave behind at all. Everything I’d done had been focused on the future, on impressing college admissions officers, but it was just empty paper. Just numbers and letters on a transcript and a list of clubs I’d belonged to.

I remembered what Charlie had said about shutting down his Facebook, as a preemptive strike against it turning into a memorial wall. About needing to finish his music. About trying to create a legacy, because if he didn’t record his songs, he’d have nothing to leave behind.

“If he knew he was that sick, why didn’t he just stay in bed last night?” I asked.

“Would you?” Nick said, and for a moment I didn’t understand what he was saying. And then, horribly, I did.

Charlie hadn’t wanted to pass away in the hospital ward, wasting his last days waiting to die instead of spending them living. And he hadn’t wanted to die in his bed, beeping, while the whole dorm woke up and crowded the hallway to see what was going on.

We’d gone into the woods, and he’d known that, but he didn’t have anyone else. He’d turned off his sensor so he wouldn’t get caught, and he’d gone to find us. He just hadn’t made it.

There was nothing we could have done. No way we could have known. Because he hadn’t wanted us to know, not until right at the end, and then, it had been too late.

“You’d think if there was a god that Charlie would have had five more minutes to come find us,” I said.

Nick shook his head. “It makes me so sad that I’m not even sad anymore, I’m just angry. Dr. Barons said we’d be cured. He didn’t say we’d be cured if we all lived six more weeks, but heads-up, guys, some of you might not live that long.”

Nick was sitting on the floor, his back against the wardrobe, and he pulled his knees and arms in, curling himself into a ball.

“Maybe he thought it was the right thing, giving everyone hope,” I said.

“Maybe he’s just an asshole,” Nick muttered. “I knew it was too good to be true that we’d all go home and have fucking Skype chats. Four weeks till the cure, a hundred and forty-nine of us to go.”

Nick got up, pulled a water bottle of vodka out of his desk drawer, and took a swig.

“Want some?” he asked, coughing.

I shook my head, and Nick lifted the bottle in salute.

“To Charlie,” he toasted. “For finishing his art.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

SADIE

I WATCHED FROM my window as the nurses and doctors scurried back and forth in the overcast morning, frantically searching for Charlie. I tried to pretend I was backstage at a play, watching the chaos as everyone scrambled around before curtain, but part of me knew that I wasn’t. That all our games and jokes had finally twisted into something serious and terrible.

I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d just sat there watching the sky and listening to this one bird that didn’t understand it was night, and wondering if I’d ever sleep again. I was terrified of what I’d dream, of whose corpses I’d conjure up when I closed my eyes.

It was all my fault. Charlie was dead because of me. I hadn’t meant for it to happen, but that didn’t make it any less true. I’d just wanted to show off about the med sensor, but if I’d thought about it, I would have realized it was a terrible idea.

Charlie had always been sicker than the rest of us. We’d never made a big deal about it, because that sort of thing could change in an instant. Any week, one of us could have come back from an appointment with Dr. Barons, our face ashen as we moved our things to the hospital wing for round-the-clock care, and our parents were summoned, and we were given a pain pump instead of an aspirin. Any week, one of us could have come back from the same appointment with a copy of our latest chest X-ray and a release date.