Extraordinary Means

I’d been waiting for the latter to happen. For the people I cared about to leave me behind, one by one, like I was an imaginary friend they’d outgrown. I wasn’t prepared for any of us to leave the other way, with the doors locking behind us, and a hearse driving quietly through the back gate.

We were the ones who got dressed in the morning, who stole internet and staged photo shoots in the woods during naptime, who hid phones in our beds after lights-out and snuck into town to get coffee. We weren’t the ones who died here. We couldn’t be.

Everyone in the dining hall stared at our table during lunch. They all knew, or they guessed. Charlie had missed two meals, and the nurses had been ru

I stared down at the sandwich and fruit cup and salad on my plate, because I knew I should eat them, even though I wasn’t hungry. I could feel Charlie’s empty chair at the edge of my vision, and I wanted so badly for him to sit there bent over his notebook, scribbling away. I wanted to hear the high strum of a ukulele coming from his window as I walked back to the cottages. I wanted him to play me a record with this huge grin on his face, delighted by the antiquated technology. I wanted him to dress up in eyeliner and velvet again, and to do his spot-on impression of Dr. Barons, asking us to rate our pain on a scale from one to ten.

Except right now I didn’t want to rate my pain. I wanted to rate my grief. And there wasn’t a number high enough.

I left lunch early and went back to my room, collapsing onto my bed in tears. I cried until it made me cough, and when I took my handkerchief away from my mouth, it was stained with blood. I was surprised, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t been taking care of myself. None of us had. We’d rolled our eyes and skipped rest periods and stayed up late and drunk Nick’s booze.

It was no wonder Charlie had gotten so sick. Oh God, Charlie.

The memory of last night seared through me, and I curled up in a ball, clutching that horrible handkerchief, and cried some more. I knew Natalie Zhang would be able to hear it through the wall, but I didn’t care. I cried for the way Charlie had died, and I cried that I hadn’t gotten a chance to say good-bye, and I cried that the last thing I’d said to him was, “You better not oversleep.” I cried because, while Charlie was dying alone in the woods, I was so close, pressed up against a tree with Lane, kissing him like nothing else in the world mattered except how the two of us felt about each other, and naively thinking how wonderful it was that all of us had so much time.

DR. BARONS CAME into the dining hall that night to make an a

There was a collective groan as Dr. Barons exited the dining hall. It felt like everything had fallen apart, like I’d blinked, just for a moment, and when I’d opened my eyes I was surrounded by ruins.

I stalked off to bus my tray, and Lane followed me.

“Sadie, wait,” he called.

He looked terrible. We all did, I guessed, except now it worried me in a way it hadn’t for weeks. I couldn’t tell if the dark circles under his eyes were serious, or if his cough sounded worse. And I hated that I wasn’t looking at Lane with a melty feeling in my stomach, that instead I was sca

I slotted my tray into the return.

“What?”

“I haven’t seen you all day,” he said.

“I haven’t wanted to see anyone all day.”

“Not even me?” he asked, biting his lip and staring at me adorably.

I wished he wasn’t so cute when he did that. I wished he’d already gone home and left me behind without calling. I wished I didn’t have a fever, and he didn’t look so tired, and we hadn’t just eaten di

I hated that I was in love and grieving, because I didn’t know how to be both. It was just too much. Too many things that could go wrong. And there was too much potential pain for us to keep going.

I don’t know what made me do it, except some combination of sorrow and anger and the stupid fever I couldn’t get rid of, and the feeling of everyone at Latham staring at our table in that awful hushed way, but I sighed and shook my head.

“Sorry,” I said. And then I fled the dining hall.

FINNEGAN HAD GIVEN us homework, but I’d completely forgotten about it. We were supposed to write a poem or something, and I felt so embarrassed when everyone else took out theirs. I’d been out of school so long that it felt strange having homework. I wondered if bereavement was an excuse, although at Latham, probably not.

And then Fi

“You can leave when you finish, no need to hand it in,” he said.

With a sip from his mug, he was out the door.

“What the heck?” Nick muttered. “I thought we were doing poems.”

“I did, too,” Marina said. “Whatever happened to ‘you need to be prepared for high school’?”

“What do you think?” I said bitterly. “Homework adds u

Lane sighed. He was staring at me again in this pleading, can-we-talk way, but I pretended I didn’t see.

I didn’t know what to say. Now that there was news of a cure, everything at Latham felt different. It wasn’t the same “we can treat the symptoms but not the disease, so if you’re feeling tired, how about a rest” bullshit that Dr. Barons had always pushed. No doctors would ever say that again. Now there was this frantic new undercurrent of “let’s just keep everyone alive until the protocillin arrives,” as though any of us could keel over at any moment, and it would somehow be fifty times more tragic than if we’d done it a month ago.

GRIEF IS A strange thing. I’d thought, for the longest time, that being at Latham was a constant grieving for an answer. Live or die. Return home or succumb. But it wasn’t grief at all. It was fear.

I knew at least that much after Charlie died. Because I could hardly breathe through the pain of thinking about what had happened, but underneath that, I was so, so scared that there were more casualties to come. That I’d gotten too attached to the idea of us, of Nick and Lane and Marina and Charlie and me as being untouchable, while the invisible hand of tuberculosis hovered there, drumming its fingers impatiently.

I remembered the look on Dr. Barons’s face when he’d pulled up my X-rays, and the way Lane’s cheeks had seemed flushed at di

The saying at Latham was “Welcome to the rotation,” but the unspoken second half of that phrase was “you can exit through either of two doors.” I’d always had a theory which door would be mine, but I’d been careful not to make predictions for anyone else.

Lane called me every night, and every night I ignored him, turning away from the ringing phone and turning up the volume on my music. I knew it was a bad plan, but I didn’t know what else to do. The idea of giggling and flirting after what had happened struck me as horrible. It was like something in me had snapped. I could feel my emotions floating there, just beneath the surface, but I couldn’t access them. All I could get was numb, and horrified, and occasionally angry.