Extraordinary Means

But I couldn’t avoid Lane’s calls forever. You can’t end a relationship by ignoring it, you can only hurt the other person’s feelings and make the inevitable breakup even worse. It was like Lane had said that night so long ago in the gazebo: being someone’s ex isn’t an existing condition you find out about later, it’s something you know about the moment it happens to you.

And so, on Thursday, I called him.

“Hello?” he said after the third ring, his voice uncertain.

“It’s me,” I said.

“I’m so glad.” I could hear his smile, and I wished he didn’t do that. I wished he could just talk to me without sounding like I was the one person he wanted to talk to more than anyone. Without making me feel so guilty.

I took a deep breath, trying to summon my courage. I didn’t want to do this. I hated myself for doing this. But I had to.

“Lane,” I said softly, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Lane waited, unsure.

“Do what?” he said.

“We can’t be together,” I explained.

It was very, very quiet on his end.

“We can’t, or you don’t want to?” Lane finally asked.

“Both,” I said.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” I asked, confused.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t accept your breakup. Meet me in the gazebo of sadness and breakups.”

“It’s almost—”

“We have twenty minutes, so you better hurry,” he said, hanging up.

I put on a coat over my pajamas and smoothed my ponytail, and when I got to the gazebo, he was already there, slouched on the stairs.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

I sat down next to him, and we stared out at the woods, and I felt sick over them, like they were full of corpses. I glanced over at Lane, and he looked so beautiful, his cheeks pink in the cold, his hair in need of a trim, the way he sat with his fingers curled, like he was clutching something tiny and secret in his palm.

Latham felt like a shipwreck, and I didn’t know how many places there were in the lifeboats. I wanted both of us to be okay if we turned around and found we had the last seat. So I was shutting us down preemptively, before the pain became too much to bear.

“We can’t be together,” I said, trying not to cry. “We hooked up, and it was great, but it’s like summer camp. These things never work in the real world.”

Lane was quiet a moment, and still.

“I thought I was going to drive to your house with bagels when we got out. And we’d text. And we’d make it work,” he said.

“But it won’t work,” I said angrily. “You’ll go home and want to catch up on your schoolwork so you can graduate on time, and it won’t be worth driving for hours to see me when you’re going away to college in the fall.”

“Of course it will be worth it,” Lane said.

“You’re just saying that because you’re nice.”

“I’m saying that because it’s true,” Lane insisted.

“What, so we can have breakfast? So I can tell you about how fun it is being the oldest person in my classes and the only one who doesn’t know how to drive?” I asked.

“It wouldn’t be like that.”

“It might be. You get your life back, but I don’t.”

“But I don’t want my life back,” Lane said. “I wasn’t even using it. I was just . . . waiting for everything to be different. Except I was the same me when I got to Latham that I’d always been. I didn’t want to change, but I did. And now I want to figure it out as I go. But I know that I want you to be in it.”

He looked so earnest in the moonlight. Like he really believed the world was this place where good things happened to good people, and anything to the contrary was an accident.

I wished I’d never let it get this far. I’d always been fine on my own. And I’d be fine on my own again. Now, if we broke up, it would just be that. A breakup. You don’t mourn a breakup. At least, I didn’t think you did, having never personally experienced one.

“Well, I don’t want you in my life anymore,” I said, feeling myself crumble. I was crying because it wasn’t true, and because it was. And because I’d been right to be skeptical of happy endings and love stories where no one got hurt. Someone always gets hurt. But what no one ever tells you is that you can get hurt more than once.

So I stood up and walked back inside, away from the one boy who made me feel like I wasn’t alone, because he was the one person I couldn’t stand to lose, or disappoint, or watch fall out of love with me when I stepped out of Latham and transformed back into a potato.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

LANE

SADIE IGNORED ME the next day. We sat at the same table in the dining hall and everything, but with just the four of us, there was lots of room to space out, so it was me and Nick, and Marina and Sadie, with the empty chairs between us. We’d been a group once, but Sadie’s and my breakup had thoroughly wrecked that. The awkward, thick silence that had settled over our table since Charlie’s death seemed to close up, sealing us inside in permanent misery.

I spent that weekend alone in my room, reading old books from the library. I was on this Vo

What was the point anymore? Charlie was dead, and Sadie had decided to shut herself off from the world, and Nick was medicating away his sorrows, and Marina sat there writing fan fiction like if she tried hard enough, she could pretend she was at Hogwarts.

So I sat and read Vo

I wondered what Sadie was doing. I wanted to call her. A couple of times I picked up the phone, but I always put it back down. Cowardice, through and through.

She didn’t come to Wellness anymore, and I didn’t blame her. Really, what was the point? Latham had become exactly what I’d wanted it to be before I’d known better: something to get through before we could go home.

And every time I saw Sadie walking back to the cottages after di

And I wanted Sadie. I wanted our relationship back, for us to try and stay together. Even if it was a bad idea, and even if she didn’t want a reminder of this place, because I did. I wanted to remember who I’d been when we were together, because I liked the Latham version of me so much better than the Lane I’d been before. I wanted to be the Lane who kissed a girl in a bedsheet toga and stole internet and wore a tie to a pajama movie night. I wanted to be Sadie’s Lane, not the Lane who ran the Carbon Footprint Awareness Club just so I could put “club president” on my college résumé.

And I was scared that I couldn’t be Sadie’s Lane without Sadie, that I wouldn’t be brave enough to put down my books and go on an adventure if she wasn’t beckoning me toward the woods, a smile on her lips promising that everything would be okay.

I STARTED TAKING walks around the grounds at night, thinking about everything. About Sadie, and Charlie, and about what I wanted to leave behind in this world, when the time came. I was tired of being an empty box, of maintaining a checklist instead of a passion, of having skipped so many rites of passage that were lost to me now.