Extraordinary Means

My mom wasn’t in the room, thank God. She’d taken Erica to town for lunch, so it was just the four of us, me in my pajamas, and everyone else in their fancy clothes and surgical masks. I knew they’d meant the outfits to be amusing, but the idea that they were something I wasn’t stung. I hated that I was too sick to participate, like I was no longer one of them.

“Round of Bullshit?” Marina asked, taking out a deck of cards. Everyone pulled chairs around the bed, and Marina shuffled the deck. I was the first one out, and after I lost, I lay back, listening to them play and pretending we were lying on the grass in the sunshine, instead of in a hospital room.

My mom and Erica came back while Nick and Lane were dueling it out to win the game, and they watched, smiling, at Nick’s energy, and Lane’s psych-out tactics. And I was glad my mom got to see my friends, and a little of my life here, because I knew she worried I was making it all up, like I had when I’d written letters home from camp about how the girls were all my best friends, and then when she’d come to pick me up, no one had hugged me good-bye.

I GOT THE medication on Monday. Dr. Barons came in and hung the bag off my IV drip, choosing the lowest setting. My mom pulled over a chair and held my hand, even though it didn’t hurt. For a moment, it reminded me of what Marina had said, about how Amit’s parents had hovered and treated him like an invalid after he went home. But I pushed away the thought, and other, troubling thoughts, like men following me through a carnival, and Michael lunging toward me in the woods, and the way my mom had already gone through two large bottles of hand sanitizer.

I closed my eyes and pretended it was next summer, and Lane and I were camp counselors together, making sure the kids in our cabins didn’t get bullied. I pictured him in a pair of cutoffs and his loafers, with one of those lanyard key chains around his neck, both of us in matching staff T-shirts. I pictured us eating s’mores at a campfire, the chocolate all over our hands. I pictured us sneaking into the same shower stall after I bet him that he didn’t have the nerve. And I pictured the antibiotics dripping into my body, and binding tight to the infection, and making me better.

Except they didn’t.

My fever spiked that afternoon, and one of the nurses gave me something so I’d stop shivering, but the pain in my chest was so bad by that point that I knew. It wouldn’t work. I wasn’t extraordinary enough.

If living and dying were really the same thing, then I’d been dying for seventeen years, and I didn’t have much longer now to go. But I knew that might happen. I accepted it a long time ago. My miracle wasn’t a cure. It was a second chance. But second chances aren’t forever. And even miracles have an expiration date.

Mom’s eyes crinkled as she smiled down at me, her hand in mine, her voice murmuring.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay.”

I closed my eyes, wishing I believed it.

It’s so strange how the moment of your birth is this fixed point in time, but the hour of your death is always changing based on what you eat for di

Thinking about it like that made it more bearable, that we go back to God when we’ve had our turn, that some of us roll the dice less than we’d like, but that we’re the ones who are rolling them.

When I first came to Latham, I thought this place existed to protect the outside world from us, but now I know it’s the other way around. Latham protects us from them.

And the thing about trying to cheat death is that, in the end, you still lose.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

LANE

I COULDN’T HELP but hope that Sadie would make it. That, miraculously, she’d live until the first batch of protocillin arrived. That what she had, like the rest of us at Latham House, was curable. But deep down I knew the truth.

The treatment she’d asked for didn’t work, and she started to get sicker.

There were days where Sadie slept most of the time, where I bargained my way into the room and sat reading in a chair by her bed.

Sadie’s mom sat there, too, filling in Sudoku squares with a pencil and the occasional tear. A boyfriend, or fiancé, came and went, bald and sagging, bringing bags of health food and looking like he didn’t know what else to do. Marina sat with Sadie’s little sister, playing board games and bringing her a stack of fantasy novels. And Nick came by, with drooping flowers he’d picked down by the lake, although I couldn’t tell you whether it was Nick or the flowers that looked more wilted.

On Wednesday, Sadie and I were alone in the room, and she was propped up in bed, making me paint her nails a bright purple.

“B-minus,” she said, inspecting my work. “You missed, like, half my thumbnail.”

“It’s hard!” I complained.

“Well, you better fix it, since I’ll probably wear this for the rest of my life,” she joked.

My jaw tightened.

“Sorry,” she said with a sigh. “Not fu

“So basically everything?” I said.

“Basically everything,” Sadie echoed, leaning back and closing her eyes.

For a moment, I thought she’d fallen asleep, and then she asked, very softly, “What do you think happens to us when we die?”

I wasn’t expecting that, and I wasn’t sure I had an answer.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Maybe it’s different for different people.”

“I have a theory,” Sadie said. “That life is gathering the raw materials, and when we die, we get to make patterns out of our lives and relive them in whatever order we want. That way I can spend forever repeating the days when I was really happy, and never have to experience any of the sad days. So that’s how you live a really great life. You make sure you have enough good days that you want to go back to.”

Sadie swallowed thickly, and I could see that she was crying.

“Do you think I could go there, too?” I asked her. “And meet you in our good days?”

“I think you could,” Sadie murmured, her voice slowing. “I’ll meet you there. I’ll wait for you there. And I hope I’m waiting a very long time.”

SHE DIED ON Friday, less than two weeks before the first protocillin injections were given at Latham House.

I wasn’t there.

Her mother held her hand as Sadie died, not of tuberculosis, but of the thing she’d been convinced would cure her.

She would have made it if Michael hadn’t attacked her. If she hadn’t gone into the woods that night. If I had gone with her. If people were less afraid of diseases they didn’t understand, and less horrified to find that, somehow, the invisible hand of contagion had come for them, too.

In AP Bio, I learned that the cells in our body are replaced every seven years, which means that one day, I’ll have a body full of cells that were never sick. But it also means that the parts of me that knew and loved Sadie will disappear. I’ll still remember loving her, but it’ll be a different me who loved her. And maybe this is how we move on. We grow new cells to replace the grieving ones, diluting our pain until it loses potency.

The percentage of my skin that touched hers will lessen until one day my lips won’t be the same lips that kissed hers, and all I’ll have are the memories. Memories of cottages in the woods, arranged in a half-moon. Of the tall metal tray return in the dining hall. Of the study tables in the library. The rock where we kissed. The sunken boat in Latham’s lake. Sadie, snapping a photograph, laughing in the lunch line, lying next to me at the movie night in her green dress, her voice on the phone, her apple-flavored lips on mine. And it’s so unfair.