Extraordinary Means

All of it.

After Dr. Barons refused to let me up to see her and told me the news, I walked back to the cottages, through the early dusk that had come with the end of daylight savings, and banged on the door of Cottage 7 until Genevieve came down and opened it.

I pushed past her, not caring, and then I realized I didn’t know which room was Sadie’s.

“You’re not allowed in here,” Genevieve called after me.

“I’m looking for Sadie’s room?” I asked, and she must have seen it in my eyes that I wasn’t budging, because she took me to it.

I opened the door, and suddenly, I was surrounded by Sadie. The twinkle lights wrapped around her bed, the color-coded towers of books, the old trunk in the corner, which she’d covered with Harry Potter stickers. The mint plant she was growing on the windowsill, which explained why I’d always thought she smelled of fresh mint. The mug shaped like a British telephone booth, filled with different-colored Sharpies. The world map over her bed with a cluster of pins in Southern California, and one in Hawaii.

I wanted to curl up in that room forever, along with all of Sadie’s hopes and dreams. Along with her unfinished travel map and orphaned mint plant. Instead, I took the memory card out of her camera. And then I went back to Cottage 6 and tried very hard to dissolve.

THAT NIGHT WAS unbearable. I didn’t want to go to di

Nurse Jim found me sitting on the floor of my room, in the dark, scrolling through her photos on my laptop. It was the closest thing to seeing her again, to having her there with me. But it wasn’t enough. God, it wasn’t enough.

“Di

“Strike,” I said.

He hesitated a moment.

“I’ll put you down as sick,” he said.

WHEN I FINALLY did leave my room the next day, it was to bang on Nick’s door.

He opened it, looking as heartbroken as I felt. I’d gone over there to yell at him, but yelling wouldn’t do anything.

“Go

“What would that solve?”

“Well, if you’re not going to hit me, come on in,” he said, and I went inside, noting a trash can overflowing with apple juice boxes.

“God, I miss her,” Nick said, sinking onto his bed and burying his head in his hands. “I know she was your girlfriend, but she was my best friend, and I fucking miss her.”

“I do, too,” I said.

“I keep going over it,” Nick plunged on. “And I really think it’s my fault. If I’d been there, things might have gone differently.”

“They might not,” I said.

“I could have taken that guy,” Nick insisted, coughing.

“You couldn’t even take it when I hit you,” I said.

He shrugged, knowing it was true.

“I really want to be mad at you,” I told him.

“Because we’re in love with the same dead girl?” he asked. And he looked so broken that I couldn’t say any of the angry things I’d wanted to say. So I nodded and said yeah, because we were in love with the same dead girl.

THE WEDNESDAY THAT the protocillin arrived, we all lined up in the gym after lunch. The nurses sat behind tables, with piles of syringes, and I tried not to look for the place where Sadie would have stood in line to receive her injection.

Nurse Monica plunged the needle into my arm, and the protocillin pinched as it entered my bloodstream.

“Dose one of fifty-six,” she said, typing it into her tablet. “Now can you rate your pain for me on a scale of one to ten?”

But I couldn’t. It seemed so wrong to me then that there were only ten options, only ten types of pain. Because I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of types of pain in this world, maybe even thousands. And none of these are numbers on the same scale. They all hurt differently, and amounts have nothing to do with it. They all hurt too much, and not enough.

“I’m waiting, honey,” Nurse Monica reminded me, and I tried to concentrate on my arm, on the serum that was flowing through it.

“Two,” I lied.

I CAN BARELY remember those last few weeks at Latham. I know that we lined up each afternoon for our injections, and that after a few days, the tightness in my chest started to fade, and that after a week, I could take a deep breath without coughing.

It was strange to think that my insides were changing, that the version of myself who had been with Sadie was gone forever, and that as much as I wanted to live in the past, I had a long, gleaming future ahead of me. Latham House, which had once seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance, was now a relic of the past.

The sanatoriums were shut down, like they’d been before. We were removed from the world and then put back, as though nothing had changed. But we had. Without internet, without our phones, without being sure we had a future, it changed us. At least, I know it changed me.

And when my dad’s SUV pulled up outside Latham, and my parents climbed out, Mom crying, and Dad stiff but smiling, I knew that I hadn’t belonged to this place the way Sadie had. That my home was in the real world, and hers wasn’t, and she’d made her peace with that a long time ago.

But that didn’t make it any less painful that I wasn’t helping her carry her things out to her mom’s car. And it didn’t make it any less awful how she’d slipped from my life, and from her own.

I used to think a lot about the future, but now I spend my time thinking about the past. It sneaks in, even when I don’t want it to, while I’m sitting in a coffee shop doing my homework, or when I put on a shirt with my name inked into the collar from Latham’s laundry, or when the teacher calls on me in French class. And I know that I’ll eventually need to figure out what I want to do with my life, but right now, enjoying it seems like a pretty good option, since it’s not like I can have what I really want.

What I want is for Sadie to be there outside her house, waiting for me on the curb. What I want is to spend a day at the beach that starts with us covering each other in sunscreen and laughing. What I want is to take her to my school carnival and promise her a medium-soda-sized wish if she can grab my hand on the swing ride. What I want is for her to grab my hand and lead me through the woods, back in time to that first moment I saw her, when we were thirteen.

Maybe, if I’d kissed her at summer camp, things would have gone differently. Maybe then we wouldn’t have caught TB, or wound up at Latham, or fallen in love.

But we did all those things. We grew up, and we grew sick, and we slunk unprepared toward our respective futures. Or lack of futures.

There’s a difference between missing someone and mourning them. And I hold out hope that one day I will no longer mourn Sadie, that I will simply remember her, and smile sadly, and then I’ll keep going. Because that’s all you can do in this world, no matter how strong the current beats against you, or how heavy your burden, or how tragic your love story. You keep going.

It took a lot of things to make me realize that. To make me see the path, as opposed to the destination. I’d been sitting in the coffee shop and thinking for a long time. It was getting late, and my parents were expecting me at home, since it was a school night. So I packed up my books and walked into the parking lot.

I climbed in my car and started to head home, my visor down against the glare of the sun. But at the last minute, I turned left, because I never had before, and because I had time to go down a different road.