Extraordinary Means

I was ranked second in my graduating class. I’d almost killed myself to get there, too. I’d bussed over to the community college all of junior year for the AP Physics lab, volunteered at the health clinic on Wednesday afternoons, given up most of my weekends for Model UN practice and SAT prep courses, and started the Carbon Footprint Awareness Club after my adviser told me I needed to demonstrate “unusual hobbies and passions” to set my application apart.

I was good at being smart. At studying the textbooks until I had them memorized. At knowing the right answer so often that I’d stopped raising my hand in class, because I didn’t need to prove anything. My parents had always pushed me to succeed, and after a while, I hadn’t needed the push anymore.

Until a couple of weeks ago, it was a straight shot to the college of my choice. To Stanford. I could land a summer banking internship at twenty, graduate in three years, and recruit straight to Wall Street. I’d have my loans paid back by the time I turned twenty-three, just in time for business school, or law school, I wasn’t quite sure yet. But that was the plan.

And I intended to stick to it. Anyway, I healed fast. I’d recovered in a weekend when I got my wisdom teeth out, so I didn’t have to miss the exam review in English. All I needed were a couple of weeks for my body to get its shit together and then I could go home. I didn’t even feel that sick. I was a little tired, and I coughed sometimes, but it felt like having a cold, not some serious illness.

“Well, it’s my senior year—” I began.

“Lane,” Dr. Barons interrupted. “What you need to do is to think of Latham as a vacation. A calm, welcoming place to relax and to escape from all the stresses and toxins of the real world.”

“A vacation. Right,” I said, my shoulders sagging.

I didn’t do vacations. Vacations were for people who had time to relax, and I didn’t. Stanford’s acceptance rate was only 5 percent. I couldn’t afford to be better than 94 percent of the other applicants. I had to be better than almost everyone.

But I could see that I wasn’t getting through to Dr. Barons about how important it was for me to stay on track. I’d have to show him that Latham was working. That I was improving. And then he’d send me home. I just had to make sure I wasn’t too far behind when I got there.

CHAPTER FOUR

SADIE

I LOOKED FOR Lane at di

But the thing about being a disaster in middle school is that the shame of it never fully goes away. Even after your braces are off and your hair is exactly the way girls wear it on Tumblr, underneath it all, you’re still just as unsure whether someone actually likes you, or is only talking to you so they can laugh about it afterward.

And even though stuff like that never happened anymore, even though it had been years since I’d experienced anything you could really call bullying, I was still terrified I’d wake up one day and someone would declare everything about me totally and irreparably wrong. I knew it was dumb, but I didn’t want some boy around who could tell embarrassing stories about me. I didn’t want anyone to look at me and see Sadie Be

The cafeteria line inched forward, and I grabbed a turkey burger and two fruit cups. Nick snickered at me for taking two, and I was like, “Sorry for having an appetite.”

And that was when I saw him. It was him, after all. He was taller than I’d imagined, with unruly brown hair that seemed to defy gravity. He was pale and thin, which we all were, with dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes were too formal for Latham, like something you’d wear to a country club. But there he was, with his collared shirt untucked and a burger on his tray, talking to—ugh, Genevieve Reaser.

A couple of days ago, in the hall bathroom, I was i

I watched as Genevieve led Lane back to her table of prayer-group disciples. What a grim crowd. But it was always kids like that who volunteered to be tour guides.

“What’s with you?” Nick asked.

“Nothing,” I muttered. “I know him, that’s all.”

“Uh-oh, typhoid Sadie.”

“Shut up. I meant when we were kids.”

“Even worse.” Nick smirked, shoveling a spoonful of sweet potato fries onto his plate.

“Hey, Nick, do you know what it would say under your photo in a high school yearbook?” I asked. “‘Most likely to be friend zoned.’”

“Fu

I shot him my most serene smile.

The truth was, most of us weren’t in high school yearbooks. We were the ones who’d faded away, who hadn’t come back in the fall. Who might never come back. Because TB wasn’t like cancer, something to be battled while friends and family sat by your bedside, saying how brave you were. No one held our hands; they held their breath. We were sent away to places like Latham to protect everyone else, because it was better for them.

Maybe we should have anticipated it. The return of old things, the way history was starting to repeat itself. Spanish influenza came back first, in 2009, although we called it swine flu. Then whooping cough reappeared. Then polio. Then there was a meningitis outbreak at Princeton, some weird strain no one had seen before, which made the government import an emergency vaccine from Europe. Then Ebola. In the middle of this, a new strain of tuberculosis caught on, developing a resistance first to the drugs that had treated it, and then to the vaccine that had prevented it. And then it caught us. I know you’re supposed to phrase it the opposite way, with patients catching the diseases, but that’s never sounded right to me, as though, instead of catching TB, I could have missed.

Di

“Was anyone supposed to go home today?” Marina asked.

“I don’t think so,” Nick said.

Marina’s boyfriend, Amit, had gone home in July. And it had been two months of radio silence, while Marina sent emails that were never returned and waited for a phone call that never came. Lately, when she saw someone celebrating their last night, or packing their things into their parents’ car, she went all mopey. And I didn’t blame her.

“Bet there’s a lockout tonight,” Charlie said, glancing up from his notebook long enough to register the weirdness.

“Boys or girls?” Marina asked.

“I’m not the oracle of death,” Charlie told her. “I can’t be that specific.”

“It’s not specific,” I said. “You have a fifty percent chance of being right either way.”

Then Nick started telling this story about how he’d accidentally farted in yoga that afternoon and had blamed it on this awful girl Cheryl. And before I knew it, di

We had these tall metal tray returns, the kind that are always full when you get to them, so it takes forever to find a slot for your tray. Miraculously, there was an open slot right in the middle. I shoved my tray in, and at the same moment, so did someone else, from the other side.