Extraordinary Means

Our trays banged, the sound startling me. Mine came shooting back, and I managed to catch it before the plate slid off.

“Sorry!” someone called. It was a boy’s voice. “Did I get you?”

“Colonel Mustard, in the dining hall, with a tray,” I said. “That’s how I died, if anyone asks.”

“I’ll let them know,” he promised, popping his head around to my side.

It was Lane.

“So that’s the murder weapon,” he said mock-seriously, nodding toward my tray. “Here, let me.”

His voice was low and gravelly, with just a hint of California to it, and the way he was staring at me was disconcerting. He couldn’t stop staring at me.

Maybe he wouldn’t recognize me. Maybe the makeup and dry shampoo and ski

Before I could say anything, he took my tray and slid it onto the return.

“Thanks,” I murmured, relieved he hadn’t made the co

“Sadie, right?” he said, smiling. “We, uh, went to camp together.”

Damn it.

“We did?” I frowned like I couldn’t place him. I knew that trick, at least. If you pretend not to remember someone, you immediately have the advantage.

“Camp Griffith,” he prompted. “I was in 8B. I don’t know if you’d remember me.”

How could I forget? He’d been horrible to me at summer camp. Unforgivably horrible. I had every right to dump the nearest tray over his head. And now he was acting like he thought I’d be pleased to see him.

“Lane?” I said, pretending it had just dawned on me.

“Yeah.”

I waited for him to say something. To apologize, or at least bring it up. But he just stared at me expectantly, with a grin that made him look like a kid, like he had when we were thirteen, with his badminton racket and cargo shorts.

“You got tall,” I said, which was idiotic, but too late to take it back.

“And sick, although I can see why you’d say tall.” He shrugged, still smiling. “Sorry, again, about the tray.”

“The tray?” I said, thinking I hadn’t heard him correctly.

“You can give me a strike or something for failing the tray return. I hear they’re worth collecting.”

“Why?” I asked. “Pla

“Aren’t you?”

He gri

“I don’t know,” I said coldly. “Maybe I’ll change my mind.”

All of a sudden, I was furious. Furious that he was here, that he was talking to me the way he never had when we were thirteen, that his acting nice was somehow fifty times worse than his being the asshole I was expecting. I didn’t need his pity. I didn’t want him feeling sorry for me and putting away my tray for me like I was too weak to lift it myself.

Before he had a chance to respond, I walked away as fast as I could, not caring how my pounding heart would read on my med sensor.

The summer I’d known him had been the worst of my life. The summer of the divorce. The summer my parents had shipped my little sister away to Aunt Ruth’s and packed me off to camp at the last minute, so they could fight over selling the house without having to moderate the volume.

I was sent away for eight weeks, which would have been bad enough if the girls in my cabin hadn’t all known each other for years. They weren’t a cabin, they were a clique. And this one girl, Bethie, was the ringleader.

I had a pink Disneyland sweatshirt, and the first week of camp, she asked to borrow it. I was sitting on the porch reading a Diana Wy

“So can I have it?” she demanded impatiently, like it was me who was inconveniencing her. I was suspicious of what she meant by “have it,” so I said no. It’s fu

Later that afternoon, I was reading on my bunk while Bethie held court in the cabin. She’d gotten this box of tampons from the commissary, and her friends were wetting them in the sink, then launching them at the ceiling and laughing. The tampons stuck there, twenty feet up, their strings dangling like little mouse tails.

When our counselor came in, she took one look at the ceiling and demanded to know who had done it. Bethie blamed me, and her friends backed her up. Which was how I got ba

It would have been awful enough to stay behind during one of the few off-grounds trips, but then one of the boys asked where I was. And Bethie told him I hadn’t come because I was on my period. According to her, I got superbad ones. Really heavy, “like Ragú.”

Of course no one questioned how Bethie, who I’d only met last Sunday, knew the intimate details of my menstrual cycle. When the bus came back from the rafting trip, everyone on it called me Ragú. Even the boys. Especially the boys.

No one in my cabin would sit next to me, or swim near me, or use the toilets after me. The girls dumped my shampoo and crammed my bathroom cubby full of sanitary napkins. Whenever I put on my swimsuit, they talked really loudly about how sharks can smell blood. Every time they did it, I’d squeeze my eyes shut and I’d write “Don’t cry” on my leg with my finger like I was casting an invisible don’t-cry spell.

I had a camera with me, so I started spending all my time doing photography. I’d sign into the arts and crafts cabin, where they never checked, and then I’d go into the woods. I’d take pictures of birds, or spell out words with rocks and photograph them. So while my cabin was hell, at least I had a sanctuary.

And then, one day, I felt someone watching me. It was a boy, from 8B, with floppy brown hair and the cool kind of braces, the ones everyone called “invisible” even though they were really just clear. He was holding a badminton racket and one of those plastic balls that looks like a Snitch, which I guessed was the reason he’d come into the woods. He stood there a minute, where he thought I couldn’t see, and then he was gone.

I saw him a couple of days later in the same place. And again the day after that. Always just for a minute, like a deer pausing in the woods. He never got closer. Never said hello.

I hoped he wouldn’t tell anyone where I was. I didn’t want the girls from my cabin to show up and ruin it. And I didn’t want those awful boys to come laugh at me. They were always asking really crudely if any girls wanted to go to “the rock” with them, which was this urban legend at camp, this hookup spot.

I was a little nervous that this boy from the woods knew where I went all day, so one night, after di

“Lane Rosen,” she said. “He’s kind of a nerd. Why, do you like him?”

“No,” I said. “I was just wondering.”

She’d made it sound threatening, as though I wasn’t allowed to like him. And I didn’t. I’d only wanted his name.

A couple of days later, everyone was swimming in the lake. It was sweltering outside, over a hundred degrees, so I’d gone into the water to cool off, even though I usually just watched from my towel.

“Stay back!” one of the girls shrieked when I swam too close. “Sharks can smell blood!”

“We’re going to die!” her friend added, pretending to be terrified.

It was so unfair. I didn’t even have my period yet.

And then Lane, who was floating on one of those i

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he told them. “We’re in a lake. There aren’t any sharks.”

After he said that, I thought maybe he wouldn’t tell anyone about the woods. I thought maybe he was nice, even though I always saw him with that foul group of boys. I thought maybe he was different.