Extraordinary Means (3 page)

ONE THING I
’
VE
realized about new places is that they’re like jeans. Sure, they might fit, but they’re not comfortable. They need time to be broken in. I was thinking about this as I sat in the sterile waiting room of the medical building, trying not to cough from the air-conditioning. The whole place smelled like a hospital, a combination of antiseptic and misery. It was completely different from the boarding-school atmosphere of the cottages and classrooms, a reminder of what was lurking just around the corner. Literally.

The posters on the wall, marked with the Cross of Lorraine—the skull and crossbones of tuberculosis—urged us to “fight the war against contagion” or “crusade for a TB-free America.” I almost would have preferred a cat telling me to hang in there. At least that would have been generically terrible. Instead, I was staring at posters claiming I was the enemy.

I sighed and slouched in my chair, waiting for the nurse
to summon me. Up until a few weeks ago, I was a novice at hospitals. Before all this happened, I’d been to the emergency room exactly twice. Once for an ear infection, and once when I’d wiped out on the quarter pipe in Josh Dow’s driveway in seventh grade and broken a bone in my foot. But it’s like they say: third time’s the charm.

A nurse took me back to an exam room, which was even colder than the waiting room. When I sat down on the exam table, the thin paper crackled. I had a theory it was the same paper that covered toilet seats in public restrooms, except on a much larger, much more depressing roll.

Once again, my hands itched for my phone. My mom always complained I was addicted to the thing, but that wasn’t true; I just didn’t like sitting around with nothing to do, wasting time instead of spending it.

It took forever for the doctor to come in, and when he did, he was in a rush.

“Sorry for the wait,” Dr. Barons said, taking a seat on the little metal stool by the computer. “So, Lane. How are we getting on?”

“Fine,” I said automatically.

“Good, good.” He stared at me in this probing, obvious way, and I could tell that despite the friendliness, I was being evaluated. “Tired at all? In any pain?”

“No, I’m okay.”

I mean, I was a little tired, from not getting enough
sleep, but I wasn’t, like, medically exhausted.

“On a scale of one to ten,” he prompted, waiting for a number.

“Um, two?”

“That’s what we like to hear,” Dr. Barons said, taking out his phone and tapping the screen. “Let me get a read on your vitals here. . . .”

I stared down at the bracelet on my wrist, black and silicone and bulky. I wasn’t used to the thing, or how it worked to give the doctors and nurses most of the data they needed, so they could spend as little time alone with me as possible. It felt strange, being recorded, having the way my body worked chronicled in some database that they could pull up on their phones and tablets, either across the room, while I was watching, or secretly, from rooms away.

“Excellent,” Dr. Barons said, still looking at his screen. “Now let’s see what’s going on with those lungs of yours. . . .”

And then he pivoted toward the computer and pulled up two side-by-side X-rays of my chest. One from the day in the hospital when I’d been diagnosed, and one from the night I arrived at Latham.

Dr. Barons talked a little, gesturing toward the cavities with the tip of his pen, like some bizarre PowerPoint presentation where I was both subject and viewer.

“This area here is what we need to watch out for, to make sure these two lesions in the right lobe don’t get any bigger,”
he said, speaking so slowly and loudly that it was almost insulting. “Can you see what I’m talking about? These black shadows?”

I nodded, waiting for him to continue. I didn’t need Tuberculosis 101. None of this was new to me. Back at St. Luke’s, when I’d spent two weeks going stir-crazy in the infectious disease ward, I’d at least had the internet to keep me company. And even though I knew Googling “total-drug-resistant TB” wasn’t the best idea, I hadn’t been able to help myself.

So I knew how to identify the small, tuberculous lesions on an X-ray. I knew all about how the infection in my lungs affected the red blood cells that passed through them, which was what made this new strain of tuberculosis so much worse than the ones that had come before it. TDR-TB, the news reports called it, since none of the old medications worked on it. But unlike so many other incurable diseases, it was contagious. Whenever I coughed, I put everyone near me at risk. Hence the whole reason for shipping me off to a sanatorium in the middle of the mountains, surrounded by woods and sealed with iron gates. Walling off the infection, literally.

But even though I’d read a lot about what was wrong with me, I’d read even more on how doctors couldn’t do anything to fix it until scientists managed to develop a treatment that actually worked. Essentially, every doctor’s appointment I’d had over the past few weeks had boiled down to
this: the only thing to do was wait and see. Sanatoriums like Latham had statistically higher and faster rates of recovery than being quarantined in your bedroom, but they couldn’t promise anything.

“So,” Dr. Barons said, “how are we going to tackle your TB? While you’re here at Latham, the best course of treatment is to follow your schedule.”

“My schedule?”

He couldn’t possibly mean the daily schedule I’d taped over my desk, which began with
Breakfast, eight a.m.
and ended with
Lights-out, nine p.m.

“You’ll find it in the front of your handbook,” he continued. “And I think you’ll discover that having a routine gives you something outward to focus on. Rest periods are for resting quietly in your room, or the common room if you’re feeling up to it. Wellness periods are spent engaging in gentle physical activities, like nature walks, lawn games, and yoga.”

“Yeah, sounds great,” I said, without enthusiasm. Naptime and nature walks, the foolproof Latham Treatment Plan. I’d known that going in, but there hadn’t been a choice. I couldn’t stay at home: my parents were both teachers, and if either of them tested positive for exposure to what I had, the school board would be forced to fire them.

Dr. Barons smiled at me, like he thought I was actually raring to go on a nature walk that very second.

“Of course, you should still listen to your body. If you’re
feeling tired, spend your Wellness time resting in bed. If you’re feeling ill, check in at the nurse’s station in your dorm. And of course once a week you’ll check in with me, so we can see how much progress you’ve made.”

“Once a week?” That seemed ridiculously drawn out, like I’d be at Latham forever.

“Your hall nurse is available twenty-four hours a day.” He smiled, misunderstanding.

“No, I mean, how long am I going to be stuck here?”

I didn’t realize what a dangerous question it was until I’d asked it, and Dr. Barons’s smile widened.

“That’s a good question, Lane. First, we have to get your X-rays looking better. Wall off that pesky infection in your right lung. Make sure your hemoglobin levels have stabilized. And how long that takes is really up to you, not me.”

Yeah, no kidding.

“Two months?” I pressed. “Three?”

I couldn’t imagine being away for longer than that. In three months, I’d have missed the entire fall semester. Even with the binders of makeup assignments my teachers had sent over, I still wouldn’t be able to keep up. Not in the Advanced Placement classes. And then I wouldn’t get the scores I needed on the AP exams in the spring, and I wouldn’t get college credit, which meant I’d have to take intro courses instead of skipping ahead to the classes I actually wanted.

“What’s so important that you need to get back for?” Dr. Barons asked.

He had this condescending smile, and in that moment, I knew he wouldn’t understand.

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.

I LOOKED FOR
Lane at dinner, wondering if I’d recognize him. And then I wondered if he’d recognize me. To be honest, I hoped he wouldn’t. I’d been a total mess at thirteen, with frizzy hair and the wrong type of shorts and Deathly Hallows symbols inked onto my sneakers.

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 Bennett, the outcast girl who sat alone in the arts and crafts tent making friendship bracelets for her American Girl doll.

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 innocently brushing my teeth, and Genevieve had come in with her face wash and cheerfully informed me that “Jesus wants us to be ancestors of our future happiness by staying positive.” I’d told her that Jesus wanted her to wait her turn for the sink.

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.’”

“Funny,” Nick grumbled. “Sharpen that wit of yours any more and someone might think you actually have a point.”

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.

Dinner was strange that night. Marina had been right; something was unmistakably off, and everyone else was starting to sense it. I could feel the dining hall playing a giant game of Guess Who.

“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, dinner was ending.

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.

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 skinny jeans had made me just another stranger in the dining hall.

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

“Thanks,” I murmured, relieved he hadn’t made the connection. But then, who thinks you’re going to run into someone you know on the downward slope of your own precarious fate?

“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. “Planning on skipping the social?”

“Aren’t you?”

He grinned like it was a private joke, but if it was, it wasn’t funny. He didn’t get to make jokes about missing dances. Not to me.

“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 Wynne Jones novel, and I was so immersed in the story that I didn’t even hear her ask the first time around.

“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 funny how small moments can ruin everything.

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 banned from the coed rafting trip that weekend.

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 dinner, I asked one of the nicer girls in my cabin about him.

“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 inner tubes nearby, pushed his sunglasses into his hair and sighed.

“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.

I’d never been so wrong.

The next weekend was the lower-seniors dance, and the girls in my cabin wouldn’t shut up about it. They practiced their hair and makeup in the bathroom for days. They acted like it was a formal prom, not some lame thing with bug juice and a disco ball and the horrible boys from 7B and 8B.

“Has anyone asked you yet?” they’d say, giggling, and then discuss which boys they wanted to make out with.

Back home, I went to the K–8 school down the street, so I could walk my little sister. The neighborhood kids who went to the actual middle school called where I went “baby school.” I hadn’t understood what they’d meant until camp, where I suddenly felt years younger than everyone else in my grade. I had lip balm and pastel panties, while they had lace thongs and eyeliner.

The night before the dance, this girl Meghan from my cabin caught up with me on the way to dinner.