“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 shu
t 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.
“I’m supposed to give you this,” she said.
It was a note, folded into one of those footballs, with my name on the front in cramped boys’ handwriting. I unfolded it. The note asked if I would go to the dance with him, and if yes, he’d pick me up at my cabin. It was signed Lane Rosen, from 8B.
I couldn’t believe it.
“Well?” Meghan asked.
“Did you read it?” I asked.
“Duh, I don’t have to. He likes you. Or maybe he just waited too long and you were one of the few girls left.”
I put the note into my pocket, trying not to grin.
“And he said to give you these,” Meghan told me, producing a pair of sunglasses from the pocket of her hoodie.
They were Lane’s Ray-Bans, the red ones he’d been wearing in the pool. I couldn’t believe he remembered. Bethie had “accidentally” stepped on my sunglasses at the lake the other day and had broken them.
Lane had seen. Everyone had. And now he wanted me to have his sunglasses. He’d been watching me in the woods because he liked me. Maybe, if he thought I was cool, the girls in my cabin would finally leave me alone.
The night of the dance, I got ready early and sat on my bed reading while everyone else jostled for the mirror. Finally, the first boy arrived. It was this buzz-haired guy, Zach, who’d asked Bethie. She sashayed off with him, and the rest of the girls rushed to make last-minute touch-ups before their dates arrived.
And their dates did, in a trickle, the boys wearing short-sleeved button-ups and khakis and looking underdressed in comparison to the girls in their strapless dresses. I was the last one left, so I took my book out to the porch to wait.
I waited a long time, and Lane never came.
Just as I was about to go inside, this girl Sarah came back to the cabin.
“Note for you,” she said, handing me a folded thing with my name scrawled across the front.
I tore it open. Sorry, it said. Changed my mind.—Lane.
Something in my face must have given it away.
It had been a joke all along. A cruel prank he wanted to play on me to show everyone he wasn’t interested in the weird, nerdy girl who kept asking about him.
“God, I’m so stupid,” I whispered, half forgetting that Sarah was there.
Sarah sighed.
“News flash,” she said, “boys suck. It’s why our cabin sticks together. It’s like, we’ve known these boys for years, and they’re all pigs. Most of them have girlfriends back home.”
I could feel the tears bubbling up, my chest constricting so tightly that it hurt to breathe. Wordlessly, I turned around and ran back into the cabin, and for the first time that summer, I let myself cry.
Standing in Latham’s dining hall with him, four years later, had made time melt away. I was back there again, thirteen years old and sobbing in my best dress, alone on my bunk with the meanest note a boy had ever written.
And I didn’t want to be. I’d spent a long time walking away from that summer, that loneliness, that version of myself. And then Lane Rosen had found me by the tray return, and it turned out all the walking I’d done had been in a circle.
CHAPTER FIVE
LANE
AFTER DINNER, AS I walked across the grounds back toward the cottages, I had to admit, Latham was beautiful. The dorms looked like fairy-tale ski lodges, and the lake glittered, and the classical revival buildings felt exotically collegiate. Even the stone benches along the pathways were charming. We might have been anywhere. Any place where grades mattered and students had bright futures, instead of, well . . .
I’d thought Sadie would be happy to see a familiar face, but she’d reacted as though I was a ghost. I supposed the fact that I’d almost impaled her with a cafeteria tray hadn’t made me particularly endearing. I’d only wanted to say—well, I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like I knew her. But I wanted to. Sadie and her friends seemed interesting, and anything was better than sitting at Genevieve’s table, which I was starting to suspect was a faction of an overeager prayer group I really didn’t want to join. I mean, it’s not like you can pray for something to un-happen.
I touched my med sensor to the scan pad outside my dorm, but it flashed red and beeped, refusing to open.
“Come on,” I muttered, scanning again.
It stayed locked.
I scanned again, and again. Still locked.
“You’ve got to be kidding!” I cursed, banging my fist against the scan pad.
I don’t know why, but that stupid red light got to me. I couldn’t do anything right. I’d been ditched by my tour guide, and then Sadie couldn’t wait to get away from me. I’d failed breakfast, and now I was going to fail the goddamned front door.
Suddenly, everything that had happened over the past twenty-four hours came crashing over me in this horrible wave. I gave the door a frustrated tug, but it was no use.
“Dude, calm down. We’re locked out,” someone said.
It was the punk kid from the woods. He was sitting on the porch, his back against the railing, a Moleskine notebook propped over one knee. He looked frail and exhausted up close, not so tough after all.
“What?” I asked.
“Locked out,” he repeated, gesturing toward the crowd of people standing around.
I’d been so lost in my own misery that I hadn’t realized. No one had gone inside. It looked like half the dorm was congregated around the porch, their expressions ranging from resigned to upset.
“What’s happening?” I asked. “Fire alarm?”
The punk kid snorted.
“Someone checked out. They’re doing housekeeping.” He said it darkly, like he’d deliberately chosen the wrong words. When he realized I didn’t get it, he sighed. “You know, cleaning out his room for the next lucky occupant.”
“Someone died?”
“Oh, you get used to it. Just wait until they bring the body out.” He nodded toward the front door.
I must have looked freaked, because he laughed, coughing a little.
“Nah, I’m messing with you,” he said, and then added, “They have tunnels for that.”
I didn’t know whether I believed him.
“So we all have to stand around until his stuff is removed?” I asked.
“Pretty much.”
He went back to scribbling in his notebook while I stood there in shock. Someone had died. I mean, I knew it happened at Latham, but I hadn’t expected it on my first day. It felt so . . . sudden. Like I was being thrown headfirst into the deep end of tuberculosis before I’d even gotten used to the water.
“Who was it?” I asked.
“Grant Harden,” a wiry, mustached kid said. “Wasn’t at breakfast. Went to the medical building and never came back.”
I couldn’t believe it. Grant. He was supposed to show me around.
My tour guide hadn’t ditched me. He’d died.
After the nurses let us back into the dorm, I watched in shock as people staked out places in the common lounge, turned on the television, and set up board games like nothing had happened.
I went back to my room and collapsed onto my bed, listening to the noises in the hall. The walls of my room felt so close, so claustrophobic. And so thin, like
there was nothing between me and the hallway except a flimsy sheet of cardboard, and I had no privacy at all.
I was shocked that everyone could bounce back so fast, that Grant’s death had been cleared away as quickly as his belongings. All I knew was that I didn’t understand Latham, and I wondered if I ever would.
“Start as you mean to go on,” my father was fond of saying, but I certainly didn’t mean for my life at Latham to continue like this.
No, not my life. Just the next few weeks. Latham was temporary. A vacation. A place to stay while I was contagious, so my parents wouldn’t get fired, and so my mom wouldn’t panic every time I coughed.
The whole Grant thing was an anomaly. A weird twist in the fabric of the universe. But then, so was my being sick. I’d caught TB somewhere. It was random and unfair, and if I’d just taken Spanish instead of science, volunteered at the clinic on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays, seen a different movie, taken a different seat, I’d be at home, eating pizza for dinner and working on my Stanford application.
Thinking of it like that helped. As long as I was here, the plan was not to care. To keep my head down, do my work, and get through it.
I didn’t need to play nice, or to make friends. I needed to stay on track, get better, and go home. I took a couple of deep breaths, which actually sort of hurt, put on some appropriately gloomy music, and started to unpack.
My mom had packed my suitcase for me, and even though I’d made pretty specific requests, she’d still grabbed the wrong jeans and, like, five of these polo shirts I never wear. Instead of my favorite T-shirts, I had a stack of every unwanted Hanukkah gift, my name freshly scrawled across each label for the laundry. Fantastic. I put all of it into the wardrobe, and then I stacked my Harbor coursework, my college guides, and my SAT books on my desk.
I tried to unpack slowly, so I could avoid the inevitable phone call home, but calling your parents is just one of those things you can’t put off forever.
It was seven thirty, and they were probably sitting on the sofa grading papers, with the news on in the background. I could picture my father with his herbal tea and Chapman sweatshirt, my mother in her purple slippers and reading glasses, sipping decaf, the careful way my parents used coasters, as though they were guests in someone else’s home and didn’t want to offend. They were big believers in routine, in getting things done. “When you feel like quitting, do five more,” my dad always said. Most of his catchphrases were motivational insults.
Extraordinary Means Page 4