“Nothing happened,” Lane said, shrugging. “I just decided to change it up.”
There was this awkward silence where I swear Genevieve was waiting for him to apologize and promise he’d sit at her table for dinner, but he didn’t.
“Well, our Bible study is always open,” she finally said.
“Oh my God, you do know he’s Jewish, right?” I interrupted.
Genevieve glared at me, and I shrugged.
“Jesus welcomes everyone to his table,” she snapped, abandoning her tray on the condiment counter and flouncing away.
Lane picked up Genevieve’s tray and added it to the return.
“Do you know who else welcomes everyone to their table?” I asked. “Anyone desperate for friends.”
He snorted.
“Who are you calling desperate?” Nick interrupted, coming over with his tray.
“Anyone who would date you.” I smiled sweetly.
“Whatever, I’m awesome.” Nick bused his tray. “We have any plans this afternoon?”
I shook my head.
“Great,” he said. “Lane, how are you at first-person shooters?”
“Worse than I’d like.”
Nick grinned. “We can fix that.”
And then Charlie came over to drop off his tray, and the boys left for the dorms together.
It was rest period, which most of the time I was fine skipping, but that afternoon, I could feel myself starting to drag. Stupid Natalie Zhang and her loud, horrible sobbing. Everyone knew you were supposed to muffle it with your pillow if you didn’t want the whole world to hear.
As Marina and I walked back to the cottages, I could see Lane, Charlie, and Nick already scanning into their dorm. Nick was flailing excitedly about something, and they were all laughing.
“The look on your face,” Marina said.
“That’s just my face. It expresses a range of unprompted emotions.”
“Whatever. You’re jealous that Nick stole your friend.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, because it was. They could go play video games if they wanted.
“Seems pretty on point to me,” Marina said, grinning. “Unless, of course, he isn’t your friend.”
I rolled my eyes.
“What else would he be?”
“Who cares, he’s adorable.”
“You think so?” I asked, a little warily. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I liked Lane. A lot. And if Marina liked him, too, I didn’t know what would happen.
“Just because I’ve sworn off Latham boys doesn’t mean that I can’t spot a cute one when he’s literally sitting next to me.” Marina rolled her eyes. “Besides, I saw the way you were staring at each other during lunch. You two are so completely Pride and Prejudice.”
“You mean he’ll scorn me for my family while convincing my sister’s soul mate that he doesn’t really love her?” I asked hopefully.
“Exactly.” Marina laughed. “But you forgot about the dirigibles. And the talking wombats.”
Marina trailed off, and I could tell that she was scripting out the story in her head, one with flying machines and snarky animals and a happily ever after, where no one died, or got too sick to be a perfect love interest.
But we were all too sick to be anyone’s perfect love interest here. And it didn’t matter how healthy anyone seemed. Any of us could wake up the next morning with blood splattered across the pillow and a hole in our lungs so painful that having a broken heart on top of it would have been unbearable.
And even though I wasn’t all that sick on the Latham scale, I was sick enough to know better. I was a stagnant case. I wasn’t getting well enough to go home, but my X-rays weren’t bad enough for Dr. Barons to be all that concerned. It was like my body and TB had reached a state of equilibrium. Or maybe it was mutually assured destruction, with both sides hovering over the big red button, but neither wanting to push first.
A year ago, it had seemed like a miracle when the lesions on my lungs stopped forming and my blood tests evened out, but you can even get tired of miracles when they’re not quite big enough to cure you.
Because the thing about miracles is that they’re not answers, no matter how much we want them to be. If anything, they’re even more troubling questions. But then, Latham wasn’t a place for answers, it was a place for waiting. And I had chosen a long time ago to wait here alone.
“I’m happier alone,” I said.
“Nope, I know you,” Marina said. “You’re just telling yourself that because you don’t want to get hurt.”
“No one wants to get hurt.”
“Well, maybe not, but sometimes it’s worth it.” Marina shrugged, and I could tell she was thinking about Amit again. “I may have sworn off boys, but at least I tried them.”
“Marina!”
“What? Don’t you want to? It won’t cure you, but it sure makes you feel better,” she said, giggling.
“He just broke up with his girlfriend,” I pointed out, and Marina sighed like I was missing the point.
“That’s what I’m saying! He’s so adorable that some girl continued dating him for weeks after she found out he was sick.”
She grinned, like it was indisputable proof of his cuteness, and I laughed, supposing it was. Leave it to Marina to conjure a silver lining to Lane’s horrible breakup story. And as much as I wished she didn’t have a point, she kind of did.
When it came to dating at Latham, there were no good options. The boys who stayed cute inevitably went home, and the boys who got sicker just wanted to lose their virginity as fast as possible to any girl willing. By Latham’s standards of eligibility, Lane was pretty close to the top. And I was sure half the girls in our French class would be all too eager to take him into the woods and hook up, which was a particular pastime at Latham, in a way that eerily reminded me of summer camp. Except our ticking clock was far more depressing than Camp Griffith’s.
I wondered how often Marina thought about Amit, and what his life was like now that he’d gone home. And I wondered if Amit thought about Marina, or the rest of us still at Latham, even though he’d mostly hung out with those RPG-obsessed boys in Cottage 8.
Marina and I scanned into our dorm, and this awful group of girls was already at the table in the microkitchen, painting their nails. They did this super-involved nail art for hours, and stank up the common lounge with their polish remover, and reinforced Nietzsche’s theory that hell is other people.
“Show tunes?” Marina asked as we went upstairs.
She kept trying to get me into Broadway musicals, as though hearing her Spring Awakening soundtrack for the fifth time would suddenly make me sing along with her, but it wouldn’t. Show tunes depressed me. I didn’t see the point in listening to songs from musicals I might never see.
“I really want to finish this book,” I lied, instead of just telling the truth that I was embarrassingly excited for naptime.
LANE SAT WITH us again at dinner, putting down his tray along with Nick and Charlie. The three of them were in the middle of a ridiculous argument about whether it was sacrilege to put ketchup on hot dogs.
“You do know you’re eating chicken fingers, right?” Marina asked, looking concerned.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Nick told her. “We’re having a debate.”
“What you’re having is chicken fingers,” I corrected. “Which go with basically every dipping sauce you can think of.”
“That’s how the whole thing started,” Lane explained. “Hot dogs are exclusionary, but—”
“But the chicken finger welcomes all sauces,” Charlie interrupted. “All hail the food of the proletariat, the chicken finger.”
And then he shoved an entire chicken finger in his mouth and choked, dissolving into a coughing fit.
Marina rolled her eyes. I was with her. Our table felt overwhelmingly full of boys. It reminded me of those groups from my high school, the ones that crammed too many people around a table and were so uni
ntentionally loud that you couldn’t help paying attention. I’d always stared wistfully at those groups across the cafeteria, wondering how they’d happened, and why they always seemed to happen without me. But then, everything always seemed to happen without me.
I was feeling a lot better after my nap, though, and less like I wanted to shout at Finnegan about French homework again. Which reminded me.
“Hey, Nick,” I said. “Finnegan said something earlier to go with your ex-pos theory.”
“Told you!” Nick gloated.
Lane was like, “Ex-pos theory?” so I explained it to him, and he nodded solemnly.
“It makes sense,” he said. “I was wondering why anyone would sign up to, um . . .”
“Be around us?” Nick supplied with a grin.
“Don’t make me feel sorry for Finnegan,” Marina warned. “I mean, ughhh!”
“I’m not,” I said. “I just thought it was interesting.”
“Like, maybe they’re not terrified of us, maybe they’re scared that they could wake up tomorrow and be us?” Charlie said.
“No, shut up, shut up, shut up!” Marina said, covering her ears.
Charlie smirked, pleased that he’d annoyed her.
“It’s, what, a ten percent chance you get sick if you’re exposure-positive?” Lane said.
“Exactly.” I shrugged. “You’re not contagious, you’re not sick, you probably won’t get sick, but you stay up all night freaking out anyway. One of my friends back home had that.”
What I didn’t add was how she’d sent me this horrific Facebook message accusing me of giving it to her, even though we’d been diagnosed within two days of each other, so obviously there was a nefarious third party to blame.
Thankfully, our dinner conversation drifted to other things then, and we got onto the subject of movies. Which, with Marina around, inevitably led to Miyazaki films, her particular passion. It turned out Lane had never seen one.
“Not one?” Nick asked incredulously.
“Not Princess Mononoke? Or Totoro?” Marina pressed.
Lane shook his head.
“That’s it,” I said. “Tonight we’re watching a movie.”
So we did. Marina and I went over to the boys’ dorm after dinner, which technically we weren’t supposed to do, but we’d figured out a way. Marina and I went back to our dorm first and waited for someone to leave so we could slip out after them, avoiding the scan pad.
“How much trouble can we get into for having a girl in our room?” Lane asked as he led us up the stairs.
“Why, are you planning on sneaking a girl into your room?” I teased. “We’re going to Nick’s room, not yours.”
“Right,” he mumbled. “That came out wrong.”
Marina shot me this knowing look, which I pretended I hadn’t seen. And then Nick poked his head out of his room and was like, “Quick, get in here.”
Nick’s room was a total nerd cave, even though he clearly thought it was the best thing ever. His posters were things like Game of Thrones and Doctor Who, and his desk was set up with a video game console and this fancy cinema display. He didn’t talk about it much, but I knew his dad was one of those rich tech guys. A lot of kids at Latham were like that, and a lot were on assistance, like Charlie.
I’d brought some contraband snacks with me, and I dumped them on the bed while Nick set up the movie. Lane stared at the bags of sour candy and peanut butter cups like he’d never expected to see junk food again.
“Sadie always has contraband,” Charlie explained, opening the bag of peanut butter cups. “It’s why we put up with her.”
“Oh, whatever.” I pretended to be mad. “Nick does, too. He just went to the extra-special preschool where they learned math instead of how to share.”
Nick sighed, opened a desk drawer, and tossed a water bottle into the pile.
“Vodka,” he said. “What was that about not sharing again?”
“Where did you get this stuff?” Lane asked, which I guess I’d been expecting. There was only so long you could be at Latham without noticing the contraband bags of chips, or the water bottles of booze at weekend movie nights, without asking someone where it came from.
“I’m a coyote,” I said. “I help illegal goods cross the border into Latham.”
He laughed, thinking it was a joke, and then realized I wasn’t kidding.
“What else can you get?” he asked.
“Name it,” I said.
“Wait,” Lane said. “You do this for real?”
“Nick and I do. We’re the kingpins of the black market.”
We’d inherited the responsibility about nine months ago, from this kid Phillip, who’d gone home. Which was about the time Nick had inherited an interest in dating me, although I’d quickly let him know that was never going to happen.
“That mixed metaphor was painful,” Nick said, wincing.
“How painful? On a scale of one to ten,” I prompted.
“Screw you,” Nick said, not meaning it. “And seven.”
And then we watched Spirited Away, which I hadn’t seen for ages. It was about a girl who got trapped in the spirit world and worked at a witch’s bath house to rescue her parents and get home. I know that sounds like some kid movie, but trust me, it’s amazing. I’d forgotten how much I loved it.
At one point, I glanced over at Lane, who was staring at the screen, enthralled. His face was lit up in the glow of the monitor, all sharp angles, and I couldn’t help but imagine reaching out and tracing my finger over the curve of his jawline.
I don’t know why I did it, but I imagined us at a real movie theater, splitting an overpriced popcorn, our fingers getting tangled as we scooped the last kernels from the bottom. And it was a real date, the kind where he picked me up in his car and we ran into people we knew from school. Except his town was hours away from mine, and I didn’t know if he had a car, and we didn’t go to the same school, and those weren’t even the reasons it wouldn’t work. It was just a fantasy. Just a scene in my head of a date I’d never have with a boy who hadn’t asked me.
Lane looked over at me and smiled then, and we stared at each other in the dark, across Charlie, who was snoring softly. I wasn’t mad anymore about his being friends with Nick. I wasn’t mad about any of that. I was angry that Marina was wrong about us being Lizzie and Mr. Darcy, even in some made-up version with wombats and dirigibles. Because if the past year had made me certain of one thing, it was that love stories at Latham all ended the same way: with someone left behind.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LANE
THERE WAS SOMETHING about having a group of friends at Latham that transformed it. When I thought back to that first day, watching from my window as the four of them slunk back from the woods, they’d all seemed so mysterious and unapproachable.
But as I became a regular fixture at their dining table, they came more sharply into focus. And so did life at Latham House. It was like I’d misread the directions and had been trying to solve an unsolvable equation, when all I had to do was simplify.
Nick began knocking on my door before breakfast, and we’d wake up Charlie, who was usually still in bed and was apparently allergic to early mornings. We’d spend first rest period playing video games in Nick’s room, and I’d walk the lake path in Wellness with Sadie and Marina. Then I’d grab a shower and take a nap until dinner. We kept up the post-dinner movie marathon, sneaking the girls into our dorm each night. Marina brought over her selection of Miyazaki movies, which I couldn’t believe I’d missed. I wasn’t an anime fan, so I’d always figured they weren’t my thing, but they completely were.
I remembered how, at summer camp, the first few days had always felt disorienting, and then one morning I’d wake up and everything would just click. That Friday, everything just clicked. I worked on my Dickens packet in English and tried to stay awake during this documentary about the Dark Ages. And then, as we were leaving lunch, Nick complained that his math teacher had brought a travel the
rmos again and spilled it, making the entire classroom smell like coffee.
“It was like a torture chamber,” he complained. “And then, on top of it, we had to do math.”
“There’s no reason we can’t have caffeine,” Sadie informed us. “I looked it up.”
“Except that Latham doesn’t want us bouncing off the walls,” said Nick.
“Which you do anyway,” Marina said, and we all snickered.
“Oh, whatever,” Nick grumbled.
I asked why they didn’t just smuggle in coffee, and Sadie stared at me like I’d suggested she bring in mung beans.
“Instant coffee?” She wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”
“See, that’s a coffee drinker’s problem,” Marina said. “Meanwhile, I’m perfectly fine with tea bags.”
“I love that there’s such a rivalry,” said Charlie. “It’s like, leaf water versus bean water, you know?”
“Bean water?” Sadie echoed. “You better take that back.”
“Watch out, espresso shots are being fired in the drink fandom,” said Nick.
“Can we not talk about coffee, though?” I asked. “Because it’s all I can think about. That, and how we don’t have any.”
Coffee was one of the main things I missed from my old life. Every time Finnegan brought a travel thermos, I practically salivated.
“Actually . . .” Sadie nodded toward the woods, grinning mischievously.
Everyone besides me seemed to know what she meant.
“Oh no,” Marina said. “Not again.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Sadie asked.
“I’ll find my sense of adventure when you find your sense of direction,” Marina retorted.
“It was one small miscalculation,” Sadie said. “Besides, I have a compass now.”
We were stopped on the lawn outside the cottages, and Charlie started to walk away.
“Wait,” Sadie called. “Where are you going?”
“To take a nap,” he said, and then snorted. “Where do you think? To get my wallet.”
“Does someone want to fill me in?” I asked after Charlie disappeared inside.
“We’re going to Hogsmeade,” Sadie said. “To get butterbeer.”