Extraordinary Means

  I stared miserably at the screen, and Sadie scooted up even closer and leaned her head on my shoulder.

  “You’re not erased,” she said. “Erased means you disappear. It’s more like you’ve just been . . . forcibly evicted from your old life. You’re still leaving your mark, you’re just doing it somewhere else.”

  “Forcibly evicted,” I echoed, testing it out.

  “Exactly,” Sadie said. “And now you’re here, in the library, with me. That part’s pretty nice.”

  It really was, and I tried to summon the nerve to tell her that.

  While I was still summoning, Charlie wandered over to see what we were up to.

  “Internet just cut out,” he said. “What’s with the cuddling?”

  “We’re allowed to cuddle,” Sadie retorted.

  “Yeah, but why do you look so unhappy about it?” he asked.

  “Lane’s depressed about Facebook,” Sadie said.

  “About my ex-girlfriend,” I clarified. “Not, like, the website in general.”

  Charlie shook his head.

  “Delete,” he said. “I keep telling you.”

  But I couldn’t. Even though I wasn’t sure what the point was anymore. No one kept in touch, they just kept up. And then, when they couldn’t keep up anymore, they forgot.

  I wished I could take all of it back. The afternoons I’d sat home wondering what everyone was doing but not having the courage to ask. The countless nights I’d fallen asleep at my desk. The subdivision pool I’d walked past for years without ever stopping for a swim. The way I’d always driven straight home after taking classes at the community college, because it had never occurred to me to just drive around for a while and see where the night took me.

  Maybe Sadie had it right, scrolling through fantasies of impossibly pretty people having picnics beneath the Eiffel Tower, instead of looking at a chronicle of everyone she used to know having fun without her. Or maybe I was just upset that my life back home had been so small and so pathetic. I wished I could take all of it back.

  I realized then that I hadn’t had a life, I’d just had a life plan. And it wasn’t that I didn’t still want all those things—Stanford, summer internships, graduate school—I just wasn’t sure I’d gone about achieving them the right way. If everyone at college shut themselves in their rooms and studied every night, what would any of us really get out of being there? It was like Latham: sometimes the point wasn’t being the best, because it didn’t mean you had the best life, or the best friends, or the best time.

  I didn’t want to spend the next six years falling asleep at my desk with headphones on to block out the noise of everyone else having fun. I didn’t want to rush through all the moments that I wouldn’t know I wanted until they were gone. I could see my future narrowing, with options like football games and school dances being squeezed out, until trying not to die had become my main extracurricular activity. And if the road did stop narrowing, it would never be as wide as it had once been. I wasn’t going to get my life back, and even if I could, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I didn’t know what I wanted anymore, except to fall asleep every night to the sound of Sadie’s voice over the phone, at Latham house, and after we’d both gone home.

  “I HAVE AN idea,” Sadie announced, putting down her sandwich. It was lunch on Friday, and we were all eating grilled cheese sandwiches, except for Nick, who had sawed his into strips and was arranging them into shapes on his plate.

  “Someone already invented sarcasm, sorry,” Nick said, smirking into his sandwich strips.

  Sadie rolled her eyes at him, which was something I’d noticed between the two of them more and more these days. How Nick seemed upset all the time, at the two of us in particular.

  “Whatever,” Sadie said. “I think we should go to movie night.”

  Charlie was doodling in his notebook, and his head snapped up at this.

  “We never go to movie night,” he said, sounding suspicious.

  “I’m aware,” Sadie said.

  “Why would we go to movie night?” Marina asked.

  “Aha!” Sadie said. “See, that is the type of question the rest of you should be asking. Why would we go to a lame, chaperoned pajama party in the gym with healthy snacks and just about everyone we can’t stand?”

  “You’re really selling this, by the way,” I said, stirring my soup. It was tomato, and awful, even with half a grilled cheese sandwich stuffed in. I had a suspicion that it was actually watered-down spaghetti sauce.

  “It’s such an excellent plan that it sells itself,” Sadie promised. “Wait for it . . . instead of wearing our pajamas like everyone else, we’ll dress up fancy. I’m talking ties, boys.”

  Sadie leaned back in her chair, a look of triumph on her face.

  “Fancy?” Nick said, considering it. “Could there be booze?”

  “If you have booze, there can be booze,” Sadie said.

  “So it’s like Dapper Day,” I said, and everyone stared at me blankly.

  “Seriously?” I said. “Am I the only one from SoCal? Once a year, there’s a day where people get dressed up and go to Disneyland. It’s a thing.”

  Although I only knew it was a thing because I’d seen pictures of my classmates who had gone without me.

  “That’s awesome,” Sadie said. “So, tonight is Dapper Day.”

  “It can’t be day if it’s night,” Nick pointed out.

  Sadie stuck out her tongue at him.

  “A day is twenty-four hours, so yes it can,” she said. “Now shut up. We’re doing it.”

  AFTER LUNCH, CHARLIE insisted on holing up in his room, and when Nick and I tried to make him come out and do something, he said he was working on his music.

  “He gets like that sometimes,” Nick told me. “He’ll snap out of it in a day or two and won’t stop bothering us to listen to whatever new song he’s written.”

  So Nick and I went up to his room and played this vampire-killing game that I, uh, sucked at. I suggested we play something else, but Nick insisted I just had to get the hang of it.

  “Are you really getting dressed up for the thing tonight?” he asked as his avatar loaded a crossbow.

  “If we’re all doing it,” I said with a shrug.

  “You just go along with everything Sadie wants, don’t you?” Nick challenged.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  On the screen, his guy killed three vamps at once. I had a theory there was some extra button he pressed to do that, but I didn’t want to ask.

  “You could have your pick of girls at Latham, you know,” Nick said angrily.

  “Whatever,” I said, because he couldn’t be serious. But apparently he was.

  “Come on. Any one of those girls in our French class would let you butter their croissant.”

  “‘Butter their croissant’?” I repeated.

  “Whatever you want to call it,” Nick said. “Any of them would be interested. Except you’re only interested in Sadie. It’s fucking unfair.”

  I was about to say, Unfair to whom? and then I got it. Maybe Sadie was just friends with Nick, but the feeling wasn’t mutual.

  “I thought you two were just friends,” I said.

  Nick killed another vampire before answering.

  “For now. That’s how it always starts out with me. It’s a long con.”

  Except we both knew it wasn’t.

  “Do what you want,” Nick said. “I’m just saying, there are other options, and probably more likely ones, if you want to get laid.”

  “But none of them are Sadie,” I said.

  “No, none of them are Sadie,” Nick said.

  And then one of the vampires got to me, and my avatar fell to the ground, twitching, as Nick smirked.

  I DIDN’T KNOW why my mom had packed a tie and dress shirt, but she had, and thankfully, it wasn’t too wrinkled. Despite his complaining, Nick put on a tweed vest with a watch chain, and I found him in the hall bathroom frantically combing pomade into
his hair and muttering. Even Charlie got into it, wearing a blazer and a scarf and eyeliner, which Nick called “a sad tribute to David Bowie.”

  “You can David Blow Me,” Charlie retorted. “At least I’m not cosplaying as Professor Slughorn.”

  I tried not to laugh. We were on the porch with pillows under our arms and blankets shoved into our backpacks, waiting for the girls.

  “Who’s cosplaying?” Marina asked, waving.

  “Well, if it isn’t Audrey Hepburn,” Charlie said, and Marina struck a pose.

  She was wearing this black dress and long white gloves, and she looked fantastic. But then I spotted Sadie, and I almost forgot how to breathe.

  She had on this green dress that was like something from an old photo, and her hair was curled, and she was wearing heels. She looked like one of the models from those pictures she scrolled through on the internet, girls too perfect to be real.

  Except she was real. And she was walking toward me. She stared at me, this wonderful smile rising to her lips, and I don’t know that I’d ever seen someone so beautiful.

  “Wow,” I said.

  And then she whacked me with the pillow she was holding. I went to hit her back with mine, but she squealed and ducked away, begging me not to ruin her hair. While we walked over to the gym, I kept jokingly raising my pillow, and she kept saying, “Don’t do it!” And I kept teasing, “I’m gonna do it!” and I’m sure we annoyed the hell out of everyone.

  I’d never been in the gym before. It was your average high school gymnasium. The bleachers had been pushed back, and everyone was in their pajamas and sweats, with blankets and pillows spread on the floor.

  A bunch of people gave us odd looks about our clothes, but Sadie just laughed.

  “They wish they thought of it,” she whispered to me.

  And I wished I was wearing a T-shirt instead of a tie, but I didn’t say that.

  We spread our things in the very back, making a patchwork out of our blankets and pillows. A nurse I didn’t recognize came by and smiled at us.

  “Don’t you all look darling,” she said, and then she gave us packs of organic fruit snacks and chocolate milk cartons, like we were five.

  I stared down at the fruit snacks in dismay.

  “No popcorn?” I asked.

  “You wouldn’t be able to hear the movie over all the coughing,” Marina said. “Although check out the water bottles.”

  She was right. There were a lot of suspicious-looking Nalgene bottles being passed around.

  “Speaking of,” Nick said, unzipping his backpack and pulling out a bunch of apple juice boxes. It was one of the annoyingly healthy snacks that they sold in the commissary, and I’d never understood why anyone would want them.

  The juice box Nick passed me had been tampered with; there was a piece of tape over the hole. I stared at him questioningly, and he rolled his eyes like it was obvious.

  “I modified them,” he said.

  I poked my straw in and cautiously took a sip of what turned out to be vodka apple juice. Very strong vodka apple juice. I coughed, not expecting it.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Charlie told me, laughing.

  I took another sip, and now that I was prepared, it wasn’t half-bad.

  “Stop moving, you’re ruining it.” Sadie pouted at Nick.

  She’d brought her camera, and she kept taking pictures of us, then giggling and showing them to Marina. She told me to come over to where she was sitting, so I did.

  “Smile,” she said, putting her face next to mine. And then she held the camera at arm’s length, snapping a selfie. She turned the camera around so I could see.

  It was a perfect close-up of the two of us, Sadie smiling wide in her fancy dress, and me in a shirt and tie, my hair on point for once. In the background, you could just make out the wall of the old gym, with its faded pennant from when Whitley Prep had qualified for some basketball league. It was exactly like the photos everyone from my high school had put up. Exactly like Hannah’s picture, come to think of it. We looked like we were having a great time, and we could have been anywhere. Even at a homecoming dance.

  “This is great,” I said.

  “I thought you could put it on Facebook. To document your new life after being evicted from your old one.”

  “It’s perfect,” I said. And it was. The joke of putting it online was too good, of it looking like something it wasn’t. Of us looking like something I wanted us to be. Or, I guess, a lot of things I wanted us to be.

  “That’s why I had everyone dress up,” she said, except she grinned like she was kidding, so I couldn’t quite tell. “The whole thing was just an excuse for a photo I wanted you to have.”

  A nurse I didn’t recognize finished setting up the projector, and the lights dimmed and the movie started. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. It was a good movie, and I’d seen it before, so I didn’t have to pay attention too closely.

  We all snuck sips from our juice boxes. I’d had a few beers at some of the Model UN overnights, but never hard alcohol. I hadn’t exactly pictured my first time drinking vodka to be at a pajama party, out of a juice box, while wearing a shirt and tie, but I guessed it was a good story. I didn’t have a lot of stories, but ever since I’d arrived at Latham, it seemed I was collecting them.

  I wasn’t used to drinking, and the vodka kept making me cough. If we’d been anywhere besides Latham, we probably would have been busted. But that night, whenever one of us would cough, we all grinned like it was a private joke.

  I was lying on my stomach with my elbows in my pillow. On the screen, Ferris Bueller claimed he was Abe Froman, the sausage king of Chicago, and everyone laughed. The room was spinning gently, I supposed from the alcohol, and even though it was a dumb chaperoned event full of sick kids in their pajamas, it was one of the best nights I’d had in a long time.

  I was there with the right group of friends, and we were up to a small, ridiculous act of mischief, and I never once worried that I should have been at home studying instead of out watching a movie.

  About halfway through the film, Sadie scooted her blanket closer to mine.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  “Hi,” I whispered back.

  “Mind if I watch from here?” she asked, and then she put her pillow right next to mine and settled in.

  It was dark in the gym, and it was just the five of us, sitting apart from everyone else. Something about Sadie lying there felt more intimate than any of the other times we’d watched a movie. I was mesmerized by the curve of her bare back in that dress, and she was so pretty that I didn’t know where to begin.

  I propped myself on one elbow, facing her instead of the screen, and she copied me.

  “Sorry it’s not a real dance,” she whispered.

  “That’s okay, it’s a real gym.”

  “And you didn’t stand me up.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  Sadie smiled at me, and it felt like she was holding the universe together.

  “I know,” she said.

  After the movie ended, we walked back to the dorm. Nick was sulking and had polished off at least three juice boxes. I could feel Marina silently cheering as Sadie and I walked together and I carried both of our pillows. Charlie kept moaning about how he’d had to pee for, like, half the movie, and how it wasn’t funny, and could we please not make him laugh unless we wanted to be personally responsible for the consequences, which would be pee.

  There were twenty minutes before lights-out, hardly enough time for anything, but I’d consumed a juice box full of alcohol while wearing a shirt and tie, so the weirdness of that night was already out of my hands.

  Charlie beelined for Cottage 6, and Nick followed.

  “Um, I’ll see you later,” Marina said with a yawn, heading back toward the girls’ dorm.

  And then it was just Sadie and me standing on the grass, with me awkwardly clutching our pillows.

  “Why don’t we put these down?” Sadie suggested,
so I dropped them on the porch swing, and then we stood there wondering what came next.

  Everyone streamed around us in their pajamas, talking and laughing in this excited but exhausted way, and it felt so strongly like we were at summer camp. Like we’d never left but had grown old there separately, and had only now found each other again.

  “Wanna take a walk?” I asked.

  “A promenade,” Sadie said, giggling. “Come, fair gentleman, let us take a turn about the garden.”

  She rested her hand on my arm, and we walked toward the gazebo.

  “Nope,” I said, steering her away. “That’s a sad place. We don’t go there.”

  “That’s okay, I have a better idea.”

  “You always have a better idea,” I teased.

  “I can’t tell if that’s a compliment,” she said, and then she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the woods.

  The moon wasn’t quite full, but it was still bright enough to see by. It had been a long time since I’d been in the woods at night, and they seemed to twist around me, to chirp and hum and vibrate from every direction.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Shhhh, we’re time traveling.”

  Sadie bent down to take off her heels, and then she stepped ahead of me, in that green dress with the achingly low back, her spine pale in the moonlight as she pulled me deeper into the woods.

  “We’re here,” she said, stopping suddenly.

  “Where?”

  “Camp Griffith, four summers ago. The night of the dance.”

  Behind her was an enormous rock, like the legendary one from camp. I laughed at the reference.

  “You brought the rock all the way here?” I joked.

  “Yes, I did,” she said seriously. “Because I’ve considered it and have concluded that the make-out rock is the most romantic place in the world to have a first kiss.”

  “Well,” I said. “Who am I to argue with the world’s most romantic time-traveling rock?”

  I was awestruck by my good fortune, and by this profoundly gorgeous girl who was staring at me in the moonlight. And then she stepped forward, and her lips parted mine, and nothing else mattered. Not that we were sick and might never get better, not that we’d missed so much and would miss more still, and not that the band around her wrist wasn’t a corsage but a med sensor.