“How’s the music?” I asked.
“It’s good,” Charlie said. “Yeah, I’ll let you guys hear it soon.”
“We can already hear it,” Lane reminded him. “Open windows, remember?”
“That’s just the bare bones,” Charlie said. “I’m doing the whole thing on the computer, adding in different layers with virtual instruments and stuff. You’ll see.”
“Oh really, that’s what you’re doing on the computer?” Nick said, and we all laughed.
“Shut up,” Charlie muttered. “I’m trying to create a legacy here. There’s a specific energy to different moments, and once you lose it, it can’t be recaptured. You’ve got to record it, or you’ve got nothing.”
He stood up to bus his tray.
“Where are you going?” Nick asked.
“To keep working,” Charlie said.
And then he stalked off.
MARINA INSISTED ON having a birthday party that night, and the plan was to sneak out of the dorms and rendezvous in the woods for some late-night revelry. We’d meet at the dried-up creek bed a little bit west of the rock. It was far enough from Latham that flashlights wouldn’t be visible, but not too deep in. The theme was a toga party, and the plan was to bring our bedsheets. We could just stick them in the contaminated laundry chute, for bloodstained sheets, so it didn’t matter if we ruined them.
Marina and I spent the afternoon with craft glue and leaves, attempting to make laurel crowns for the party. Mostly, we just wound up ruining our manicures, since the craft glue got everywhere and refused to dry. In the end, we had to staple the leaves together, which took about thirty seconds and made us feel like idiots for not thinking of it in the first place.
That night, Marina and I went through the routine of putting on our pajamas, just to make it feel even more illicit, and then we went back to our rooms and waited for the hall nurse to come check.
Lane called, which he usually did.
“So, what are you wearing?” he asked.
“Lane!”
“I mean under your toga.”
“Mm-hmm, sure,” I teased.
“Although, come to think of it, what are you wearing?”
I giggled, and then I heard footsteps in the hall.
“It’s the nurse,” I said. “Wear jeans and a hoodie. I’ll see you later.”
And then I hung up and tried to look innocent.
“You’re running a bit of a fever, hon,” Nurse Heather said. “I’m gonna give you this.”
She handed me an aspirin, and I rolled my eyes and gulped it down.
“You’re a champ,” she said, reaching for the light switch. “Sleep well now.”
Which, obviously, I didn’t.
Marina knocked on my door an hour later, wearing her backpack.
“Ready to go?” she whispered.
I grabbed mine and flipped up my hood, and we snuck down the dark hallway together. The dorm echoed with coughing, and I wondered if I coughed in my sleep, too, and if it sounded that bad.
It wasn’t hard to get out of the dorms after lights-out, just a little inconvenient. The doors locked, but the windows didn’t. So all you had to do was slip out the window that led onto the back porch, and then jump down onto the grass. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d properly snuck out. The real thing, not just snuck into the boys’ dorm before lights-out.
Marina and I wiggled out the window and jumped off the porch, and then, in the thin light of the moon, we crept across the grass and into the woods.
I switched on my flashlight as soon as I dared, illuminating the tree trunks and the thick, moldering leaves that covered the ground. I loved the woods best in the summer. They felt warm and welcoming, with golden shafts of light filtering through the trees. But the woods were changing now that it was November. They felt cold and bleak, almost like they were dying.
It was farther than I’d remembered to the clearing, and somehow the woods were darker that night, wet and thick with the scent of decay.
Marina and I were the first ones to arrive. We took our sheets out of our backpacks and tried to fasten them into togas, which we probably should have practiced. Lane arrived just after we finished pinning them. Relief washed over him when he saw us.
“I thought I was lost,” he said.
“First star to the right, and then straight on till morning,” I said.
“Not a lost boy, lost in the woods.” Lane shook his head, grinning. “Happy birthday, Marina.”
“Thank you,” she said, giving her toga a twirl. “Welcome to Toga Night. We’re going to party like Jay Gatsby.”
Lane snorted.
“What?” I asked.
“Well, no one wants to party like Jay Gatsby,” he explained. “Because he doesn’t even attend his own parties. When he does, he just stands there, sober and unhappy and waiting for a girl who never arrives.”
Marina made a face.
“He’s right,” I said apologetically.
“Fine,” Marina said. “We’re going to party like guests at one of Jay Gatsby’s parties, but not like Jay Gatsby himself.”
“Yes, we’ll party like nameless minor characters in a novel about someone else,” I agreed.
“Perfect,” Marina said. “The theme for my party is both togas and forgettable literary characters from misunderstood classics.”
Lane shook his head over the two of us.
“Mind helping me get this thing on?” he asked, holding up his bedsheet with a pleading look.
I’d never realized how intimate it was to wrap a sheet around a boy, how my hands would hover in all the wrong places, and how he’d smile at me the whole time, like we were both enjoying a private joke too dirty to say out loud.
“Toga! Toga!” Nick chanted.
I was still pinning Lane’s, and Nick was like, “Look at you two, between the sheets.”
“Hilarious,” I said. “Want Marina to help with yours?”
“I can do it myself,” Nick said, and then draped the sheet around his neck like a cape.
“You look ridiculous,” Marina told him.
“Who has a toga party in the woods? That’s ridiculous,” Nick shot back.
“Well, next year, you can have one at your lame engineering frat,” Marina teased.
Small, casual comments about the future weren’t usual at Latham, and it still felt weird to hear people making them. To hear my friends joking not just about going home but also about growing up.
“I will,” Nick said. “And it’ll be awesome!”
He opened his backpack and took out a bottle of rum, presenting it to Marina with a flourish.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“Thank you, Captain Boozypants.”
It was actually sweet of him. Although we only had lemonade as a mixer, so the drinks were going to taste interesting.
“Should we wait for Charlie?” Marina asked, twisting the top off the Captain Morgan like she really didn’t want to.
“Hell no, he oversleeps, it’s his loss,” Nick said.
We put on the laurel crowns, which actually came out pretty great. The boys fetched rocks and sticks, and we had Nick build up a campfire, since he’d been a wilderness scout.
Marina had brought a bongo drum she’d borrowed off one of the hippie boys, and we swilled the rum, and took turns drumming the bongo, and danced around the fire in our togas. At first it felt stupid, but after more rum, and more drumming, the woods seemed to spin like we were about to rocket off the planet and launch our tiny, contained world straight into outer space.
“Hey, come here,” Lane said, pulling me away from the fire.
We ducked behind a tree, and the not-too-distant firelight made the woods seem to flicker. Lane looked so handsome in his toga that I wished I’d brought my camera to capture it. Then he cupped my face in his hands, and instead of taking a picture, I settled for stealing a kiss.
Our lips were sweet and sticky from the rum, and I could taste a fai
nt hint of his toothpaste, and something about that melted me. I kissed him like there was no tomorrow, like all we had was this moment in the woods, even though that wasn’t true. We were seventeen, and we’d graduate high school and go off to college and grow old and boring and tell stories about when we were young and sick and falling in love. Being at Latham didn’t mean what it used to. The rules, the treatment system, all of it was just a ceremony now, just a way to waste time until the first batch of protocillin was ready. And maybe we could be Pride and Prejudice, with a happy ending, with neither of us burying, or forgetting, the other.
“You know how much I adore you, right?” Lane said.
“I’m crazy about you, too,” I said, leaning my forehead against his chest.
I wished that we were brave enough to use the real word, instead of deliberately choosing the wrong one. But we had time to gather our nerves. We had so much time.
We went back to the group and joined the dancing again. The four of us spun and twirled in our togas, and the fire crackled, and we laughed, getting more than a little drunk. And even though the woods were dark, we were this tiny, perfect circle of light.
“I’m going to miss you guys,” Marina said, stopping to catch her breath.
“Don’t say that,” I told her. “You’re not allowed to mourn the future.”
Lane, who was drumming on the bongo, stopped.
“Isn’t that all we do, though?” he asked.
“Keep bongo!” I insisted, a bit tipsy.
Lane started drumming again, a soft patter.
“I mean it,” he said. “We mourn the future because it’s easier than admitting that we’re miserable in the present.”
The combination of his pattering on the drum, and the intensity with which he said that, made it sound like a spoken-word poem, and I thought about it for a moment, probably more seriously than I should have.
“Then maybe we’re not mourning the future,” I said. “Maybe we’re mourning ourselves.”
“Okay, no more rum for you,” Nick said, taking the bottle away from me and sloshing it. “Crap, it’s almost out.”
The woods were still spinning, even though we weren’t anymore, and we were all pretty drunk. And I wasn’t sure if it was the rum or the late hour, but I was suddenly so cold, and so exhausted, and so ready to be in bed, as opposed to just bedsheet.
“Is Charlie really not coming?” Marina asked.
“He probably fell asleep,” Lane said, yawning.
But yawns, like tuberculosis, are contagious. And soon everyone had caught his.
“Lane!” I accused.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s the rum. Clearly I’d be a terrible pirate.”
We packed up our things, and Nick kicked dirt over our fire.
“Should we take these off?” Lane asked, motioning toward his toga.
“Leave them on,” Marina said, so we did.
“No one takes off their togas until we’re back at the dorms,” I warned. “Or you are a suckbeast. Nick is already a suckbeast because his is a cape.”
“You never said toga, you just said to wear your bedsheet,” Nick complained.
“Yeah, to a toga party,” Marina said.
We set off in the direction of the cottages, exhausted and still wearing our togas.
Lane slipped his hand into mine.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi back,” I said, smiling at him.
He looked so amazing in his toga, with his floppy hair and the crown of leaves, like he’d walked out of the Greek Acropolis, or whatever it was called. Like there was a statue of him somewhere, in marble, missing its private parts.
“You’re cute,” I said.
“You’re drunk,” Lane said.
“Which is the only time you’re cute, otherwise you’re a potato.”
I giggled. God, I really was drunk.
To my left, a twig snapped loudly. My heart sped up, and I swung my flashlight beam around, but it was just one of those silver rabbits the woods were full of, its eyes luminous in the dark.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I wish Charlie had come,” Lane said.
“I do, too.” I squeezed his hand, and we squelched through a particularly muddy pile of leaves. Our sheets were going to be ruined.
Marina and Nick had veered a little off course, and I called out to them.
“Hey, is it muddy over where you are?”
But they didn’t answer. They were stopped, still as stone, and in the beam of my flashlight, they were the ones who looked like statues.
“Hello?” I called, shining my flashlight at Marina.
The look on her face was devastating.
“Sadie—” she choked out.
Something was wrong. I knew it as Lane and I ran toward them, our togas dragging and ripping on rocks and branches. We coughed as we ran, but we didn’t stop running. I guess that’s what people mean about racing toward disaster, how in the last moments before everything comes crashing down, you never walk.
And then I saw what they were staring at.
Not what, who.
It was Charlie, his body unnaturally splayed in the leaves.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LANE
IT WAS AS though we’d stepped into a nightmare. We shone our flashlights down on Charlie’s body, barely registering that it was real. The white fabric of his bedsheet was tangled around him, splattered with bright-red arterial blood. There was blood smeared around his mouth, and he was so still, lying on the carpet of rotting leaves.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I stood there in horror, not fully processing the enormity of what had happened.
“Charlie—” Sadie wailed. She got to her knees, shaking him. “Come on, Charlie! You’re okay, come on. Please!”
He wasn’t okay, though. Any of us could see that.
“Is he . . . ?” Marina asked, but she already knew. We all did.
Nick went pale and staggered away, and we could hear him vomiting.
We were drunk, and cold, and covered in mud, with bedsheets pinned over our clothes. And until that moment, it had all seemed so silly. The sneaking out, the woods, our trips into town, the nurse barging in on Charlie with his pants down. We’d been playing a game where we hadn’t quite believed the stakes. But I believed them then, staring down at the first corpse I’d ever seen, the first person I’d known who had died.
“He can’t be dead; his sensor would have gone off!” Sadie insisted. She reached for his wrist, and at first I thought she was taking his pulse, but then she pushed up his sleeve.
The light on his sensor wasn’t green, or flashing yellow in warning. There was no light on his sensor at all. It was just a black silicone band.
“That’s why no one came,” Sadie said. “Because Charlie had his sensor off!”
The enormity of what that meant washed over me, and I felt my stomach sour and twist, like I might be sick as well. We’d joked about Charlie’s sensor in the dining hall, laughing at him when it had gone off, instead of being concerned. And now it was too late to be concerned. Now it was too late to be anything except sorry.
While we’d danced around the fire in our togas, and beat our drum, and thrown back our booze, Charlie had lain there dying. Alone. In the woods.
I didn’t realize I was crying until I tried to put a hand on Sadie’s shoulder to steady her, and found that I was trembling as well. I swallowed thickly and glanced over at Marina, who looked as distraught as I felt.
Nick staggered back, pale and sweating.
“Fuck, Charlie, you don’t turn off your sensor! You don’t ever do that, you hear me?” Nick said.
But of course Charlie didn’t hear him. The dead never listen when you want to tell them anything.
Charlie wasn’t supposed to be dead. None of us were. Not now that they’d announced a vaccine, and what we had was curable. We were supposed to be cured, all of us, with medication that would be ready in four short wee
ks.
It hadn’t occurred to me that some of us might not have four weeks left.
“This is my fault,” Sadie said, blinking back tears. “I showed him how to shut off his sensor. I didn’t think anything would happen.”
“None of us did,” I said, wondering how Sadie could think that.
“Charlie was really sick,” Nick said. “We all knew he was doing the worst of any of us.”
“Having the worst symptoms doesn’t mean anything,” Marina said. “We never saw his charts or his X-rays. Sometimes people seem really healthy, and then they die. And sometimes they seem sick, and then they just go home.”
I’d had too much to drink. We all had. The woods were spinning in this uncomfortable, dizzying way, and I tried to steady myself by putting my hand against a tree, but it was slick with sap. The woods no longer felt like our sanctuary. They were dark, and twisted, and full of phantoms. Now I knew why everyone else stayed within the narrow confines of Latham, only venturing up the well-marked path on afternoon nature walks.
The whole night had taken on this strange, nightmarish tone, and I struggled to believe any of it. Any moment, I expected to wake up back in my dorm room, my heart pounding and my T-shirt clammy, wondering what the hell was wrong with my subconscious.
“If we’re the only ones who know, we have to tell someone,” I said. “A nurse. Someone who’ll know what to do.”
Everyone stared at me like I’d suggested calling the police.
“We can’t,” Nick said, his voice cracking.
“Nick’s right,” Sadie said. “No one can know we found him here.”
There was a terrible silence where we were all thinking the same thing.
“So we just go back inside?” Marina asked.
“Yes,” Sadie said. “We go back inside, and climb into bed, and in the morning, when Charlie isn’t at breakfast, they’ll look for him.”
“We can’t just leave him here,” I said.
“Yes, we can.” Nick’s expression dared me to argue. “Unless you can think of a better option?”
“Maybe a nurse would understand,” Marina said.
“Understand what?” Nick said angrily. “Do you want to tell Dr. Barons that we all decided to sneak out and get super drunk in the woods, and oh yeah, Charlie turned off his med sensor and died, but we weren’t with him or anything, which we can’t prove, but we found his body and can take you to it, and please don’t punish us for breaking, like, every rule at Latham House that actually matters.”