When he said it like that, it sounded terrible. Like we’d been up to something awful. Like it was our fault.
“But they can’t really punish us, can they?” I asked.
They all stared at me like they couldn’t believe they had to spell it out.
“Are you kidding?” Nick said. “We get kicked out of here, we’re out of the drug trial.”
The drug trial. It was one of the reasons my parents had sent me to Latham, after all, instead of one of the cheaper, public places. Instead of the holistic hot springs, or the homeopathic place where everyone slept in yurts and farmed their own kale. Latham gave us med sensors, and sent that data to researchers, and it put us at the top of the treatment list for any experimental drug trials. Like the one for protocillin.
Nick was right, and we all knew it.
“Okay,” Marina said. “So we walk away.”
“We walk away,” I agreed.
“Like we were never here,” Sadie said hoarsely.
“Like we have no idea Charlie isn’t asleep in his room,” Nick said. “None of us gets in trouble, and in a couple of hours, it will all be over.”
Except that’s the thing about dying, or experiencing death. It happens, but it’s never over. So we stood there one final moment together. And then, slowly, regretfully, we walked away.
I WOKE THE next morning convinced it had been a bad dream. And then I looked down at the tangle of mud-streaked sheets, and at my filthy sneakers, and was horrified to realize it had actually happened.
It was early, and Sunday, which meant breakfast began slightly later than usual. My head was pounding, and my mouth tasted terrible, but I dragged myself out of bed. I put my sheets down the contaminated laundry chute and rinsed my sneakers in the shower.
Breakfast was an ordeal. I don’t know how any of us managed to act normally. We were all pale and gray from the alcohol, and just the sight of pancakes and eggs made my stomach churn unpleasantly. But I piled my tray high, because I didn’t know what I’d do if Linda made me go back through. And then the four of us sat around our table, wan and silent, while the rest of the dining hall talked and laughed and hummed with energy.
Nick stood up early to bus his tray.
“We should head back,” he said, staring at me. “We have to do that thing.”
I followed him over to the tray return, and across the grass, and back into Cottage 6. He didn’t say anything. And he didn’t have to. I knew what we were doing—cleaning up before the lockout.
One night in the dorms, Nick had been talking about how, in the army, when a soldier dies, the other soldiers wipe all the porn off his computer before it’s returned to his family.
“You’d do it for me, right?” Nick had said. And we’d all agreed that yeah, we’d do it for each other. It had seemed like a joke, the way everything did then, when we did what we wanted because nothing bad ever happened. But now the joke was on us.
It felt wrong going into Charlie’s room without his permission, like the room was still his, instead of just filled with his things.
“You check his computer, I’ll see if I can find his stick,” Nick said.
I told him that sounded good, and then I went over and woke up Charlie’s computer. The whole thing had been restored to the original settings, with the generic outer space background.
“Nick?” I said.
Nick was holding a shoe box, an unreadable expression on his face.
“I’ve got everything,” he said.
“That fast?”
“It’s all here. Let’s go,” Nick said.
We went back to his room and set the box on his bed. It had PROPERTY OF NIKHIL PATEL written across the top in black Sharpie, but I recognized it as Charlie’s handwriting immediately.
“What’s in it?” I asked.
Nick lifted the lid. Inside was a stack of Moleskine notebooks, a bag of peanut butter M&M’s, an iPod, and two USB sticks. One was suspiciously titled “Math Homework,” and the other was labeled “Gone to His Narrow Bed—Charlie Moreau.”
Nick picked up the second USB stick and popped it into his computer.
It was an album. Charlie’s album. With hand-drawn and meticulously inked cover art. He’d finished it.
Nick pressed play, and for a moment, nothing happened, and then a familiar melody drifted from Nick’s speakers. I’d heard Charlie play this song so many times, but the finished version sounded different. It was darker, and richer, and full of anguish.
He sang about getting sick, and about making art, and about time, how we never had enough of it. I closed my eyes and listened, my heart breaking with each track.
“I am a grave man, children play in my graveyard/skipping stones on headstones/It’s time to rest these too young bones/If anyone asks, I’ve gone to my narrow bed.”
The last song finished, and when I opened my eyes, I was crying, and Nick was, too.
“Fuck,” he said, sniffling. “All that time I thought he was writing love songs to One Direction.”
I laughed, and then felt horrible about it. But there was something about the box that was bothering me. Charlie had spent the last few weeks working almost constantly on his music, with an intensity I hadn’t understood. He’d skipped class, barely left his room, hardly eaten anything. . . .
“Do you think Charlie knew?” I asked.
“That he didn’t have much time?”
I nodded.
“Yeah,” Nick said finally. “I do. I just think he didn’t want us to worry about him, since we’d all started talking about going home and stuff.”
We were silent a moment, considering it.
“He left that box right there, on his bed,” Nick said. “So we’d find it when we went into his room for our army mission. It’s like he wanted to make it easy for us.”
“Then why the notebooks, and the music?” I asked. “Why wipe his computer if he kept all the X-rated stuff on a stick?”
“Haven’t you ever thought about it?” Nick asked. “What you want to leave behind, and what you don’t?”
“Not really.”
It had never occurred to me that I had anything to leave behind at all. Everything I’d done had been focused on the future, on impressing college admissions officers, but it was just empty paper. Just numbers and letters on a transcript and a list of clubs I’d belonged to.
I remembered what Charlie had said about shutting down his Facebook, as a preemptive strike against it turning into a memorial wall. About needing to finish his music. About trying to create a legacy, because if he didn’t record his songs, he’d have nothing to leave behind.
“If he knew he was that sick, why didn’t he just stay in bed last night?” I asked.
“Would you?” Nick said, and for a moment I didn’t understand what he was saying. And then, horribly, I did.
Charlie hadn’t wanted to pass away in the hospital ward, wasting his last days waiting to die instead of spending them living. And he hadn’t wanted to die in his bed, beeping, while the whole dorm woke up and crowded the hallway to see what was going on.
We’d gone into the woods, and he’d known that, but he didn’t have anyone else. He’d turned off his sensor so he wouldn’t get caught, and he’d gone to find us. He just hadn’t made it.
There was nothing we could have done. No way we could have known. Because he hadn’t wanted us to know, not until right at the end, and then, it had been too late.
“You’d think if there was a god that Charlie would have had five more minutes to come find us,” I said.
Nick shook his head. “It makes me so sad that I’m not even sad anymore, I’m just angry. Dr. Barons said we’d be cured. He didn’t say we’d be cured if we all lived six more weeks, but heads-up, guys, some of you might not live that long.”
Nick was sitting on the floor, his back against the wardrobe, and he pulled his knees and arms in, curling himself into a ball.
“Maybe he thought it was the right thing, giving everyone hop
e,” I said.
“Maybe he’s just an asshole,” Nick muttered. “I knew it was too good to be true that we’d all go home and have fucking Skype chats. Four weeks till the cure, a hundred and forty-nine of us to go.”
Nick got up, pulled a water bottle of vodka out of his desk drawer, and took a swig.
“Want some?” he asked, coughing.
I shook my head, and Nick lifted the bottle in salute.
“To Charlie,” he toasted. “For finishing his art.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
SADIE
I WATCHED FROM my window as the nurses and doctors scurried back and forth in the overcast morning, frantically searching for Charlie. I tried to pretend I was backstage at a play, watching the chaos as everyone scrambled around before curtain, but part of me knew that I wasn’t. That all our games and jokes had finally twisted into something serious and terrible.
I hadn’t been able to sleep. I’d just sat there watching the sky and listening to this one bird that didn’t understand it was night, and wondering if I’d ever sleep again. I was terrified of what I’d dream, of whose corpses I’d conjure up when I closed my eyes.
It was all my fault. Charlie was dead because of me. I hadn’t meant for it to happen, but that didn’t make it any less true. I’d just wanted to show off about the med sensor, but if I’d thought about it, I would have realized it was a terrible idea.
Charlie had always been sicker than the rest of us. We’d never made a big deal about it, because that sort of thing could change in an instant. Any week, one of us could have come back from an appointment with Dr. Barons, our face ashen as we moved our things to the hospital wing for round-the-clock care, and our parents were summoned, and we were given a pain pump instead of an aspirin. Any week, one of us could have come back from the same appointment with a copy of our latest chest X-ray and a release date.
I’d been waiting for the latter to happen. For the people I cared about to leave me behind, one by one, like I was an imaginary friend they’d outgrown. I wasn’t prepared for any of us to leave the other way, with the doors locking behind us, and a hearse driving quietly through the back gate.
We were the ones who got dressed in the morning, who stole internet and staged photo shoots in the woods during naptime, who hid phones in our beds after lights-out and snuck into town to get coffee. We weren’t the ones who died here. We couldn’t be.
Everyone in the dining hall stared at our table during lunch. They all knew, or they guessed. Charlie had missed two meals, and the nurses had been running into the woods all morning, and where Charlie Moreau had once sat, there was now a definite ripple.
I stared down at the sandwich and fruit cup and salad on my plate, because I knew I should eat them, even though I wasn’t hungry. I could feel Charlie’s empty chair at the edge of my vision, and I wanted so badly for him to sit there bent over his notebook, scribbling away. I wanted to hear the high strum of a ukulele coming from his window as I walked back to the cottages. I wanted him to play me a record with this huge grin on his face, delighted by the antiquated technology. I wanted him to dress up in eyeliner and velvet again, and to do his spot-on impression of Dr. Barons, asking us to rate our pain on a scale from one to ten.
Except right now I didn’t want to rate my pain. I wanted to rate my grief. And there wasn’t a number high enough.
I left lunch early and went back to my room, collapsing onto my bed in tears. I cried until it made me cough, and when I took my handkerchief away from my mouth, it was stained with blood. I was surprised, but I wasn’t. I hadn’t been taking care of myself. None of us had. We’d rolled our eyes and skipped rest periods and stayed up late and drunk Nick’s booze.
It was no wonder Charlie had gotten so sick. Oh God, Charlie.
The memory of last night seared through me, and I curled up in a ball, clutching that horrible handkerchief, and cried some more. I knew Natalie Zhang would be able to hear it through the wall, but I didn’t care. I cried for the way Charlie had died, and I cried that I hadn’t gotten a chance to say good-bye, and I cried that the last thing I’d said to him was, “You better not oversleep.” I cried because, while Charlie was dying alone in the woods, I was so close, pressed up against a tree with Lane, kissing him like nothing else in the world mattered except how the two of us felt about each other, and naively thinking how wonderful it was that all of us had so much time.
DR. BARONS CAME into the dining hall that night to make an announcement: med sensors were not to be turned off or tampered with. To make sure that our sensors were working properly, nurses would periodically access our data throughout the day and night. Furthermore, all ground-floor windows in the dormitories would be fitted with bug screens.
There was a collective groan as Dr. Barons exited the dining hall. It felt like everything had fallen apart, like I’d blinked, just for a moment, and when I’d opened my eyes I was surrounded by ruins.
I stalked off to bus my tray, and Lane followed me.
“Sadie, wait,” he called.
He looked terrible. We all did, I guessed, except now it worried me in a way it hadn’t for weeks. I couldn’t tell if the dark circles under his eyes were serious, or if his cough sounded worse. And I hated that I wasn’t looking at Lane with a melty feeling in my stomach, that instead I was scanning him for symptoms.
I slotted my tray into the return.
“What?”
“I haven’t seen you all day,” he said.
“I haven’t wanted to see anyone all day.”
“Not even me?” he asked, biting his lip and staring at me adorably.
I wished he wasn’t so cute when he did that. I wished he’d already gone home and left me behind without calling. I wished I didn’t have a fever, and he didn’t look so tired, and we hadn’t just eaten dinner while brooding over a friend’s death.
I hated that I was in love and grieving, because I didn’t know how to be both. It was just too much. Too many things that could go wrong. And there was too much potential pain for us to keep going.
I don’t know what made me do it, except some combination of sorrow and anger and the stupid fever I couldn’t get rid of, and the feeling of everyone at Latham staring at our table in that awful hushed way, but I sighed and shook my head.
“Sorry,” I said. And then I fled the dining hall.
FINNEGAN HAD GIVEN us homework, but I’d completely forgotten about it. We were supposed to write a poem or something, and I felt so embarrassed when everyone else took out theirs. I’d been out of school so long that it felt strange having homework. I wondered if bereavement was an excuse, although at Latham, probably not.
And then Finnegan came in, looking as miserable as I felt. Wordlessly, he set down his coffee, picked up a whiteboard marker, and scribbled an assignment. Chapter 15, exercises 8 and 9.
“You can leave when you finish, no need to hand it in,” he said.
With a sip from his mug, he was out the door.
“What the heck?” Nick muttered. “I thought we were doing poems.”
“I did, too,” Marina said. “Whatever happened to ‘you need to be prepared for high school’?”
“What do you think?” I said bitterly. “Homework adds unnecessary stress. Finnegan wouldn’t want any of us accidentally getting sick from his French assignments.”
Lane sighed. He was staring at me again in this pleading, can-we-talk way, but I pretended I didn’t see.
I didn’t know what to say. Now that there was news of a cure, everything at Latham felt different. It wasn’t the same “we can treat the symptoms but not the disease, so if you’re feeling tired, how about a rest” bullshit that Dr. Barons had always pushed. No doctors would ever say that again. Now there was this frantic new undercurrent of “let’s just keep everyone alive until the protocillin arrives,” as though any of us could keel over at any moment, and it would somehow be fifty times more tragic than if we’d done it a month ago.
GRIEF IS A strange thing. I
’d thought, for the longest time, that being at Latham was a constant grieving for an answer. Live or die. Return home or succumb. But it wasn’t grief at all. It was fear.
I knew at least that much after Charlie died. Because I could hardly breathe through the pain of thinking about what had happened, but underneath that, I was so, so scared that there were more casualties to come. That I’d gotten too attached to the idea of us, of Nick and Lane and Marina and Charlie and me as being untouchable, while the invisible hand of tuberculosis hovered there, drumming its fingers impatiently.
I remembered the look on Dr. Barons’s face when he’d pulled up my X-rays, and the way Lane’s cheeks had seemed flushed at dinner, and how Marina sometimes walked away when she had a coughing fit, so we couldn’t hear how bad it was, and how I knew Nick skipped the contraband collections because he often went to the nurse’s station for narcotics.
The saying at Latham was “Welcome to the rotation,” but the unspoken second half of that phrase was “you can exit through either of two doors.” I’d always had a theory which door would be mine, but I’d been careful not to make predictions for anyone else.
Lane called me every night, and every night I ignored him, turning away from the ringing phone and turning up the volume on my music. I knew it was a bad plan, but I didn’t know what else to do. The idea of giggling and flirting after what had happened struck me as horrible. It was like something in me had snapped. I could feel my emotions floating there, just beneath the surface, but I couldn’t access them. All I could get was numb, and horrified, and occasionally angry.
But I couldn’t avoid Lane’s calls forever. You can’t end a relationship by ignoring it, you can only hurt the other person’s feelings and make the inevitable breakup even worse. It was like Lane had said that night so long ago in the gazebo: being someone’s ex isn’t an existing condition you find out about later, it’s something you know about the moment it happens to you.