In the old days, they used to lay us out on the porch in rows. We’d sleep under the stars in our patient beds, instructed to breathe deeply and to think only of getting better. But that was before first- and second-line drug treatments. Before scientists developed a cure and the whole thing began to sound ridiculous, as though bored ladies had imagined it in their drawing rooms, gasping in their fashionable corsets. Before the disease rose from its ancient grave like some sort of zombie, immune to the drugs that doctors had once fought it with, as it shambled toward our unsuspecting towns, determined to catch its prey young.
Before it caught me.
I’d been at Latham House for more than a year, and time ran slower here. Boredom seeped in, and instead of seeming like there weren’t enough hours in a day, it felt like there were far too many.
This was my life now: a dining hall that echoed with coughing, and teachers who kept the windows open and made any excuse to leave the room. It was a life of X-rays and nurse checks, of feeling feverish before bed and having an ache in your chest after taking the stairs. Some days were worse, but really, all of them were the same, because every day at Latham was a sick day.
I barely remembered what it was like to have homeroom and Twitter and hours of freedom after school let out, while my sister was still at gymnastics, and before my mom got home from work. And Latham wasn’t just a lack of freedom, but a lack of privacy. The med sensors we wore around our wrists at all times saw to that, monitoring our temperatures and heart rates and sleep cycles, and reporting everything back to a remote computer system, as much for our own benefit as for medical research.
Dr. Crane had been right. Where I once was, there was now an active case of TB. Everything of who I was and who I wanted to be had been evicted to make room for the disease.
CHAPTER THREE
LANE
ONE THING I’VE realized about new places is that they’re like jeans. Sure, they might fit, but they’re not comfortable. They need time to be broken in. I was thinking about this as I sat in the sterile waiting room of the medical building, trying not to cough from the air-conditioning. The whole place smelled like a hospital, a combination of antiseptic and misery. It was completely different from the boarding-school atmosphere of the cottages and classrooms, a reminder of what was lurking just around the corner. Literally.
The posters on the wall, marked with the Cross of Lorraine—the skull and crossbones of tuberculosis—urged us to “fight the war against contagion” or “crusade for a TB-free America.” I almost would have preferred a cat telling me to hang in there. At least that would have been generically terrible. Instead, I was staring at posters claiming I was the enemy.
I sighed and slouched in my chair, waiting for the nurse to summon me. Up until a few weeks ago, I was a novice at hospitals. Before all this happened, I’d been to the emergency room exactly twice. Once for an ear infection, and once when I’d wiped out on the quarter pipe in Josh Dow’s driveway in seventh grade and broken a bone in my foot. But it’s like they say: third time’s the charm.
A nurse took me back to an exam room, which was even colder than the waiting room. When I sat down on the exam table, the thin paper crackled. I had a theory it was the same paper that covered toilet seats in public restrooms, except on a much larger, much more depressing roll.
Once again, my hands itched for my phone. My mom always complained I was addicted to the thing, but that wasn’t true; I just didn’t like sitting around with nothing to do, wasting time instead of spending it.
It took forever for the doctor to come in, and when he did, he was in a rush.
“Sorry for the wait,” Dr. Barons said, taking a seat on the little metal stool by the computer. “So, Lane. How are we getting on?”
“Fine,” I said automatically.
“Good, good.” He stared at me in this probing, obvious way, and I could tell that despite the friendliness, I was being evaluated. “Tired at all? In any pain?”
“No, I’m okay.”
I mean, I was a little tired, from not getting enough sleep, but I wasn’t, like, medically exhausted.
“On a scale of one to ten,” he prompted, waiting for a number.
“Um, two?”
“That’s what we like to hear,” Dr. Barons said, taking out his phone and tapping the screen. “Let me get a read on your vitals here. . . .”
I stared down at the bracelet on my wrist, black and silicone and bulky. I wasn’t used to the thing, or how it worked to give the doctors and nurses most of the data they needed, so they could spend as little time alone with me as possible. It felt strange, being recorded, having the way my body worked chronicled in some database that they could pull up on their phones and tablets, either across the room, while I was watching, or secretly, from rooms away.
“Excellent,” Dr. Barons said, still looking at his screen. “Now let’s see what’s going on with those lungs of yours. . . .”
And then he pivoted toward the computer and pulled up two side-by-side X-rays of my chest. One from the day in the hospital when I’d been diagnosed, and one from the night I arrived at Latham.
Dr. Barons talked a little, gesturing toward the cavities with the tip of his pen, like some bizarre PowerPoint presentation where I was both subject and viewer.
“This area here is what we need to watch out for, to make sure these two lesions in the right lobe don’t get any bigger,” he said, speaking so slowly and loudly that it was almost insulting. “Can you see what I’m talking about? These black shadows?”
I nodded, waiting for him to continue. I didn’t need Tuberculosis 101. None of this was new to me. Back at St. Luke’s, when I’d spent two weeks going stir-crazy in the infectious disease ward, I’d at least had the internet to keep me company. And even though I knew Googling “total-drug-resistant TB” wasn’t the best idea, I hadn’t been able to help myself.
So I knew how to identify the small, tuberculous lesions on an X-ray. I knew all about how the infection in my lungs affected the red blood cells that passed through them, which was what made this new strain of tuberculosis so much worse than the ones that had come before it. TDR-TB, the news reports called it, since none of the old medications worked on it. But unlike so many other incurable diseases, it was contagious. Whenever I coughed, I put everyone near me at risk. Hence the whole reason for shipping me off to a sanatorium in the middle of the mountains, surrounded by woods and sealed with iron gates. Walling off the infection, literally.
But even though I’d read a lot about what was wrong with me, I’d read even more on how doctors couldn’t do anything to fix it until scientists managed to develop a treatment that actually worked. Essentially, every doctor’s appointment I’d had over the past few weeks had boiled down to this: the only thing to do was wait and see. Sanatoriums like Latham had statistically higher and faster rates of recovery than being quarantined in your bedroom, but they couldn’t promise anything.
“So,” Dr. Barons said, “how are we going to tackle your TB? While you’re here at Latham, the best course of treatment is to follow your schedule.”
“My schedule?”
He couldn’t possibly mean the daily schedule I’d taped over my desk, which began with Breakfast, eight a.m. and ended with Lights-out, nine p.m.
“You’ll find it in the front of your handbook,” he continued. “And I think you’ll discover that having a routine gives you something outward to focus on. Rest periods are for resting quietly in your room, or the common room if you’re feeling up to it. Wellness periods are spent engaging in gentle physical activities, like nature walks, lawn games, and yoga.”
“Yeah, sounds great,” I said, without enthusiasm. Naptime and nature walks, the foolproof Latham Treatment Plan. I’d known that going in, but there hadn’t been a choice. I couldn’t stay at home: my parents were both teachers, and if either of them tested positive for exposure to what I had, the school board would be forced to fire them.
Dr. Barons smiled at me
, like he thought I was actually raring to go on a nature walk that very second.
“Of course, you should still listen to your body. If you’re feeling tired, spend your Wellness time resting in bed. If you’re feeling ill, check in at the nurse’s station in your dorm. And of course once a week you’ll check in with me, so we can see how much progress you’ve made.”
“Once a week?” That seemed ridiculously drawn out, like I’d be at Latham forever.
“Your hall nurse is available twenty-four hours a day.” He smiled, misunderstanding.
“No, I mean, how long am I going to be stuck here?”
I didn’t realize what a dangerous question it was until I’d asked it, and Dr. Barons’s smile widened.
“That’s a good question, Lane. First, we have to get your X-rays looking better. Wall off that pesky infection in your right lung. Make sure your hemoglobin levels have stabilized. And how long that takes is really up to you, not me.”
Yeah, no kidding.
“Two months?” I pressed. “Three?”
I couldn’t imagine being away for longer than that. In three months, I’d have missed the entire fall semester. Even with the binders of makeup assignments my teachers had sent over, I still wouldn’t be able to keep up. Not in the Advanced Placement classes. And then I wouldn’t get the scores I needed on the AP exams in the spring, and I wouldn’t get college credit, which meant I’d have to take intro courses instead of skipping ahead to the classes I actually wanted.
“What’s so important that you need to get back for?” Dr. Barons asked.
He had this condescending smile, and in that moment, I knew he wouldn’t understand.
I was ranked second in my graduating class. I’d almost killed myself to get there, too. I’d bussed over to the community college all of junior year for the AP Physics lab, volunteered at the health clinic on Wednesday afternoons, given up most of my weekends for Model UN practice and SAT prep courses, and started the Carbon Footprint Awareness Club after my adviser told me I needed to demonstrate “unusual hobbies and passions” to set my application apart.
I was good at being smart. At studying the textbooks until I had them memorized. At knowing the right answer so often that I’d stopped raising my hand in class, because I didn’t need to prove anything. My parents had always pushed me to succeed, and after a while, I hadn’t needed the push anymore.
Until a couple of weeks ago, it was a straight shot to the college of my choice. To Stanford. I could land a summer banking internship at twenty, graduate in three years, and recruit straight to Wall Street. I’d have my loans paid back by the time I turned twenty-three, just in time for business school, or law school, I wasn’t quite sure yet. But that was the plan.
And I intended to stick to it. Anyway, I healed fast. I’d recovered in a weekend when I got my wisdom teeth out, so I didn’t have to miss the exam review in English. All I needed were a couple of weeks for my body to get its shit together and then I could go home. I didn’t even feel that sick. I was a little tired, and I coughed sometimes, but it felt like having a cold, not some serious illness.
“Well, it’s my senior year—” I began.
“Lane,” Dr. Barons interrupted. “What you need to do is to think of Latham as a vacation. A calm, welcoming place to relax and to escape from all the stresses and toxins of the real world.”
“A vacation. Right,” I said, my shoulders sagging.
I didn’t do vacations. Vacations were for people who had time to relax, and I didn’t. Stanford’s acceptance rate was only 5 percent. I couldn’t afford to be better than 94 percent of the other applicants. I had to be better than almost everyone.
But I could see that I wasn’t getting through to Dr. Barons about how important it was for me to stay on track. I’d have to show him that Latham was working. That I was improving. And then he’d send me home. I just had to make sure I wasn’t too far behind when I got there.
CHAPTER FOUR
SADIE
I LOOKED FOR Lane at dinner, wondering if I’d recognize him. And then I wondered if he’d recognize me. To be honest, I hoped he wouldn’t. I’d been a total mess at thirteen, with frizzy hair and the wrong type of shorts and Deathly Hallows symbols inked onto my sneakers.
But the thing about being a disaster in middle school is that the shame of it never fully goes away. Even after your braces are off and your hair is exactly the way girls wear it on Tumblr, underneath it all, you’re still just as unsure whether someone actually likes you, or is only talking to you so they can laugh about it afterward.
And even though stuff like that never happened anymore, even though it had been years since I’d experienced anything you could really call bullying, I was still terrified I’d wake up one day and someone would declare everything about me totally and irreparably wrong. I knew it was dumb, but I didn’t want some boy around who could tell embarrassing stories about me. I didn’t want anyone to look at me and see Sadie Bennett, the outcast girl who sat alone in the arts and crafts tent making friendship bracelets for her American Girl doll.
The cafeteria line inched forward, and I grabbed a turkey burger and two fruit cups. Nick snickered at me for taking two, and I was like, “Sorry for having an appetite.”
And that was when I saw him. It was him, after all. He was taller than I’d imagined, with unruly brown hair that seemed to defy gravity. He was pale and thin, which we all were, with dark circles under his eyes, and his clothes were too formal for Latham, like something you’d wear to a country club. But there he was, with his collared shirt untucked and a burger on his tray, talking to—ugh, Genevieve Reaser.
A couple of days ago, in the hall bathroom, I was innocently brushing my teeth, and Genevieve had come in with her face wash and cheerfully informed me that “Jesus wants us to be ancestors of our future happiness by staying positive.” I’d told her that Jesus wanted her to wait her turn for the sink.
I watched as Genevieve led Lane back to her table of prayer-group disciples. What a grim crowd. But it was always kids like that who volunteered to be tour guides.
“What’s with you?” Nick asked.
“Nothing,” I muttered. “I know him, that’s all.”
“Uh-oh, typhoid Sadie.”
“Shut up. I meant when we were kids.”
“Even worse.” Nick smirked, shoveling a spoonful of sweet potato fries onto his plate.
“Hey, Nick, do you know what it would say under your photo in a high school yearbook?” I asked. “‘Most likely to be friend zoned.’”
“Funny,” Nick grumbled. “Sharpen that wit of yours any more and someone might think you actually have a point.”
I shot him my most serene smile.
The truth was, most of us weren’t in high school yearbooks. We were the ones who’d faded away, who hadn’t come back in the fall. Who might never come back. Because TB wasn’t like cancer, something to be battled while friends and family sat by your bedside, saying how brave you were. No one held our hands; they held their breath. We were sent away to places like Latham to protect everyone else, because it was better for them.
Maybe we should have anticipated it. The return of old things, the way history was starting to repeat itself. Spanish influenza came back first, in 2009, although we called it swine flu. Then whooping cough reappeared. Then polio. Then there was a meningitis outbreak at Princeton, some weird strain no one had seen before, which made the government import an emergency vaccine from Europe. Then Ebola. In the middle of this, a new strain of tuberculosis caught on, developing a resistance first to the drugs that had treated it, and then to the vaccine that had prevented it. And then it caught us. I know you’re supposed to phrase it the opposite way, with patients catching the diseases, but that’s never sounded right to me, as though, instead of catching TB, I could have missed.
Dinner was strange that night. Marina had been right; something was unmistakably off, and everyone else was starting to sense it. I could feel the dining hall p
laying a giant game of Guess Who.
“Was anyone supposed to go home today?” Marina asked.
“I don’t think so,” Nick said.
Marina’s boyfriend, Amit, had gone home in July. And it had been two months of radio silence, while Marina sent emails that were never returned and waited for a phone call that never came. Lately, when she saw someone celebrating their last night, or packing their things into their parents’ car, she went all mopey. And I didn’t blame her.
“Bet there’s a lockout tonight,” Charlie said, glancing up from his notebook long enough to register the weirdness.
“Boys or girls?” Marina asked.
“I’m not the oracle of death,” Charlie told her. “I can’t be that specific.”
“It’s not specific,” I said. “You have a fifty percent chance of being right either way.”
Then Nick started telling this story about how he’d accidentally farted in yoga that afternoon and had blamed it on this awful girl Cheryl. And before I knew it, dinner was ending.
We had these tall metal tray returns, the kind that are always full when you get to them, so it takes forever to find a slot for your tray. Miraculously, there was an open slot right in the middle. I shoved my tray in, and at the same moment, so did someone else, from the other side.
Our trays banged, the sound startling me. Mine came shooting back, and I managed to catch it before the plate slid off.