Extraordinary Means

  I stared dubiously at the ancient landline on my desk, knowing resistance was futile. And then I picked up the thing and dialed.

  Of course my mom answered on the second ring, sounding way too concerned.

  “Lane, sweetie, how are you?” she cooed. I said I was fine, and she plunged on, talking about how Dr. Barons had uploaded my new X-ray so she and dad could see it, and how she thought it looked much better than the last one, and my dad agreed.

  The thought of them staring at a picture of my insides on their iPads was pretty embarrassing, and I tried not to imagine the two of them discussing it over dinner like they’d done with my SAT scores.

  There was an awkward silence, where I guessed my mom was waiting for me to say something about my doctor’s appointment, but I had no idea what.

  “How was the drive back?” I asked instead, trying to change the subject.

  “Oh, fine,” Mom said. “Not too much traffic.”

  An uncomfortable pause again.

  “Hold on, let me get your father,” my mom said. “I’ll put you on speaker.”

  Then she and my dad took turns asking Concerned Questions about what I was eating, and if there were enough pillows on my bed because they could always send more, and if I was running a fever, and how I was sleeping, and how were the nurses, and did the doctor say anything at all about how he thought I was doing. It went on forever.

  “Did you ask your teachers if you can do the AP work you brought with you instead?” my dad asked.

  “Um,” I said, glancing at the stack of textbooks and assignments on my desk. It was more like a tower, actually. I’d meant to ask, but I’d been so thrown by everything that I hadn’t gotten the chance.

  “It doesn’t matter,” my mom said soothingly, and my dad cleared his throat like he disagreed. “I mean it, sweetheart. I don’t want you to tire yourself out.”

  “No, I’m sure it’s fine,” I said. “I’ll ask them tomorrow.”

  Then my dad told me to “Hang in there, bud,” and I said, “You too,” which was completely the wrong thing. But too late. There was an awkward chorus of “I love yous,” and, thankfully, it was over.

  I felt entirely removed from my old life in that moment, a million miles from the band posters on my walls, and from Loki, my black Lab, and from everything that had defined me for so long. My parents never used to worry how I was sleeping, or if I wanted more pillows. They never used to tell me not to tire myself out back when I was pulling all-nighters over my physics exams. They’d just ask if I felt prepared, and then, after I got my grade, they’d ask what I could do to improve my score on the next one.

  I was used to my parents. To our cadence, and our lives. I just hadn’t realized quite how much my getting sick would turn us into strangers, our usually predictable conversations becoming distant and unfamiliar.

  I picked up the phone one more time and called Hannah, which was my reward for talking to my parents. Hannah and I had been together for five months, since the Model UN trip to San Francisco. The amount of time surprised me. It sounded so significant, when in actuality we’d barely even started.

  “Hello?” she said tentatively.

  “Congratulations, you’ve won a romantic trip for three to Sea World.” I tried to disguise my voice.

  “Lane?”

  “Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “Sorry about the weird number.”

  “It’s fine, although I’m devastated I won’t be taking my two favorite lovers to Sea World.”

  “Wait, you have more than two?”

  “You don’t know me.” Hannah giggled.

  It felt so good to talk to her, to joke about things that didn’t matter. I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes, for a moment letting myself pretend that I was somewhere, anywhere else.

  “So what’s going on in the Harborverse?” I asked.

  “Oh God, everything.”

  Hannah had this wonderfully energetic voice, which always reminded me of a steam engine, barreling full force ahead. So I listened as she talked about the weekly quizzes in AP Bio, and how freaking unfair it was that six of them got picked at random to count for most of her grade.

  “If I fail, like, one quiz and then do perfectly on the rest I’d still get, like, ninety percent. It’s precarious. I’m going to stress eat an entire pizza over this every Thursday night, I can just tell.”

  “You’ll do fine,” I said.

  “Maybe.” She sighed. “Except it’s on a curve, and everyone’s fighting for second now that . . .”

  She trailed off, embarrassed.

  “Now that I’m out of the picture?” I supplied.

  Hannah didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

  “I’m coming back, you know,” I said.

  “I know,” Hannah said quickly. “Forget I said anything.”

  We lapsed into silence for a moment. I wasn’t used to talking on the phone. Not with Hannah. We texted, sure. And we stayed on Skype for hours sometimes, leaving it running in the background while we reviewed for exams. But this was different. This wasn’t keeping each other company. It was keeping in touch. Being long-distance, as opposed to past tense.

  “How is it there?” Hannah asked. “Really?”

  “Fine.”

  “And you’re feeling okay?” She said it in this mom-ish voice, and I shut my eyes a moment, as though that would erase it.

  “Yeah, I’m great,” I said. “There’s only four classes. We mostly get to lie in bed and watch movies.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Well, I’d say ‘wish you were here,’” I joked.

  “Lane?” she said tentatively. “Can I ask you something?”

  “You can ask me anything.”

  Although she hadn’t asked me much of anything recently. It was like she was afraid. Afraid of answers she didn’t want to hear. That was why she acted so cheerful and talked about her classes, the ones I should be in. It had to be.

  “You know how I’m applying early action to Stanford?”

  Almost everyone in our group was applying early action to Stanford, so I said yeah.

  “I was wondering if you’d read over my admissions essay?” she asked.

  I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

  “Just to proofread and see if I’m on the right track, or if it’s obvious that I used a thesaurus. That kind of thing. You were always better than me in English, so . . . ,” she trailed off, waiting for me to respond.

  I knew I was supposed to agree to it no problem. Because that was what we did, Hannah and me. Back in sophomore year, I’d outscored her on every English quiz, and she’d beaten me on every precalc, so it only made sense to partner up in chem. And, eventually, in other things. I used to joke that we were “lab partners in crime,” because instead of staying nemeses, locked in a battle over class rank, we’d become a team, fighting to succeed at the same thing.

  “I just started it, but can I send a draft this weekend?”

  “Sure,” I said hollowly. “Email it over whenever.”

  My voice caught in my throat, and I started coughing. I pressed the receiver against my jeans, so Hannah wouldn’t hear how bad it was.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said hoarsely.

  “Promise?”

  “I’m fine,” I insisted.

  “You’ll get better soon,” Hannah said, like she had some authority on the matter. “And then everything will go back to normal.”

  “Right,” I said. “Normal.”

  Except Latham was my normal now. And being healthy, being okay, wouldn’t feel normal at all. It would feel incredible.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SADIE

  FRENCH WAS ONE of the better classes, which wasn’t saying much. We had it with Mr. Finnegan, who was about thirty-five and was married to one of the hall nurses. When I first arrived at Latham, Finnegan had been new, and eager, and actually sort of good. He’d let us read poetry and listen to French
music instead of doing insipid exercises about Janine and Paul going to the store to buy a baguette. But Latham had gotten to him. Too many cross-outs and add-ins on his attendance sheet. Too many kids having coughing fits when he called on them, even though half the time they were faking it because they didn’t know the answer. Lately, Finnegan had begun sticking to the textbook, and had mostly put away his playlists.

  My friends and I all took French together, which was how we’d met. We were sitting in our usual seats by the windows when Lane walked in. Nick was in the middle of some story about this care package his mother was sending, which promised to be the worst thing in the world. “Underpants and caffeine-free tea bags,” he predicted. “And newspaper clippings about my cousins.”

  And then Lane was there, hovering awkwardly in the doorway, wearing another button-up shirt and cardigan, which shouldn’t have annoyed me, but it did. That was our thing, my friends and me. While practically everyone else shuffled around in their sweats, we were the ones who still got dressed in the morning and carried school bags. I knew it was just an illusion of normalcy, but it was our illusion, not Lane’s.

  Mr. Finnegan walked in then, carrying a travel mug of coffee. Watching him take a sip was torturous, since all we got was weak, generic tea.

  “Un nouvel étudiant!” Mr. Finnegan said, spotting Lane.

  I noticed he didn’t comment on the lack of Sheila Valdez, who’d decided to take a sick day that morning and was laid up in the nurse’s station, enjoying trashy magazines and a dose of Vicodin.

  Lane asked where he should sit, but Finnegan shook his head and made him stand up in front of everyone and have a conversation in French. First-day torture. I’d hoped Lane would stumble, but he hardly seemed fazed, speaking with Finnegan in rapid, flawless French.

  God, I hated him. I hated his pretentious button-up and the way he smirked after he answered each question and Finnegan said “Bien,” because he didn’t need any grammar corrections.

  My French never sounded like that. I had to pause and mentally conjugate each verb, starting with je. Of course Angela Hunter and her clique of brainless Frenchie girls all stared at him lovingly. They didn’t know he was a jerk. They just knew that, with 150 of us at Latham, a new boy had miraculously appeared. A cute boy, who hadn’t yet proceeded to pull out a handkerchief and noisily hack up blood.

  That day, we were working on a unit that was supposed to help us in case we got sick in France. I knew we were just going through the textbook, but it still annoyed me.

  In the exercises, no one ever had anything worse than flu. It was always a cold, a cough, a headache. Something that could be fixed with Tylenol or a bandage. Something you wouldn’t really go to the hospital for, particularly in the middle of a European vacation.

  “I’m going to pair you up,” Finnegan said. “You’ll come to the front of the room and put on a short skit about going to the hospital. One of you will be the patient, and one of you will be the doctor. Let’s start with . . . Genevieve and Nikhil. Nikhil, you’re the patient. Genevieve, you’re the doctor.”

  Nick gave me a look of pure mourning over that one. Genevieve hated us. She said that Nick and I did the devil’s bidding, since we ran Latham’s black market. We supplied everyone with a liberal sprinkling of booze, junk food, and condoms, sneaking everything in through twice-a-month collections in the woods. We left a list, and our guy got what we wanted, although he charged a fortune. Nick and I didn’t really take a cut. It was more about the mischief, about doing something that undermined Latham’s system. And so Genevieve, despite having cornered me by the laundry chute last month to order five boxes of Milk Duds, was convinced that we needed to get us some Jesus.

  Nick shuffled to the front of the room, where he melodramatically informed Genevieve that, Zut alors! He had a terrible stomachache.

  Genevieve, who spoke awful French, asked if it hurt.

  “Yes, because it’s a stomachache,” Nick said incredulously, while everyone collapsed into giggles.

  “Shhhh!” Mr. Finnegan warned.

  “Do you eat something?” Genevieve asked.

  “Qu’est-ce que vous avez mangé?” Mr. Finnegan corrected, and Genevieve repeated it in the right tense.

  “Twenty hamburgers I found in the trash,” Nick said, clutching his stomach in fake agony. “Help me, Doctor!”

  And then he very loudly pantomimed throwing up all over the floor.

  “Eewwww!” Genevieve screeched, looking to Mr. Finnegan.

  “Continuez,” Mr. Finnegan instructed.

  “You are pregnant,” Genevieve informed Nick, at which point Mr. Finnegan sighed and told them they could sit down.

  The next few groups weren’t nearly as bad. Marina and Charlie got a lot of laughs after Charlie did a flawless impression of Dr. Barons and asked her to rate her pain on a scale from one to ten.

  I suppose I knew what was coming, because I didn’t even blink when Mr. Finnegan called, “Lane and Sadie.”

  “I’ll be the doctor,” I said, because there was no way I was letting Lane diagnose me with God-knows-what in front of everyone.

  Lane shrugged like he didn’t care. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans, and I could see a leather belt peeking out from under the hem of his shirt. Honestly. A belt. At Latham.

  “Où est-ce que vous avez mal, monsieur?” I asked.

  “Alors, j’ai toussé depuis une semaine,” said Lane.

  Ugh, he was being so flowery about it. So show-offy. We could do the whole thing in present tense, but he was conjugating in the passé composé.

  “Et vous avez de la fièvre aussi?” I asked, a plan beginning to form.

  Lane confirmed that yes, he coughed and he had a temperature.

  “Have you coughed up any blood?” I asked, in French.

  Lane paused, staring at me in panic.

  “Et voilà,” I said, pointing at his shirt. “A spot of blood!”

  “No, no, that’s . . . ketchup,” Lane said, trying to deny it. “I think I have the flu.”

  “L’infirmière a déjà fait une radiographie, n’est-ce pas?” I demanded.

  And Lane, looking resigned, had no choice but to agree that yes, the nurse had taken an X-ray.

  I pulled an imaginary X-ray out of my notebook and pretended to hold it up to the light, enjoying myself immensely. The whole classroom was silent, waiting.

  “It’s only a little tuberculosis,” I said, somehow keeping a straight face.

  “Un peu de tuberculosis?” Lane repeated, glaring at me.

  And that was when I did it.

  “Luckily, monsieur,” I said, “this is simple to treat with the excellent drugs we have. You are very lucky that you are in France.”

  That was when Finnegan snapped for us both to sit down. He didn’t look happy. Actually, he looked exhausted at the thought of having to deal with me. Which was fine. Lane knew better than to mess with me, and I’d put on a fun little performance for the class, so whatever Finnegan did to me now would be entirely worth it.

  “Sadie, what was that?” Finnegan asked.

  “I read about how they treat tuberculosis in France with medication that worked on the older strains,” I said.

  “Is that true?” someone asked.

  Finnegan took off his glasses and polished them on the hem of his shirt. You could feel the discomfort radiating off him.

  “No,” he said firmly. “Not for two years.” He paused, considering it, and then allowed, “Well, only in desperate cases, when the patient requests it. But it was deemed an extraordinary means of preserving life.”

  “What does that mean?” Angela asked.

  Finnegan sighed. He wasn’t getting out of this one easily.

  “The treatment for the other strains didn’t work the same on TDR-TB,” he explained. “Doctors couldn’t figure out why, but too many patients who were given the medication died from it. And a lot of those people might have gotten better on their own, or at a sanatorium.”

&
nbsp; Finnegan glared at me, and I stared back at him defiantly. The room was so quiet that you could hear the maple trees outside the window, their leaves rustling in the breeze.

  “But it worked on some people, right?” Angela asked.

  “The odds of dying from the treatment were higher than the odds of being cured by it,” Finnegan said. “And in those cases, where the treatment is worse than the disease, doctors stop offering it.”

  “Like pneumothorax,” said Charlie. “When doctors collapsed people’s lungs.”

  “Sort of,” Finnegan allowed.

  “Doctors collapsed people’s lungs?” Genevieve sounded horrified. “Like, inside their bodies?”

  Finnegan put his glasses back on.

  “This is a French class,” he reminded us.

  “Inside their bodies?” Genevieve echoed, scandalized.

  “Enough talk!” Finnegan said sternly. “Take out your workbooks! Page forty-three, exercises A and B.”

  And then, like he’d been doing more and more lately, he left the room.

  WHEN CLASS WAS over, I watched Lane approach the teacher’s desk.

  “Excuse me,” he said tentatively. “Monsieur Finnegan?”

  “Not now,” Finnegan snapped. He recoiled a bit, the way the teachers did sometimes when we got too close and they weren’t expecting it. I wondered if Lane noticed.

  “Sorry,” Lane apologized. He shuffled out of the room, looking dejected.

  “Dude,” Nick whispered, shoving his French exercise book into his bag. “That TB is curable thing was genius.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Too bad it isn’t true.”

  “Too bad you’re not really pregnant,” I shot back.

  He laughed as he sailed out of there.

  I was the last one left in the room, and Finnegan didn’t even look up from his desk as I slunk out. Whatever. He didn’t have to explain all that stuff about the treatment for multi-drug-resistant TB killing people with the TDR strain instead of curing them. He didn’t have to tell us that it was a last resort only offered in rare cases. He could have just given me a stupid strike and moved on. He could have yelled at me, like a real teacher would have done in a real classroom. Like he used to, in the beginning, when Nick and I did that presentation about the mating habits of ducks. It was his fault for acting like we were actual students, and slowly taking it back.