Extraordinary Means Read Online Free

said, using his Mock Trial voice. “And I, I took the one less traveled.”
    “Ugh, that was awful,” Marina complained. “Besides, that’s not even the quote.”
    “Of course it’s the quote,” Nick said, but he sounded unsure.
    “It’s two roads diverged,” Marina insisted.
    “We’ll Google it,” said Nick. “You’ll see.”
    I laughed, because Nick was always doing that. Messing up and stubbornly defending himself, like he could argue his way out of being wrong.
    “The poem is literally called ‘The Road Not Taken,’” I informed him. “Now, can you put three more leaves on Marina’s skirt, the gold-yellow ones?”
    “Path, road, lane, whatever,” he said, adding the leaves. “Actually, that was the new kid’s name. Lane. The one I helped piss off the nutritionist.”
    My camera almost slid off the rock.
    “Lane Rosen?” I asked.
    “I have no clue.” Nick placed the last leaf with a flourish. “Who introduces themselves with their full name?”
    He had a point, but I wasn’t going to admit it.
    “Maybe I will from now on, just to annoy you,” I said.
    I took a test photo, to check that it wasn’t still blurry, but my lens wasn’t the only thing out of focus. I had to force myself to concentrate, because my head was spinning over the possibility.
    Lane wasn’t a common name. I vaguely remembered some hiccup at the front of the line, but I’d figured it wasjust the nutritionist being a raging bitch, per usual. Not the casual arrival of someone I hadn’t thought of in a long time, and was perfectly happy never to see again.
    “Hello, Sadie?” Marina sounded like she’d been trying to get my attention for a while. “I asked how it looks.”
    “Sorry,” I said, scrolling through the memory card. “Um. Hold your right arm a little higher.”
    I took a couple of shots, then made Nick add in some more leaves, even though Marina complained that they’d never come out of her skirt and that her arm ached from holding it up.
    “Art is pain,” I said, mock-seriously.
    “And so is life,” Charlie put in. “Which makes life the art from which we are all afflicted. Aahhh, that would make such an awesome lyric. . . .”
    I could never tell when Charlie was paying attention. He had the suffering-in-silence thing down to an art, which actually made sense, because he was our group’s resident artist. He’d sit there covering his notebook with song lyrics and sketches, all of them dark and painfully brilliant. And then he’d look up and ask something ridiculous, like whether we thought it was possible that dinosaurs had glowed in the dark.
    “Almost done?” Marina asked.
    “Almost,” I promised. “You look great.”
    She really did. The combination of her dark skin and curly hair and vintage dress covered with leaves was enchantingand almost eerie. Marina did theater back home, designing the costumes. I decided I liked her after I caught her reading a fantasy novel under her desk in Finnegan’s class.
    I’d never had a group of friends like this back in real school. We wouldn’t have existed. Charlie would have been some misunderstood loner. Nick would have been off with his mock-trial cult, pretending they weren’t just a glorified drama club. Marina would have hung around with those backstagey cosplay kids who watch Doctor Who and wear interesting hats. And I would, well . . . I would have hung out with the same three girls I’d met in eighth grade, who always seemed to get into relationships with non-statusy boys while I sat there being this mildly entertaining friend who they kept apologizing to when they went on group dates without me.
    But Latham had reinvented us. Made us more offbeat, more interesting, more noticeable than we would have been anywhere else. I’d expected to hate Latham, but I hadn’t expected to find friends who hated the exact same things about it, mocking the rules and the teachers and Dr. Barons until we were laughing so hard we could barely