Extraordinary Means Read Online Free Page A

breathe.
    We’d gone out to the woods because I was finishing up this thematic series, which involved photo manipulations of my friends escaping in fantastical ways. This one was eventually going to be an image of a miniaturized Marina flying away, held aloft by a bunch of balloons. Except the balloons would be leaves.
    A couple of weeks ago, I’d done one of Charlie gliding above the cottages on a paper airplane made of sheet music. And before that it had been Nick boating across the lake on an antique pocket watch, with a twig as a paddle. It had taken forever to put them together in Photoshop.
    We walked back to the cottages after I got some pictures I thought I could use. I’d wanted to take more, but we still had to change for Wellness, and if we waited too long and hurried, it would show on our med sensors.
    Because Big Brother was always watching. Except we could trick him sometimes, if we were clever enough, and if we timed the distractions perfectly.
    “So what’s the new kid like?” I asked.
    “Curious much?” Nick teased, not very nicely.
    “I’m just trying to find your replacement,” I said, smiling sweetly.
    “You couldn’t replace me if you tried,” Nick boasted. “I’m impossible to replace. Like a girl’s virginity.”
    “But not a boy’s virginity?” I asked.
    “Oh, shut up,” Nick muttered, embarrassed, as everyone laughed. “Go talk to the new kid yourself, if you care so much.”
    “I don’t,” I said, because being interested wasn’t the same thing as caring. Caring meant eagerness, and how I felt about running into Lane was the opposite of eagerness. It was a combination of embarrassment and dread. Dreadbarrassment.
    “Something feels off today,” Marina announced.
    I could feel it, too, but I hadn’t wanted to say anything.
    And it wasn’t just the appearance of a new kid, folded into the rotation with minimum fanfare only weeks after the last dorm lockout. There was a definite ripple. A weirdness, which usually meant one thing at Latham.
    “Oh God, who died?” Nick deadpanned.
    He was joking, but he wasn’t.
    “One day that’s not going to be funny,” Charlie warned.
    It wasn’t funny now. But we all knew what he meant.
    We were back by the cottages then. Back in time for Wellness, like we’d never been gone. Charlie and Marina were lagging behind, Charlie because he was always stopping to catch his breath, and Marina because she’d been right, it was going to be hell getting those leaves out of her skirt.
    “Hey, wait,” I said, holding up my camera and documenting the moment.
    The light was perfect there, slanting through the trees and toward the cottages, and the day was turning unseasonably warm. I could almost imagine that we were at camp. That we’d pull a prank on the counselors and toast s’mores at the campfire. That we’d go home tanned, our clothes smelling of bug spray. That we’d go home.
    But it was possible not all of us would. Four out of five residents returned home from Latham House. That fact was in the brochure, and it was the part of all this that hadstruck me the most deeply. Deeper than the day I’d fainted in phys ed from the cardio conditioning sprints and wound up in the ER in my embarrassingly unwashed gray jersey gym set. Deeper than how Dr. Crane had gotten my test results and, staring straight through me, had said, “There is an active case of tuberculosis,” a sentence hauntingly absent of a pronoun. Like, I had once been there, but my personhood was now irrelevant, because when anyone looked at me from that moment on, all they would see was a grim and incurable disease.
    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