Extraordinary Means Read Online Free Page B

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 withcoughing, 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 nurseto 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 enoughsleep, but I wasn’t, like, medically exhausted.
    “On a scale of one to ten,” he prompted, waiting for a