Next to me, Genevieve started coughing. She scrambled for a napkin, pressing it over her mouth.
“Sorry,” she said. “The orange juice had pulp.”
“You okay, bunny-wunny?” John asked, rubbing her back.
God, I really had picked a winner of a table. But something about Genevieve’s choking made me realize that, beyond the talking and the eating and the scraping of chairs, the dining hall echoed with coughing. It was like a symphony of sickness.
I glanced over at Sadie’s table again, and sure enough, that’s what they were laughing at. Nick, with his tofu sausage, was conducting the coughing.
THANKFULLY, ALL THE classrooms were in the same building, so I found my way to English without too much trouble. It was in a large, wood-paneled room with huge open windows, like an atrium. There was an old-fashioned chalkboard and twenty desks.
Twenty. I was used to SMART Boards. Lockers. Public school. And something told me that Mr. Holder, a balding crane of a man in a shapeless tweed blazer, had never been near a public school in his life.
“Yes?” he asked as I hesitated in the doorway, wondering if seating was assigned.
“I’m Lane Rosen,” I said. “I’m new?”
“Welcome to the rotation,” he said grimly. “Take the seat next to Mr. Carrow.”
He pointed toward a sullen-looking boy in the first row. I sat, taking out my notebook and pencil. Holder slapped a copy of Great Expectations and a photocopied packet on my desk.
“Read a chapter, answer the questions. Rinse and repeat. When you’re done, I’ll give you an essay topic,” he said, leaving me to it.
I stared down at the paperback on my desk. All around me, students were working. Some of them had different books. I spotted Lord of the Flies, Moby Dick, and The Sun Also Rises. I sighed and opened my packet, skimming the questions so I knew what answers to look for when I started reading, a trick I’d picked up in SAT prep.
When class was over, Holder said, “See you on Wednesday,” and everyone started to pack up. I was about halfway through the questions for chapter two.
“Wait,” I said to the boy next to me. “What’s the homework?”
“Good one.” He snorted, as though I’d said something funny.
In history, we watched a documentary on the black plague and filled in a worksheet during the movie. The teacher didn’t even stay in the room. When she left, I expected the class to erupt into chaos, but everyone continued watching, except for a couple of kids who put their heads down on their desks and went to sleep.
I sat at the same table for lunch, which I hadn’t meant to do, except Genevieve was two places behind me in line, so there really wasn’t an exit tactic. I’d hoped my missing tour guide would have found me by now, but no such luck. I could feel the monotony setting in, and I wished it wouldn’t.
I didn’t want to be at Latham. I didn’t want this routine of having my meals checked and my teachers write me off at first glance. I wanted to be in third-period AP Euro, in Mr. Verma’s classroom with all the old newspapers framed on the walls, where we got pizza the Friday before an exam.
Back at Harbor, being in AP was like belonging to the club that teachers liked best. We were going somewhere in life, the teachers said, handing us extra-credit assignments instead of detention, study guides instead of busywork. I’d just never thought that where I was going was Latham House.
WE TOOK A long break after lunch. As I trudged across the quad, toward the cottages, I saw four students cut out toward the woods. Nick and Sadie’s crowd. They walked quickly, heads down, as though hurrying toward something far more interesting than rest period. And even though they did it in plain sight, no one seemed to care.
The eight cottages were arranged in a half-moon, around a gazebo in desperate need of a paint job. They were more like ski lodges than actual cottages, with dark wood and deep porches and neat rows of windows.
Each cottage had around twenty residents, if I had to guess. The first floor was a lounge area with dilapidated plaid sofas, a long study table, and stacks of board games. There was a separate television room, and a microkitchen, even though we weren’t supposed to cook anything.
The best places in the lounge had already been staked out by early arrivers. I watched as a group of four Asian kids played a loud game of Settlers of Catan on the rug, and two boys with a deck of Magic cards hunched over the coffee table.
My new and hopefully temporary acquaintances from earlier were setting up a game of Chinese checkers, and they cheerfully waved me over.
“We can play teams,” John suggested.
“I should finish unpacking,” I said, edging toward the door.
“Well, later then,” Tim called. Or maybe it was Chris. I didn’t want to stick around long enough to figure it out.
As I made my way back to my room, muffled music and the unmistakable sound effects of video games leaked from behind closed doors. It was reassuring to hear the Smiths and someone’s Pokémon battle, for some small part of my day to be normal.
I reached into my pocket, forgetting for a moment that it was empty. I felt so lost without my cell phone, like I might get the most important email of my life and it would just sit there for hours, unread. Not that I was expecting an email like that, but still.
My room was at the very end of the hall, a corner room. I assumed that was why it was so narrow. Best coffin in the place, I thought, and then instantly hated myself for going there. It wasn’t terrible. I mean, sure, all the furniture was miniaturized. There was a twin extra-long bed, which still didn’t make it any roomier. I had a massive bed at home, and I loved her dearly. She was my queen, and I was her loyal subject. Well, her loyal subject in exile.
At the foot of my minibed was a wardrobe that looked suspiciously like a locker, a vestige of when this place had been an all-boys’ boarding school. I’d tried and failed to squish my still-packed suitcase inside the night before, and had kicked it under the bed in defeat. It stuck out, and I’d already tripped over it. Twice.
I also had a wooden desk and chair, and two huge windows that were stuck open permanently, for fresh air. The best part about my room, though, was the view: an endless stretch of woods and sky, with a distant haze of mountains. If I hadn’t known why we were in the middle of nowhere, it might have been peaceful.
I rummaged through my desk drawers until I found the thick, glossy handbook I’d been given the night before, and climbed into bed to read it. I figured studying the rules was the best thing to do, since I didn’t want to accidentally fail breakfast again.
God, the handbook was tedious. I could feel myself falling asleep as I read about suggested Wellness dress options. I tried to stay awake, but I’d been up for most of the night, and there hadn’t been any coffee at breakfast. . . .
I woke up groggy and disoriented. The handbook was on the floor, pages down, like it was trying to scuttle away. I didn’t blame it. When I checked my wrist, I realized I’d been out for a while.
I stretched and walked over to the window that faced the woods, watching for the four students to return. It was getting late, and I wondered if I’d missed them entirely. We were all supposed to dress out for PE, which was ironically called Wellness, by two thirty. Except I wasn’t cleared for Wellness yet. I was supposed to go to the medical building instead.
I was just about to head over when I saw them emerge from a grove of trees. Sadie was out front, an expensive camera swinging over her shoulder. Nick was there, too, his horn-rimmed glasses glinting in the sun. Bringing up the rear was this punk kid in black skinny jeans and Docs who looked like he was in a band, and a tall black girl who was shaking leaves from the hem of a billowing lace dress like she’d just stepped off the stage in a school play. They strolled back toward the dorms as though they owned the place, and in that moment, they did.
I watched as Sadie stopped to take a picture of the group, solemnly raising her camera and fiddling with the lens. Instead of posing, they stopped where they w
ere, as though frozen, letting her capture the moment forever.
I remembered at least this much about her: she’d taken photos all the time at summer camp, sneaking out to the woods and disappearing for hours. She was all elbows and skinned knees back then, and I was one of the shortest boys in my cabin.
My memories of that summer were hazy and mostly had to do with being terrified of this one asshole cabinmate of mine who threatened to piss on everyone’s beds if we didn’t give him our commissary snacks. We were starting eighth grade in the fall, and almost overnight everyone had gone from pointing out girls with visible bra straps to girls who were definitely gonna blow them after the lower-seniors dance, at this rock in the woods. For their sake, I’d hoped the rock had a sign-up sheet.
I hadn’t exchanged more than a couple of sentences with Sadie. I didn’t say much of anything during that terrible summer, where two guys got kicked out of my cabin for stealing and a disgusting game of soggy cookie had ended so badly that my only real friend went home two weeks early, his parents threatening a lawsuit. But I still remembered Sadie, with purple rubber bands in her braces and these tie-dyed shorts, always alone, and always stooping to photograph a leaf, or a flower.
It had seemed impossible that I’d recognize anyone at Latham, that there could be a familiar face up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, hundreds of miles from home. But the more I considered it, the more it made a terrible kind of sense.
At Latham House, we were asked to believe in unlikely miracles. In second chances. We woke up each morning hoping that the odds had somehow swung in our favor.
But that’s the thing about odds. Roll a die twice, and you expect two different results. Except it doesn’t work that way. You could roll the same side over and over again, the laws of the universe intact and unchanging with each turn. It’s only when you consider the past that the odds change. That things become less and less likely.
Here’s something I know because I’m a nerd: up until the middle of the twentieth century, dice were made out of cellulose nitrate. It’s a material that remains stable for decades but, in a flash, can decompose. The chemical compound breaks down, releasing nitric acid. So every time you roll a die, there’s a small chance that it won’t give you a result at all, that instead it will cleave, crumble, and explode.
CHAPTER TWO
SADIE
WE WERE OUT in the woods behind the cottages when Nick mentioned what had happened in the breakfast line. It was one of those beautifully crisp fall days that was starting to give way to a warmer afternoon, and we’d all taken off our sweaters and tossed them into a pile with our book bags.
Charlie was sitting under a tree, sketching sword ferns. Marina was modeling for me in this great old dress she had. And Nick was sorting the leaves that we’d collected, stacking them by color family.
“Is this one more jaundice yellow or liver-failure yellow?” he asked, holding up a leaf.
“I can’t look,” I said, because I was using a fixed-length lens and had finally managed to get Marina perfectly in frame. “But please tell me you’re not sorting them by pathology.”
“Two pathologies diverged in a yellow wood,” Nick 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 was just 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 enchanting and 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 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 had struck 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.