And so, on Thursday, I called him.
“Hello?” he said after the third ring, his voice uncertain.
“It’s me,” I said.
“I’m so glad.” I could hear his smile, and I wished he didn’t do that. I wished he could just talk to me without sounding like I was the one person he wanted to talk to more than anyone. Without making me feel so guilty.
I took a deep breath, trying to summon my courage. I didn’t want to do this. I hated myself for doing this. But I had to.
“Lane,” I said softly, “I can’t do this anymore.”
Lane waited, unsure.
“Do what?” he said.
“We can’t be together,” I explained.
It was very, very quiet on his end.
“We can’t, or you don’t want to?” Lane finally asked.
“Both,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry?” I asked, confused.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t accept your breakup. Meet me in the gazebo of sadness and breakups.”
“It’s almost—”
“We have twenty minutes, so you better hurry,” he said, hanging up.
I put on a coat over my pajamas and smoothed my ponytail, and when I got to the gazebo, he was already there, slouched on the stairs.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
I sat down next to him, and we stared out at the woods, and I felt sick over them, like they were full of corpses. I glanced over at Lane, and he looked so beautiful, his cheeks pink in the cold, his hair in need of a trim, the way he sat with his fingers curled, like he was clutching something tiny and secret in his palm.
Latham felt like a shipwreck, and I didn’t know how many places there were in the lifeboats. I wanted both of us to be okay if we turned around and found we had the last seat. So I was shutting us down preemptively, before the pain became too much to bear.
“We can’t be together,” I said, trying not to cry. “We hooked up, and it was great, but it’s like summer camp. These things never work in the real world.”
Lane was quiet a moment, and still.
“I thought I was going to drive to your house with bagels when we got out. And we’d text. And we’d make it work,” he said.
“But it won’t work,” I said angrily. “You’ll go home and want to catch up on your schoolwork so you can graduate on time, and it won’t be worth driving for hours to see me when you’re going away to college in the fall.”
“Of course it will be worth it,” Lane said.
“You’re just saying that because you’re nice.”
“I’m saying that because it’s true,” Lane insisted.
“What, so we can have breakfast? So I can tell you about how fun it is being the oldest person in my classes and the only one who doesn’t know how to drive?” I asked.
“It wouldn’t be like that.”
“It might be. You get your life back, but I don’t.”
“But I don’t want my life back,” Lane said. “I wasn’t even using it. I was just . . . waiting for everything to be different. Except I was the same me when I got to Latham that I’d always been. I didn’t want to change, but I did. And now I want to figure it out as I go. But I know that I want you to be in it.”
He looked so earnest in the moonlight. Like he really believed the world was this place where good things happened to good people, and anything to the contrary was an accident.
I wished I’d never let it get this far. I’d always been fine on my own. And I’d be fine on my own again. Now, if we broke up, it would just be that. A breakup. You don’t mourn a breakup. At least, I didn’t think you did, having never personally experienced one.
“Well, I don’t want you in my life anymore,” I said, feeling myself crumble. I was crying because it wasn’t true, and because it was. And because I’d been right to be skeptical of happy endings and love stories where no one got hurt. Someone always gets hurt. But what no one ever tells you is that you can get hurt more than once.
So I stood up and walked back inside, away from the one boy who made me feel like I wasn’t alone, because he was the one person I couldn’t stand to lose, or disappoint, or watch fall out of love with me when I stepped out of Latham and transformed back into a potato.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LANE
SADIE IGNORED ME the next day. We sat at the same table in the dining hall and everything, but with just the four of us, there was lots of room to space out, so it was me and Nick, and Marina and Sadie, with the empty chairs between us. We’d been a group once, but Sadie’s and my breakup had thoroughly wrecked that. The awkward, thick silence that had settled over our table since Charlie’s death seemed to close up, sealing us inside in permanent misery.
I spent that weekend alone in my room, reading old books from the library. I was on this Vonnegut kick, which seemed to fit my mood. He had this dark, awful sense of humor that was just about perfect, and he wrote about war and death and tragedy in this irreverent way, like misery was inevitable. I’d never properly wallowed before, but I did it then, listening to the most depressing music on my iTunes with my eyes closed, and wearing two-day-old T-shirts and not shaving, even though it gave me this weird, French-looking mustache.
What was the point anymore? Charlie was dead, and Sadie had decided to shut herself off from the world, and Nick was medicating away his sorrows, and Marina sat there writing fan fiction like if she tried hard enough, she could pretend she was at Hogwarts.
So I sat and read Vonnegut, and listened to the Mountain Goats, and slept a lot, and spent too long in the shower. It was Latham House the way Latham was supposed to be, without illicit trips to town, or girls snuck into the dorm, or classroom pranks. And I couldn’t stand it, any of it. The loneliness, or the fear, or the grief.
I wondered what Sadie was doing. I wanted to call her. A couple of times I picked up the phone, but I always put it back down. Cowardice, through and through.
She didn’t come to Wellness anymore, and I didn’t blame her. Really, what was the point? Latham had become exactly what I’d wanted it to be before I’d known better: something to get through before we could go home.
And every time I saw Sadie walking back to the cottages after dinner, or tapping her pen against her notebook and staring out the window in French class, I ached in a way that wasn’t a symptom of being sick. It’s strange how we can lose things that are still right there. How a barrier can go up at any moment, trapping you on the other side, keeping you from what you want. How the things that hurt the most are things we once had.
And I wanted Sadie. I wanted our relationship back, for us to try and stay together. Even if it was a bad idea, and even if she didn’t want a reminder of this place, because I did. I wanted to remember who I’d been when we were together, because I liked the Latham version of me so much better than the Lane I’d been before. I wanted to be the Lane who kissed a girl in a bedsheet toga and stole internet and wore a tie to a pajama movie night. I wanted to be Sadie’s Lane, not the Lane who ran the Carbon Footprint Awareness Club just so I could put “club president” on my college résumé.
And I was scared that I couldn’t be Sadie’s Lane without Sadie, that I wouldn’t be brave enough to put down my books and go on an adventure if she wasn’t beckoning me toward the woods, a smile on her lips promising that everything would be okay.
I STARTED TAKING walks around the grounds at night, thinking about everything. About Sadie, and Charlie, and about what I wanted to leave behind in this world, when the time came. I was tired of being an empty box, of maintaining a checklist instead of a passion, of having skipped so many rites of passage that were lost to me now.
One night, I stayed out a little later than I’d meant to, and it was almost lights-out when I came back inside. As I walked across the deserted common room, someone called my name from the nurse’s station.
I walked over to investigate. Nick was in there, alone, lying on one of t
he cots. He was reading A Storm of Swords in his pajamas and bathrobe.
“Hey, thought that was you,” he said.
“Is everything okay?” I asked, concerned.
“Fine,” Nick said. “I’m almost out of vodka, so I was thinking what to do about that, and then I realized . . . oh man, my chest really hurts.”
He rolled his eyes while he said it.
“So you wanted to come down here and lie on the cot?” I asked, not understanding.
“Codeine, dude. They don’t even question it. I just have to stay here, is all.” He grinned, pleased with himself. “It’s awesome, I’m all floaty.”
“Well, have fun,” I said.
“Hold on,” Nick said, pushing himself up in bed. “You okay?”
“I’ll live,” I muttered. I hadn’t meant it ironically, but Nick snorted.
“Look, I’m sorry about you and Sadie,” he said.
“Really?” It shot out of my mouth before I’d thought about it.
There was an awkward pause.
“No, I’m secretly glad, I want all my friends to be as depressed and lonely as I am,” Nick said sarcastically. He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Sure you don’t want some codeine? It’s great. The room’s spinning like a trampoline.”
“Trampolines don’t spin,” I reminded him.
“Well, they should. And Sadie shouldn’t have done that to you. Shit, why are girls so impossible?”
“I don’t know,” I said, sighing. “Everything was going great with us, and then Sadie preemptively dumped me because she thinks we won’t last.”
“You probably won’t,” Nick said.
“Thanks a lot.”
“Nothing lasts,” he said. “Even this awesome floaty feeling. We all reach for whatever we think is going to dull the pain, and sometimes we don’t even want whatever it is, we just want to not be miserable, you know? So anyway, I’m sorry I was a dick.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“No, shut up, I’m atoning. We have seven more weeks at Latham, and then all this is over. It’s like the end of senior year. It’s the last chance to go for things. Otherwise you always wonder.” He shifted on the bed, coughing a little. “I want us to be cool, so we can all keep in touch. That’s all we’re going to have left, you know? Each other.”
He was right. Latham would close down, and TDR-TB would be curable, and it would be hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t gone through it what it had been like at a sanatorium, and what it was like to have this weird past that was filled with blood tests, instead of standardized ones.
“We’re cool,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Did I already ask if you want some codeine? Because it’s awesome, like a trampoline. . . .”
“Think I’ll pass. But thanks.”
I went up to my room thinking about what Nick had said, even though he was pretty out of it. I didn’t want to wonder about Sadie, I wanted to be with her. But I’d never given her a reason to think I really meant it.
I’d never asked her to be my girlfriend, not officially. And I’d never said that I loved her. I’d taken the coward’s path, telling her that I adored her, and that I was crazy about her, using every other phrase that I could instead of the one that I meant.
And now, even if I did muster the courage to say it, she wouldn’t want to hear it. She might not even believe it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
SADIE
I HADN’T EXPECTED Latham without Lane to hurt as much as it did. I’d made a mistake, and I knew it as I lay in bed each night that week, alone and lonely, with no company except my own horrible thoughts. I had trouble falling asleep, so most nights I’d curl up on my side and stare out the window at the inescapable woods. I tried to see beyond them, past Whitley and the dust-covered avocado stands along PCH, all the way down the coast to Los Angeles, to home.
But I couldn’t. All I could see was Lane’s face in the gazebo, the way he’d crumpled, the way he’d stared at me like I’d torn apart the universe and handed him the shreds.
I hadn’t known it would be like that. I didn’t have experience with boys, or experience with much of anything, except having TB. But Latham House was closing down. It was like Nick had taken to saying, that these were the last days of the empire.
He was wrong, though. The sun had already set on our little empire, which was the only one that really mattered. Our group was splintered, the energy that once made our table the center of the dining hall sucked dry. There was no empire anymore, just the ruins of a once-great civilization. Just the memories of a once-great relationship.
It took me three days to build up the courage to even sneak a glance at Lane again, and to stop pretending that whatever picture was in my fashion magazine wasn’t the most fascinating thing in the world.
And when I glanced at him, I wanted to cry. He looked the same as always, my Lane, with his floppy hair and green-brown eyes, except he wasn’t mine at all. Not anymore.
Marina knocked on my door the Thursday after I broke up with Lane. I was curled up in bed with Adele on repeat, in this little nest of electronics and books and chargers, and she snorted when she saw me.
“I see you’ve made a cave,” she said.
“I’m regressing. Next I’ll sprout gills and slither into the pond,” I said.
Marina shook her head.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “I thought this was what you wanted.”
“I don’t know what I want!” I said. “Except to sit in my mope cave.”
“Well, your mope cave has company.”
Marina shut the door and held up a USB stick.
“I just talked to Nick,” she said. “Have you listened to this?”
“What is it?”
“It’s . . . well, it’s Charlie’s album,” she said.
I sat up.
“Charlie made an album?”
“Before he died,” Marina said. “He finished it. Left it in a box on his bed.”
I hated talking about Charlie. It made me feel like I was back there again, standing over Charlie’s body, looking for his green light.
But this was different. This was new.
“Can we play it?” I asked.
“Nick made you a copy,” she said. “So, here. All yours. I’ve been listening to it on repeat all day.”
She tossed the stick onto my bed. I stared at it.
“Thanks,” I said.
“He was coming to find us, you know,” Marina said. “Charlie. He knew he wasn’t doing well. He was trying to say good-bye. That’s why he was in the woods. Not because we guilted him into attending a toga party.”
I stared at Marina. She smiled sadly.
“Not that it’s worth anything,” she said. “I just thought you should know.”
She shut the door behind her when she left.
I popped the stick into my laptop, and plugged in my headphones, and played it.
I’d heard Charlie’s music before, in snippets. A line, a chord progression, the acoustic version on the ukulele. But this wasn’t a rough draft. It was his finished verse. It was Charlie, back from the dead and sitting right there next to me, confessing everything about how it felt to be young and dying and terrified that there was something you still hadn’t finished, that you wouldn’t have enough time.
When the album ended, I was sobbing. Charlie had barely finished making this. And I’d been so stupid to abandon Lane. We hadn’t finished becoming anything yet, because I’d been so terrified that whatever we were was only temporary.
And I’d been so, so wrong. Being temporary doesn’t make something matter any less, because the point isn’t for how long, the point is that it happened. Like ancient Greece. Like Latham. Like Lane and me.
I tried my best to smooth my ponytail, and I put on the last of my favorite lip gloss, which I’d been saving for a special occasion, and then I bolted down the stairs and knocked on the door of Cottage 6.
It was evening,
not too late, and this kid Tim opened the door, looking puzzled.
“Thanks,” I said, slipping in past him.
“You’re not supposed to be in here,” he said, but I didn’t care.
I ran up to the third floor and down the corridor to Lane’s room.
I knocked, and his voice called, “Come in.”
“Hi,” I said.
His room was a mess. Piles of books, clothes, misery. It was so different from the pristine dorm room I’d made fun of a few weeks earlier. So much more lived in.
He stared at me like I was the last person he’d expected to show up at his door.
“Hi,” he said cautiously.
I closed the door and stood there, staring at him, wondering what he was thinking.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to break up with you.”
“You didn’t?” he asked, like he didn’t quite believe me.
“No. It was the worst mistake I’ve ever made, and I brought tie-dyed shorts to summer camp, so that’s saying something.”
“I remember those shorts,” Lane said, grinning.
And then he wrapped me in a hug. He squeezed me so tightly that I could almost feel the holes in my lungs, the missing parts that TB had pressed out of me, and how being with Lane made me feel like I was whole.
“I remember your braces,” I teased.
“I remember your purple rubber bands.”
“I remember your red sunglasses.”
“I remember staring at you when we swam in the lake, thinking how beautiful you were.”
“You did not!” I said.
“Okay,” Lane said guiltily, “but I should have. And I should have told you a long time ago that I love you.”
I stared up at him in shock, and he grinned down at me, all eyelashes and jawline, making me feel shivery.
“Even after I broke up with you?” I asked.
“Oh, wait, now that you mention it,” he joked.
“Hey,” I said, pretending to be mad. But I threw my arms around him and stood on my toes to kiss him, and right before I did, I said, “And I love you, too.”
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