“Yeah, I’m great,” I said. “There’s only four classes. We mostly get to lie in bed and watch movies.”

“Sounds nice.”

“Well, I’d say ‘wish you were here,’” I joked.

“Lane?” she said tentatively. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything.”

Although she hadn’t asked me much of anything recently. It was like she was afraid. Afraid of answers she didn’t want to hear. That was why she acted so cheerful and talked about her classes, the ones I should be in. It had to be.

“You know how I’m applying early action to Stanford?”

Almost everyone in our group was applying early action to Stanford, so I said yeah.

“I was wondering if you’d read over my admissions essay?” she asked.

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything.

“Just to proofread and see if I’m on the right track, or if it’s obvious that I used a thesaurus. That kind of thing. You were always better than me in English, so . . . ,” she trailed off, waiting for me to respond.

I knew I was supposed to agree to it no problem. Because that was what we did, Hannah and me. Back in sophomore year, I’d outscored her on every English quiz, and she’d beaten me on every precalc, so it only made sense to partner up in chem. And, eventually, in other things. I used to joke that we were “lab partners in crime,” because instead of staying nemeses, locked in a battle over class rank, we’d become a team, fighting to succeed at the same thing.

“I just started it, but can I send a draft this weekend?”

“Sure,” I said hollowly. “Email it over whenever.”

My voice caught in my throat, and I started coughing. I pressed the receiver against my jeans, so Hannah wouldn’t hear how bad it was.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Fine,” I said hoarsely.

“Promise?”

“I’m fine,” I insisted.

“You’ll get better soon,” Hannah said, like she had some authority on the matter. “And then everything will go back to normal.”

“Right,” I said. “Normal.”

Except Latham was my normal now. And being healthy, being okay, wouldn’t feel normal at all. It would feel incredible.

CHAPTER SIX

SADIE

FRENCH WAS ONE of the better classes, which wasn’t saying much. We had it with Mr. Finnegan, who was about thirty-five and was married to one of the hall nurses. When I first arrived at Latham, Finnegan had been new, and eager, and actually sort of good. He’d let us read poetry and listen to French music instead of doing insipid exercises about Janine and Paul going to the store to buy a baguette. But Latham had gotten to him. Too many cross-outs and add-ins on his attendance sheet. Too many kids having coughing fits when he called on them, even though half the time they were faking it because they didn’t know the answer. Lately, Finnegan had begun sticking to the textbook, and had mostly put away his playlists.

My friends and I all took French together, which was how we’d met. We were sitting in our usual seats by the windows when Lane walked in. Nick was in the middle of some story about this care package his mother was sending, which promised to be the worst thing in the world. “Underpants and caffeine-free tea bags,” he predicted. “And newspaper clippings about my cousins.”

And then Lane was there, hovering awkwardly in the doorway, wearing another button-up shirt and cardigan, which shouldn’t have annoyed me, but it did. That was our thing, my friends and me. While practically everyone else shuffled around in their sweats, we were the ones who still got dressed in the morning and carried school bags. I knew it was just an illusion of normalcy, but it was our illusion, not Lane’s.

Mr. Finnegan walked in then, carrying a travel mug of coffee. Watching him take a sip was torturous, since all we got was weak, generic tea.

“Un nouvel étudiant!” Mr. Finnegan said, spotting Lane.

I noticed he didn’t comment on the lack of Sheila Valdez, who’d decided to take a sick day that morning and was laid up in the nurse’s station, enjoying trashy magazines and a dose of Vicodin.

Lane asked where he should sit, but Finnegan shook his head and made him stand up in front of everyone and have a conversation in French. First-day torture. I’d hoped Lane would stumble, but he hardly seemed fazed, speaking with Finnegan in rapid, flawless French.

God, I hated him. I hated his pretentious button-up and the way he smirked after he answered each question and Finnegan said “Bien,” because he didn’t need any grammar corrections.

My French never sounded like that. I had to pause and mentally conjugate each verb, starting with je. Of course Angela Hunter and her clique of brainless Frenchie girls all stared at him lovingly. They didn’t know he was a jerk. They just knew that, with 150 of us at Latham, a new boy had miraculously appeared. A cute boy, who hadn’t yet proceeded to pull out a handkerchief and noisily hack up blood.

That day, we were working on a unit that was supposed to help us in case we got sick in France. I knew we were just going through the textbook, but it still annoyed me.

In the exercises, no one ever had anything worse than flu. It was always a cold, a cough, a headache. Something that could be fixed with Tylenol or a bandage. Something you wouldn’t really go to the hospital for, particularly in the middle of a European vacation.

“I’m going to pair you up,” Finnegan said. “You’ll come to the front of the room and put on a short skit about going to the hospital. One of you will be the patient, and one of you will be the doctor. Let’s start with . . . Genevieve and Nikhil. Nikhil, you’re the patient. Genevieve, you’re the doctor.”

Nick gave me a look of pure mourning over that one. Genevieve hated us. She said that Nick and I did the devil’s bidding, since we ran Latham’s black market. We supplied everyone with a liberal sprinkling of booze, junk food, and condoms, sneaking everything in through twice-a-month collections in the woods. We left a list, and our guy got what we wanted, although he charged a fortune. Nick and I didn’t really take a cut. It was more about the mischief, about doing something that undermined Latham’s system. And so Genevieve, despite having cornered me by the laundry chute last month to order five boxes of Milk Duds, was convinced that we needed to get us some Jesus.

Nick shuffled to the front of the room, where he melodramatically informed Genevieve that, Zut alors! He had a terrible stomachache.

Genevieve, who spoke awful French, asked if it hurt.

“Yes, because it’s a stomachache,” Nick said incredulously, while everyone collapsed into giggles.

“Shhhh!” Mr. Finnegan warned.

“Do you eat something?” Genevieve asked.

“Qu’est-ce que vous avez mangé?” Mr. Finnegan corrected, and Genevieve repeated it in the right tense.

“Twenty hamburgers I found in the trash,” Nick said, clutching his stomach in fake agony. “Help me, Doctor!”

And then he very loudly pantomimed throwing up all over the floor.

“Eewwww!” Genevieve screeched, looking to Mr. Finnegan.

“Continuez,” Mr. Finnegan instructed.

“You are pregnant,” Genevieve informed Nick, at which point Mr. Finnegan sighed and told them they could sit down.

The next few groups weren’t nearly as bad. Marina and Charlie got a lot of laughs after Charlie did a flawless impression of Dr. Barons and asked her to rate her pain on a scale from one to ten.

I suppose I knew what was coming, because I didn’t even blink when Mr. Finnegan called, “Lane and Sadie.”

“I’ll be the doctor,” I said, because there was no way I was letting Lane diagnose me with God-knows-what in front of everyone.

Lane shrugged like he didn’t care. His hands were in the pockets of his jeans, and I could see a leather belt peeking out from under the hem of his shirt. Honestly. A belt. At Latham.