“Sadie—”

“I mean it, thanks for teaching us how to tell the doctors in Paris that we think we might have a cough. That’ll be useful, when we’re not even allowed to get on an airplane.”

I hadn’t planned to go off on him, but I’d been up half the night listening to Natalie Zhang’s crying through our shared wall. She did that sometimes, but never as badly as last night. I should have asked the nurse for a sleeping pill, but I’d stupidly suffered through it and had been in a terrible mood all morning. Sometimes I got so tired of Latham House that I wanted to scream.

“You know that scientists are working on—” Finnegan began, but I didn’t want to hear it.

“Developing a cure,” I said flatly. “Yeah. So I’ve heard. Twice. And each time we get excited over rumors about some new medication, and then it turns out the doctors faked the data, or the drug doesn’t work. So I’m not exactly getting my hopes up.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Sadie. I want a cure as much as you do, and one day it’ll happen. But until then, we’re all stuck here.”

I couldn’t believe he’d said that. The “we” part.

Nick had this theory that our teachers were all exposure-positive and couldn’t get hired anywhere else, even though there was, like, a 90 percent chance they’d never get sick. I’d always told him that was just a rumor, but something about the way Finnegan talked about being stuck made me think it might be true.

“But you’re not stuck here,” I said, “because at the end of the day, you get to go home, and go to restaurants and movie theaters and airplanes and not have anyone get worried that French homework might kill you.”

He didn’t deny it.

“I’m late for lunch, and the line’s going to suck,” I said. “And for the record, the grading papers thing? Nick started it. Not me.”

“I very much doubt that,” he said, shaking his head. But he let me go.

It was so annoying. Nick never got in trouble. He was too geeky, too eager, too out-of-his-way friendly with the adults. They never understood that he was making fun of them, pushing them to be nice and make conversation when they’d rather back away. No one believed that I wasn’t dragging him feetfirst into our misanthropy, that actually, we egged each other on.

Of course my friends hadn’t waited for me after all. They’d taken advantage of the early dismissal and had gone through the line before it was enormous. Meanwhile, I was stuck at the back of it. I picked up my tray and glanced toward my table with a sigh. Everyone was already there.

But something was different. I looked again, and sure enough, Lane Rosen was sitting at my lunch table. I’d been gone for, like, two minutes, and somehow, in that amount of time, my friends had adopted him.

It was strange, seeing him there, laughing at something Nick was saying, which was no doubt juvenile and only half as funny as he thought. But it wasn’t a bad kind of strange, just different. I hadn’t thought ahead to his finding a group and making friends.

After we’d talked that night in the gazebo, sitting in the dark and splitting a side order of existential crisis, everything had felt different. He wasn’t this grown-up version of a thirteen-year-old nightmare anymore, he was the new kid, with the perfect handwriting and clever remarks and sheepish grin, who never left his room and barely talked to anyone. I’d seen him sitting at Genevieve’s table, looking miserable, and had considered inviting him over, but I hadn’t known what to say, or how my friends would react.

And now they’d gone and casually invited him over for me. Or, I guess, not for me. They’d just gone and become friends with the guy who’d created a diversion in the library and taken my dare in French class, which, to be honest, I was still surprised about. I hadn’t thought he had it in him. And now there he was, sitting at my table.

Oh God, what if they were talking about me? What if he was telling them embarrassing stories about our summer camp days? I fretted over it while I was stuck in the endlessly slow lunch line, behind a couple of sophomores who couldn’t make up their minds whether they wanted potato wedges or sweet potato fries.

And then, finally, I was through. I’d been so impatient that I’d grabbed a normal, boring lunch, and Linda got all smug about it, congratulating me on “making healthy choices.”

When I got to my lunch table, it was like arriving late to a party. Not like I’d ever been to a real one, seeing as how I’d been Lathamized in the spring of my sophomore year, but it felt like everything had started without me.

Charlie had already finished his lunch and was scribbling furiously in his notebook. Marina was leaning back in her chair, nibbling on a fry while she eavesdropped on the clique of overly dramatic girls at the next table. And Nick was busy carving his veggie burger into some sort of art piece while Lane shook his head over it.

“Hi,” I said.

Lane looked up at me with this huge smile, and I wished I’d said something cooler than “Hi,” but too late.

“Sadie.” He said my name like I was exactly the person he wanted to see most. “Sorry if you got in trouble with Finnegan.”

“It’s not a big deal.” I shrugged, playing it off. “Although, Nick, you know your theory on the teachers being exposure-positive?”

Nick was concentrating so hard on carving up his burger with the dull plastic knife that he was like, “Mmmn?”

“Are you even listening?” I grumbled, putting down my tray.

Lane had taken the seat across from mine, which was usually empty. I was used to us being four people, with plenty of room to spread out. The table felt fuller with him there, and more cramped, with just the one empty seat.

“What?” Nick whined.

“Forget it,” I said. “You suck.”

He did, too. I still hadn’t forgiven him for backing out of our collection with Michael on Saturday night. At least he’d distributed his half, but still.

“You say that, but only because you haven’t yet feasted your eyes upon the genius of my latest invention,” Nick bragged.

He held up his tray in triumph. It didn’t look all that impressive to me. Basically, he’d cored his veggie burger.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I call it the nutburger! It’s a portmanteau.”

“It’s portmanterrible,” I said, snorting.

“I told him that,” said Marina. “It’s twenty percent less burger and twenty times more pretentious.”

“Whatever, it’s awesome,” Nick said, taking a bite.

Mustard and ketchup oozed out the middle of his nutburger and plopped onto his plate.

Marina giggled.

“Your prototype needs work,” Lane said.

Because he was sitting across from me, we kept accidentally making eye contact. He’d smile a little and then glance away. It happened, like, five times, and whenever it did, I felt all fluttery. Lane’s eyes flicked up and met mine for a sixth time, and then he grinned into his lunch tray.

I’d remembered his eyes as hazel, but they were actually green ringed with brown. He had those long, thick eyelashes, too, the kind that I couldn’t even get with mascara. There was color in his cheeks, and he looked less exhausted than he had last week. Now that I wasn’t still seething over the summer camp debacle, it was easy to see why the girls in my French class were so interested.

Of course he’d had a girlfriend back home. I bet he was one of those drama club guys the girls all secretly had crushes on. Or maybe class council. I couldn’t place him. There was the flawless French, the preppy clothes, and the neat handwriting, and then there was the easy way he laughed, the witty comments, and that evil substitute teacher impression. It was like he thought he should be one thing but secretly was another.

Ugh, I wasn’t this girl. This blushy girl who couldn’t handle sitting across from a boy. Admittedly, a cute boy. Who was staring at me like he thought I could read Morse eye contact. I took a bite of my burger, hoping that would quelch the flutter.