Dr. Barons went on, thanking us all for listening and saying what an honor it was to share this news with us.

“Look at Finnegan,” Sadie whispered.

I glanced over. Finnegan and his wife, who was wearing scrubs, were holding each other so tightly that it looked painful. I’d never seen him so happy.

Actually, I’d never seen Latham House so happy. I hadn’t noticed before quite how grim everyone was, even if it was a cheerful, morbid sort of grimness. We were all trapped on the same hellish island together, except now, in the distance, someone had sighted a lifeboat.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SADIE

I HATED THAT there was a voice in the back of my head telling me it wasn’t true, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t quite believe that protocillin was real. All I could think about were the last two times scientists had claimed they’d created a serum that cured tuberculosis:

The first time, one of the guys on Nick’s hall had found it on the internet and printed out the Daily Mail article, and it was all over Latham by dinner. Except it turned out to be a hoax. A researcher in Korea had faked the data, and the next morning there were at least a dozen articles accusing him of fraud. That was during my sixth month at Latham House. And then, a few months later, rumors had spread about a new super drug. I’d let myself hope, only to be disappointed again when it failed miserably in lab testing.

So I didn’t want to get my hopes up for protocillin. Even if it did seem real this time. Even if it was all over the news that afternoon.

I stood around the common room with everyone else, glued to the television as reports trickled in that a group of scientists at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania had developed a first-line treatment for the previously total-drug-resistant strain of tuberculosis. That this was the first new tuberculosis treatment in fifty years, and the first major medical breakthrough to treat an infectious disease in what doctors were now definitively calling the post-antibiotic era.

Someone would switch the channel, and it would be another report, about how patients and carers at long-term treatment facilities would receive the initial course of protocillin, and how vaccinations were being developed for the general public.

They were the first news reports about tuberculosis that I could remember where the correspondents didn’t look worried as they explained that the contagious illness known as TDR-TB had been declared an epidemic by the CDC two years ago, with more than 280,000 active cases reported across the United States alone this year. If anything, they looked hopeful, like the disaster was behind us, and the scare was almost over.

October was coming to a close, and I’d been at Latham House for seventeen months. I’d missed the end of my sophomore year of high school. I’d celebrated my sixteenth birthday in the hospital playing Uno with my mom and sister while they wore surgical masks, and I’d been at Latham for almost a year and a half, longer than nearly everyone.

I wasn’t sure I knew how to leave Latham. I’d never let myself think for certain that I would, or when that might be. Except now everyone was saying we’d be home by January. I didn’t know how to feel about any of it, or even what I was feeling, just that I was overwhelmed.

No one said much of anything at dinner. We were all too busy thinking about what had just happened, and what it meant to have our futures slip back into place while we were sitting quietly at our desks, trying not to cough all over our notebooks. We were no longer incurably ill, and for so many of us that had been our defining thing for so long.

It had hurt to accept what was wrong with me, but it hurt even more to have hope.

I didn’t want protocillin to be real because I didn’t want to go home to the dreary, unappealing life I’d left behind. I wanted Latham to stay Latham forever, for us to have a million more days of playing cards in the sunshine, and a million more nights of whispering into the phone and knowing that when I woke up, Lane would be waiting on my porch, his hair still wet from the shower.

Latham was my Hogwarts, and protocillin was the cure for my magic. It would turn me into a Muggle again, one who had to worry about standardized testing and mean girls and tardy slips.

After we bused our trays, Lane and I walked down to the lake. He kept glancing at me shyly, like he thought I wouldn’t notice, and then he reached out and grabbed my hand. We walked like that down to the far edge of the lake, with the sunken boat, and lay on our stomachs in the grass.

I looked over at Lane, at the nearly invisible white hairs that dusted his earlobes, at the freckle on the center of his neck, at how absolutely thrilled he seemed, and I told myself to quelch this weird darkness that was twisting inside of me. So when he smiled and nudged me with his sneaker, I nudged back, forcing away my traitorous despair.

We had the perfect view of Latham across the water. The half-moon of the cottages, the collegiate-looking classrooms, the dining hall with its stained-glass windows, the bell tower atop the gymnasium, and just a white corner of the medical building.

“Do you think Latham’s going to shut down?” I asked.

“Probably,” Lane said. “Maybe it’ll become a boarding school again and the students will tell ghost stories about the kids who died here.”

“Maybe it’ll become some terrible artists’ colony with a bunch of nude ladies painting fruit,” I suggested, not entirely kidding.

Lane shook his head, smiling.

“We’ll have to visit and check,” he said. “We can get butterbeer lattes and everything.”

I tried not to let my smile falter as I told him that sounded great.

“You live where again? Calabasas?” he asked, and I nodded. “That’s, like, eighty-five miles. It’s nothing. I’ll be at your doorstep with bagels every Saturday morning.”

“I didn’t know you had a car.”

“Oh, yeah. My dad’s old Honda. It’s covered in a million political bumper stickers, but it has spirit.”

I smiled at the thought of him pulling up outside our condo, and us driving to the beach or one of the canyons to have a breakfast picnic. It sounded so wonderful, like something I’d dreamed up. But part of me was afraid it wouldn’t work. That he’d make the trip once or twice, to be polite, and then he’d make excuses.

“I can’t believe we’re talking about this,” I said. “About being home two months from now, and you showing up at my door.”

“Well, I’d text first,” he said.

The absurdity of having phones again, and being able to text each other, made me giggle.

“It’s so weird to think about any of it. About going back to high school,” I said.

“Well it’s even weirder to think about college,” Lane said. “I hadn’t really wanted to get my hopes up, you know, before.”

He went on to explain how he’d been afraid that Stanford wouldn’t grant him housing, and that Dr. Barons might say he wasn’t fit for full-time study, and that he’d get sick again and have to drop out. But protocillin would change all that. Our lungs would suck, so we’d never be marathon runners or anything, but we’d live.

I wished I was more excited about it, but all I could think was that I was going home for what should have been my last semester of senior year, to a school I’d left as a sophomore. I was pretty sure I’d be held back, since I doubted I could keep up with kids who’d taken precalc and chemistry. I’d be remedial, when I used to make the honor roll. I didn’t have my driver’s license, or even a permit. I hadn’t taken the SATs, or even started to study for them.

None of those things had been a part of my world for so long that it was terrifying to find them rushing back toward me.