“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.

In the old days, they used to lay us out on the porch in rows. We’d sleep under the stars in our patient beds, instructed to breathe deeply and to think only of getting better. But that was before first- and second-line drug treatments. Before scientists developed a cure and the whole thing began to sound ridiculous, as though bored ladies had imagined it in their drawing rooms, gasping in their fashionable corsets. Before the disease rose from its ancient grave like some sort of zombie, immune to the drugs that doctors had once fought it with, as it shambled toward our unsuspecting towns, determined to catch its prey young.

Before it caught me.

I’d been at Latham House for more than a year, and time ran slower here. Boredom seeped in, and instead of seeming like there weren’t enough hours in a day, it felt like there were far too many.

This was my life now: a dining hall that echoed with coughing, and teachers who kept the windows open and made any excuse to leave the room. It was a life of X-rays and nurse checks, of feeling feverish before bed and having an ache in your chest after taking the stairs. Some days were worse, but really, all of them were the same, because every day at Latham was a sick day.

I barely remembered what it was like to have homeroom and Twitter and hours of freedom after school let out, while my sister was still at gymnastics, and before my mom got home from work. And Latham wasn’t just a lack of freedom, but a lack of privacy. The med sensors we wore around our wrists at all times saw to that, monitoring our temperatures and heart rates and sleep cycles, and reporting everything back to a remote computer system, as much for our own benefit as for medical research.

Dr. Crane had been right. Where I once was, there was now an active case of TB. Everything of who I was and who I wanted to be had been evicted to make room for the disease.

CHAPTER THREE

LANE