Extraordinary Means

by Robyn Schneider

MY FIRST NIGHT at Latham House, I lay awake in my narrow, gabled room in Cottage 6 wondering how many people had died in it.

I did the flash cards every night, but it was no use, because it wasn’t the multiplication table that was giving me trouble. It was the pressure of being told two things: 1. That I only had a short amount of time, and 2. That I had to get everything right.

It was as though someone had taken an eraser to my life and, instead of getting rid of the mess, had rubbed away all the parts that I’d wanted to keep.

There was a twin extra-long bed, which still didn’t make it any roomier. I had a massive bed at home, and I loved her dearly. She was my queen, and I was her loyal subject. Well, her loyal subject in exile.

But the thing about being a disaster in middle school is that the shame of it never fully goes away.

Most of his catchphrases were motivational insults.

He was familiar and unfamiliar, like a song I’d heard a different version of, and whose lyrics I couldn’t quite remember.

Sometimes I forgot that everyone who arrived here left behind their actual lives, often in a hurry, and frequently unfinished.

“You’re the worst,” Nick told her. “You steal everything clever we say and use it in your fan fiction.” Marina shot him a look. “It’s not stealing, it’s recycling,” she said. “And whatever, you love it.”

Any of us could wake up the next morning with blood splattered across the pillow and a hole in our lungs so painful that having a broken heart on top of it would have been unbearable.

We were all ghosts at Latham House, because we were all haunted by lives that were no longer ours.

Kissing Lane was like the first time you hear a song that you’ll listen to on repeat a hundred times. It was like the first spoonful of ice cream of the whole cup. But mostly, it was the strange and lovely experience of something being even better than I’d imagined.

“Oh, wow,” I said. “Thank you for calling me a slut in New Testament. That’s super nice of you.”

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

I wished that we were brave enough to use the real word, instead of deliberately choosing the wrong one. But we had time to gather our nerves. We had so much time.

“We mourn the future because it’s easier than admitting that we’re miserable in the present.”

It seemed so wrong to me then that there were only ten options, only ten types of pain. Because I’m pretty sure there are hundreds of types of pain in this world, maybe even thousands. And none of these are numbers on the same scale. They all hurt differently, and amounts have nothing to do with it. They all hurt too much, and not enough.