Hana: A Delirium Short Story (7 page)

"Tell her," Alex says softly. It is as though I'm not even in the room.

When Lena turns to me, her eyes are pleading. "I didn't mean to" is how she starts. And then, after a second's pause, she spills. She tells me about seeing Alex at the party at Roaring Brook Farms (
the party I invited her to; she wouldn't have been there if it wasn't for me
), and meeting him down by Back Cove just before sunset.

"That's when--that's when he told me the truth. That he was an
Invalid
," she says, keeping her eyes locked on mine and forcing out the word,
Invalid,
in a normal volume. I unconsciously suck in a breath. So it's true; all this time, while the government denied and denied, there have been people living on the fringes of our cities, uncured and uncontrolled.

"I came to find you last night," Lena says more quietly. "When I knew there was going to be a raid . . . I snuck out. I was there when--when the regulators came. I barely made it out. Alex helped me. We hid in a shed until they were gone. . . ."

I close my eyes and reopen them. I remember wiggling into the damp earth, bumping my hip against the window. I remember standing, and seeing the dark forms of bodies lying like shadows in the grass, and the sharp geometry of a small shed, nestled in the trees.

Lena was there. It is almost unimaginable.

"I can't believe that. I can't believe you snuck out during a raid--f K ra0em">

For the first time in a long time, I actually
look
at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point--last summer? last year?--she became beautiful. Her eyes seem to have grown even larger, and her cheekbones have sharpened. Her lips, on the other hand, look softer and fuller.

I've never felt ugly next to Lena, but suddenly I do. I feel tall and ugly and bony, like a straw-colored horse.

Lena starts to say something when there's a loud knock on the door that opens into the store, and Jed calls out, "Lena? Are you in there?"

Instinctively I shove Alex sideways so he stumbles behind the door just as it begins to open from the other side. Fortunately, Jed manages to get it open only a few inches before the door collides with a large crate of applesauce. I wonder, fleetingly, whether Lena placed it there for that purpose.

Behind me, I can
feel
Alex: He is both very alert and very still, like an animal just before bolting. The door muffles the sound of Jed's voice. Lena keeps a smile on her face when she replies to him. I can't believe this is the same Lena who used to hyperventilate when she was asked to read in front of the class.

My stomach starts twisting, knotted up with conflicting admiration and resentment. All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie.

She was learning to love.

I can't stand to be so close to this boy, this Invalid, who is now Lena's secret. My skin is itching.

I pop my head around the door. "Hi, Jed," I say brightly. Lena gives me a grateful look. "I just came by to give Lena something. And we started gossiping."

"We have customers," Jed says dully, keeping his eyes locked on Lena.

"I'll be out in a second," she says. When Jed withdraws again with a grunt, closing the door, Alex lets out a long breath. Jed's interruption has restored tension to the room. I can feel it crawling along my skin, like heat.

Perhaps sensing the tension, Alex kneels down and begins unpacking his backpack. "I brought some things for your leg," he says quietly. He has brought medical supplies. When Lena rolls up one leg of her jeans to her knee, she reveals an ugly wound on the back of her calf. I feel a quick, swinging sense of vertigo and a surge of nausea.

"Damn, Lena," I say, trying to keep my voice light. I don't want to freak her out. "That dog got you good."

"She'll be fine," Alex says dismissively, as though I shouldn't worry about it--as though it's none of my concern. I have the sudden urge to kick him Ke tissively in the back of his head. He is kneeling in front of Lena, dabbing antibacterial cream on her leg. I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to treat and touch and tend to.
She was mine before she was yours
: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.

"Maybe you should go to the hospital." I direct the words to Lena, but Alex jumps in.

"And tell them what? That she got hurt during a raid on an underground party?"

I know he's right, but that doesn't stop me from feeling an irrational swell of resentment. I don't like the way he's acting as though he's the only one who knows what's good for Lena. I don't like the way she's looking at him like she agrees.

"It doesn't hurt that bad." Lena's voice is gentle, mollifying, the voice of a parent soothing a stubborn child. Once again I have the sense that I am seeing her for the first time: She is like a figure behind a scrim, all silhouette and blur, and I barely recognize her. I can't stand to look at her anymore--Lena, a stranger--so I drop to my knees and practically elbow Alex out of the way.

"You're doing it wrong," I say. "Let me."

"Yes, ma'am." He shuffles out of the way without protest, but he stays crouched down, watching me work. I hope he won't notice that my hands are shaking.

Out of nowhere, Lena starts laughing. I'm so surprised, I almost drop the gauze right as I'm in the middle of tying it off. When I look up at Lena, she's laughing so hard, she has to double forward and put a hand over her mouth to try to muffle the sound. Alex watches her soundlessly for a minute--he's probably just as shocked as I am--and then he, too, lets out a snort of laughter. Soon they're both cracking up.

Then I start laughing too. The absurdity of the situation hits me all at once: I came here to apologize, to tell Lena she has been right to be cautious and keep safe, and instead I surprised her with a boy. No, even worse--an Invalid. After all this time and despite all her warnings, Lena is the one who has caught the
deliria
; Lena is the one with the biggest secrets--shy Lena, who has never even liked to stand up in front of the class, has been sneaking around and breaking every rule we have been taught. The laughter comes in spasms. I laugh until my stomach aches and tears are streaming down my cheeks. I laugh until I can't even tell if I'm laughing or whether I've started crying again.

What will I remember about the summer when it is over?

Twin feelings of pleasure and pain: oppressive heat, the frigid bite of the ocean, so cold it lodges in your ribs and takes your breath away; eating ice cream so fast a headache rises from the teeth to the eyeballs; endless, boring evenings with the Hargroves, stuffing myself with food better than any I have ever eaten in my life; and sitting with Lena and Alex at 37 Brooks in the Highlands, watching a beautiful sunset bleed out into the sky, knowing that we are one day closer to our cures.

Lena and Alex.

I have Lena back again, but she is changed, and it seems that every day she grows a little more different, a little more distant, as though I am watching her walk down a darkening hallway. Even when we are alone--which is rare now; Alex is almost always with us--there is a vagueness to her, as though she is floating through her life in the middle of a daydream. And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.

I am happy for her. I am.

And sometimes, just before going to sleep, when I am at my most vulnerable, I am jealous.

What else will I remember, if I remember anything at all?

The first time Fred Hargrove kisses my cheek, his lips are dry on my skin.

Racing with Lena to the buoys at Back Cove; the way she smiled when she confessed she'd done the same thing with Alex; and discovering when we got back to the beach that my soda had turned warm, syrupy, undrinkable.

Seeing Angelica, post-cure, helping her mother clip roses in their front yard; the way she smiled and waved cheerfully, her eyes unfocused, as though they were fixated on some imaginary spot above my head.

Not seeing Steve Hilt at all.

And rumors, persistent rumors: of Invalids, of resistance, of the growth of the disease, spreading its blackness among us. Every day, streets papered with more and more flyers.
Reward, reward, reward.

Reward for information.

If you see something, say something.

A paper town, a paper world: paper rustling in the wind, whispering
to me, hissing out a message of poison and jealousy.

If you know something, do something.

I'm sorry, Lena.

Lena's thrilling story continues in

pandemonium

now

Alex and I are lying together on a blanket in the backyard of 37 Brooks. The trees look larger and darker than usual. The leaves are almost black, knitted so tightly together they blot out the sky.

"It probably wasn't the best day for a picnic," Alex says, and just then I realize that yes, of course, we haven't eaten any of the food we brought. There's a basket at the foot of the blanket, filled with half-rotten fruit, swarmed by tiny black ants.

"Why not?" I say. We are lying on our backs, staring at the web of leaves above us, thick as a wall.

"Because it's snowing." Alex laughs. And again I realize he's right: It is snowing, thick flake Netlign="cents the color of ash swirling all around us. It's freezing cold, too. My breath comes in clouds, and I press against him, trying to stay warm.

"Give me your arm," I say, but Alex doesn't respond. I try to move into the space between his arm and his chest but his body is rigid, unyielding. "Alex," I say. "Come on, I'm cold."

"I'm cold," he parrots, from lips that barely move. They are blue, and cracked. He is staring at the leaves without blinking.

"Look at me," I say, but he doesn't turn his head, doesn't blink, doesn't move at all. A hysterical feeling is building inside me, a shrieking voice saying wrong, wrong, wrong, and I sit up and place my hand on Alex's chest, as cold as ice. "Alex," I say, and then, a short scream: "Alex!"

"Lena Morgan Jones!"

I snap into awareness, to a muted chorus of giggles.

Mrs. Fierstein, the twelfth-grade science teacher at Quincy Edwards High School for Girls in Brooklyn, Section 5, District 17, is glaring at me. This is the third time I've fallen asleep in her class this week.

"Since you seem to find the Creation of the Natural Order so exhausting," she says, "might I suggest a trip to the principal's office to wake you up?"

"No!" I burst out, louder than I intended to, provoking a new round of giggles from the other girls in my class. I've been enrolled at Edwards since just after winter break--only a little more than two months--and already I've been labeled the Number-One Weirdo. People avoid me like I have a disease--like I have the disease.

If only they knew.

"This is your final warning, Miss Jones," Mrs. Fierstein says. "Do you understand?"

"It won't happen again," I say, trying to look obedient and contrite. I'm pushing aside the memory of my nightmare, pushing aside thoughts of Alex, pushing aside thoughts of Hana and my old school, push, push, push, like Raven taught me to do. The old life is dead.

Mrs. Fierstein gives me a final stare--meant to intimidate me, I guess--and turns back to the board, returning to her lecture on the divine energy of electrons.

The old Lena would have been terrified of a teacher like Mrs. Fierstein. She's old, and mean, and looks like a cross between a frog and a pit bull. She's one of those people who makes the cure seem redundant--it's impossible to imagine that she would ever be capable of loving, even without the procedure.

But the old Lena is dead too.

I buried her.

I left her beyond a fence, behind a wall of smoke and flame.

then

Some Vet8212;likeone is always sick in the Wilds. As soon as I am strong enough to move out of the sickroom and onto a mattress on the floor, Squirrel has to move in; and after Squirrel's turn, it is Grandpa's. At night, the homestead echoes with the sounds of coughing, heaving, feverish chatter: noises of disease, which run through the walls and fill us all with dread. The problem is the space and the closeness. We live on top of one another, breathe and sneeze on one another, share everything. And nothing and no one is ever really clean.

Hunger gnaws at us, makes tempers run short. After my first exploration of the homestead, I retreated underground, like an animal scrabbling back into the safety of its lair. One day passes, then two. The supplies have yet to come. Each morning different people go out to check for messages; I gather that they have found some way to communicate with the sympathizers and resisters on the other side. That is all there is for me to do: listen, watch, stay quiet.

In the afternoons I sleep, and when I can't sleep, I close my eyes and imagine being back in the abandoned house at 37 Brooks with Alex lying next to me. I try to feel my way through the curtain; I imagine if I can somehow pull apart the days that have passed since the escape, can mend the tear in time, I can have him back.

But whenever I open my eyes I am still here, on a mattress on the floor, and still hungry.

After another four days, everyone is moving slowly, as though we're all underwater. The pots are impossible for me to lift. When I try to stand too quickly I get dizzy. I have to spend more time in bed, and when I'm not in bed I think that everyone is glaring at me, can feel the Invalids' resentment, hard-edged, like a wall. Maybe I'm just imagining it, but this is, after all, my fault.

The catch, too, has been poor. Roach traps a few rabbits and there is general excitement; but the meat is tough and full of gristle, and when everything is dished up there is barely enough to go around.