Delirium

Chapter Eight

During the summers I have to help my uncle at the Stop-N-Save on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, mostly stocking shelves and working behind the deli counter and occasionally helping with filing and accounting in the little office behind the cereal and dry goods aisle. Thankfully, in late June, Andrew Marcus gets cured and reassigned to a permanent position at another grocery store.

On the Fourth of July I head to Hana’s house in the morning. Every year we go to see the fireworks at the Eastern Promenade. A band is always playing and vendors set up their carts, selling fried meat on skewers and corn on the cob and apple pie floating in a puddle of ice cream, served in little paper boats. The Fourth of July—the day of our independence, the day we commemorate the closing of our nation’s border forever—is one of my favorite holidays. I love the music that pipes through the streets, love the way the steam rising thick from the grills makes the streets look cloudy, the people shadowy and unclear. I especially love the temporary extension of curfew: Instead of being home at nine o’clock, all uncureds are allowed to stay out until eleven. In recent years Hana and I have made it a kind of game to stay out until the last possible second, cutting it closer and closer every year. Last year I stepped into the house at 10:58 exactly, heart hammering in my chest, shaking with exhaustion—I’d had to sprint home. But as I lay in bed I couldn’t stop grinning. I felt like I’d gotten away with something.

I type in Hana’s four-digit gate code—she gave it to me in eighth grade, saying it was “a sign of trust” and also that she’d slit me “from the top of the head to the heels” if I shared it with anyone else—and slip in through the front door. I never bother knocking. Her parents are hardly ever home, and Hana never answers the door. I’m pretty much the only person who comes over to see her. It’s weird. Hana was always really popular in school—people looked up to her and wanted to be like her—but even though she was really friendly with everybody, she never really got close close with anyone besides me.

Sometimes I wonder whether she wishes she’d been assigned a different desk partner in Mrs. Jablonski’s second-grade class, which is how we first became friends. Hana’s last name is Tate, and we were linked up by alphabetical order (by then I was already going by my aunt’s last name, Tiddle). I wonder whether she wishes she’d been placed with Rebecca Tralawny, or Katie Scarp, or even Melissa Portofino. Sometimes I feel like she deserves a best friend who is just a little more special. Once Hana told me that she likes me because I’m for real—because I really feel things. But that’s the whole problem: how much I feel things.

“Hello?” I call out, as soon as I’m inside Hana’s house. The front hall is dark and cool as always. Goose bumps prick up over my arms. No matter how many times I come to Hana’s house I’m always shocked by the power of the air-conditioning, which hums somewhere deep inside the walls. For a moment I just stand there, inhaling the clean smells of furniture polish and Windex and fresh-cut flowers. Music is pulsing from Hana’s room upstairs. I try to identify the song but can’t make out any words, just bass throbbing through the floorboards.

At the top of the stairs I pause. Hana’s bedroom door is closed. I definitely don’t recognize the song she’s playing—or blasting, really, so loud I have to remind myself that Hana’s house is shielded on four sides by trees and lawn, and no one will sic the regulators on her. It’s not like any music I’ve ever heard. It’s a shrieky, shrill, fierce kind of music: I can’t even tell whether the singer is male or female. Little fingers of electricity creep up my spine, a feeling I used to have when I was a tiny child, when I would creep into the kitchen and try to sneak an extra cookie from the pantry—the feeling right before the creak and squeak of my mom’s footsteps in the kitchen behind me, when I would whirl around, my hands and face coated in crumbs, guilty.

I shake off the feeling and push open Hana’s door. She’s sitting at her computer, feet propped up on her desk, bobbing her head and tapping out a rhythm on her thighs. As soon as she sees me she swings forward and hits a key on her keyboard. The music cuts off instantly. Strangely, the silence that follows seems just as loud.

She flips her hair over one shoulder and scoots away from the desk. Something flickers over her face, an expression that passes too quickly for me to identify it. “Hi,” she chirrups, a little too cheerfully. “Didn’t hear you come in.”

“I doubt you would have heard me break in.” I go over to her bed and collapse on top of it. Hana has a queen-size bed, with three down pillows. It’s like heaven. “What was that?”

“What was what?” She lifts her knees to her chest and swivels a full circle in her chair. I sit up on my elbows and watch her. Hana only acts this dumb when she’s hiding something.

“The music.” She still stares at me blankly. “The song you were blasting when I came in. The one that almost burst my eardrums.”

“Oh—that.” Hana blows her bangs out of her face. This is another one of her tells. Whenever she’s bluffing in poker she won’t stop fussing with her bangs. “Just some new band I found online.”

“On LAMM?” I press. Hana’s music-obsessed and used to spend hours surfing LAMM, the Library of Authorized Music and Movies, when we were in middle school.

Hana looks away. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, ‘not exactly’?” The intranet, like everything else in the United States, is controlled and monitored for our protection. All the websites, all the content, is written by government agencies, including the List of Authorized Entertainment, which gets updated biannually. Digital books go into the LAB, the Library of Approved Books, movies and music go into LAMM, and for a small fee you can download them to your computer. If you have one, that is. I don’t.

Hana sighs, keeping her eyes averted. Finally she looks at me. “Can you keep a secret?”

Now I sit up all the way, scooting to the edge of the bed. I don’t like the way she’s looking at me. I don’t trust it. “What is this about, Hana?”

“Can you keep a secret?” she repeats.

I think of standing with her in front of the labs on Evaluation Day, the sun beating down on us, the way she forced her mouth close to my ear to whisper about happiness, and unhappiness. I’m suddenly afraid for her, of her. But I nod and say, “Yeah, of course.”

“Okay.” She looks down, fiddles with the hem of her shorts for a second, takes a deep breath. “So last week I met this guy—”

“What?” I nearly fall off the bed.

“Relax.” She holds up a hand. “He’s cured, okay? He works for the city. He’s a censor, actually.”

My heartbeat slows and I settle back against her pillows again. “Okay. So?”

“So,” Hana says, drawing the word out, “he was waiting at the doctor’s with me. When I went to have my PT, you know?” Hana sprained her ankle in the fall and still has to do physical therapy once a week, to keep it strong. “And we started talking.”

She pauses. I don’t really see where the story is going, or how it relates to the music she was playing, so I just wait for her to go on.

Finally she does. “Anyway, I was telling him about boards, and how I really want to go to USM, and he was telling me about his job—what he does, you know, day to day. He codes the online access restrictions, so people can’t just write whatever, or post things themselves, or write up false information or ‘inflammatory opinions’ ”—she puts this in quotes, rolling her eyes—“and other stuff like that. He’s, like, an intranet security guard.”

“Okay,” I say again. I want to tell Hana to get to the point—I know all about online security restrictions, everybody does—but that would just make her clam up.

She sucks in a deep breath. “But he doesn’t just code the security. He checks for lapses—like, break-ins. Hackers, basically, who jump through all the security hoops and manage to post their own stuff. The government calls them floaters—websites that might be up for an hour, or a day, or two days before they’re discovered, websites full of unauthorized stuff—opinions and message boards and video clips and music.”

“And you found one.” A sick feeling has settled in my stomach. Words keep flashing in my brain, like a neon sign going in and out: illegal, interrogation, surveillance. Hana.

She doesn’t seem to notice that I’ve gone totally still. Her face is suddenly animated, as alive and energetic as I’ve ever seen it, and she leans forward on her knees, talking in a rush. “Not just one. Dozens. There are tons of them out there, if you know how to look. If you know where to look. It’s incredible, Lena. All these people—they must be all over the country—sneaking in through the loops and the holes. You should see some of the things people write. About—about the cure. It’s not just the Invalids who don’t believe in it. There are people here, all over the place, who don’t think . . .” I’m staring at her so hard she drops her eyes and switches topics. “And you should hear the music. Incredible, amazing music, like nothing you’ve ever heard, music that almost takes your head off, you know? That makes you want to scream and jump up and down and break stuff and cry. . . .”

Hana’s room is big—almost twice as big as my room at home—but I feel as though the walls are pressing down around me. If the air-conditioning’s still working, I can no longer feel it. The air feels hot and heavy, like a wet breath, and I stand up and move to the window. Hana breaks off, finally. I try to shove open her window, but it won’t budge. I push and strain against the windowsill.

“Lena,” Hana says timidly, after a minute.

“It won’t open.” All I can think is: I need air. The rest of my thoughts are a blur of radio static and fluorescent lights and lab coats and steel tables and surgical knives—an image of Willow Marks getting dragged off to the labs, screaming, her house defaced with marker and paint.

“Lena,” Hana says, louder now. “Come on.”

“It’s stuck. Wood must be warped from the heat. If it would just open.” I heave and the window flies upward, finally. There’s a popping sound, and the latch that’s been keeping it in place snaps off and skitters to the middle of the floor. For a second Hana and I both stand there, staring at it. The air coming in the open window doesn’t make me feel better. It’s even hotter outside.

“Sorry,” I mumble. I can’t look at her. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t know it was locked. The windows at my house don’t lock.”

“Don’t worry about the window. I don’t care about the stupid window.”

“One time Grace got out of her crib when she was little, almost made it onto the roof. Just slid the window right open and started climbing.”

“Lena.” Hana reaches out and grabs my shoulders. I don’t know if I have a fever or what, going hot and cold every five seconds, but her touch makes a chill go through me and I pull away quickly. “You’re mad at me.”

“I’m not mad. I’m worried about you.” But that’s only half-true. I am mad—furious, in fact. All this time I’ve been blindly coasting along, the idiot sidekick, thinking about our last real summer together, stressing about the matches I’ll get and evaluations and boards and normal stuff and she’s been nodding and smiling and saying, “Uh-huh, yeah, me too,” and “I’m sure things will be fine,” and meanwhile, behind my back, she’s been turning into someone I don’t knowsomeone with secrets and weird habits and opinions about things we’re not even supposed to think about. Now I know why I was so startled on Evaluation Day, when she turned back to whisper to me, eyes huge and glowing. It was like she had dropped away for a second—my best friend, my only real friend—and in her place was a stranger.

That’s what’s been happening all this time: Hana has been morphing into a stranger.

I turn back to the window.

A sharp blade of sadness goes through me, deep and quick. I guess it was bound to happen eventually. I’ve always known it would. Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind a dense early morning fog, beyond a cliff. That’s why the cure is so important. That’s why we need it.

“Listen, I’m not going to get arrested just for looking at some websites. Or listening to music, or whatever.”

“You could. People have been arrested for less.” She knows this too. She knows, and doesn’t care.

“Yeah, well, I’m sick of it.” Hana’s voice trembles a little, which throws me. I’ve never heard her sound less than certain.

“We shouldn’t even be talking about this. Someone could be—”

“Someone could be listening?” She cuts me off, finishes my sentence for me. “God, Lena. I’m sick of that, too. Aren’t you? Sick of always checking your back, looking behind you, watching what you say, think, do. I can’t—I can’t breathe, I can’t sleep, I can’t move. I feel like there are walls everywhere. Everywhere I go—bam! There’s a wall. Everything I want—bam! Another wall.”

She rakes a hand through her hair. For once, she doesn’t look pretty and in control. She looks pale and unhappy, and her expression reminds me of something, but I can’t place it right away.

“It’s for our own protection,” I say, wishing I sounded more confident. I’ve never been good in a fight. “Everything will get better once we’re—”

Again, she jumps in. “Once we’re cured?” She laughs, a short barking sound with no humor in it, but at least she doesn’t contradict me directly. “Right. That’s what everybody says.”

All of a sudden it hits me: She reminds me of the animals we saw once on a class trip to the slaughterhouse. All the cows were lined up, packed in their stalls, staring at us mutely as we walked by, with that same look in their eyes, fear and resignation and something else. Desperation. I’m really scared, then, truly terrified for her.

But when she speaks again, she sounds a little bit calmer. “Maybe it will. Get better, I mean, once we’re cured. But until then . . . This is our last chance, Lena. Our last chance to do anything. Our last chance to choose.”

There’s the word from Evaluation Day again—choose—but I nod because I don’t want to set her off again. “So what are you going to do?”

She looks away, biting her lip, and I can tell she’s debating whether or not to trust me. “There’s this party tonight . . .”

“What?” Zoom. The fear floods back in.

She rushes on. “It’s something I found on one of the floaters—it’s a music thing, a few bands playing out by the border in Stroudwater, on one of the farms.”

“You can’t be serious. You’re not—you’re not actually going, right? You’re not even thinking about it.”

“It’s safe, okay? I promise. These websites . . . it’s really amazing, Lena, I swear you’d be into it if you looked. They’re hidden. Links, usually, embedded on normal pages, approved government stuff, but I don’t know, somehow you can tell they don’t feel right, you know? They don’t belong.”

I grasp at a single word. “Safe? How can it be safe? That guy you met—the censor—his whole job is to track down people who are stupid enough to post these things—”

“They’re not stupid, they’re incredibly smart, actually—”

“Not to mention the regulators and patrols and the youth guard and curfew and segregation and just about everything else that makes this one of the worst ideas—”

“Fine.” Hana raises her arms and brings them slapping down against her thighs. The noise is so loud it makes me jump. “Fine. So it’s a bad idea. So it’s risky. You know what? I don’t care.”

For a second there’s silence. We’re glaring at each other, and the air between us feels charged and dangerous, a thin electrical coil, ready to explode.

“What about me?” I say finally, struggling to keep my voice from shaking.

“You’re welcome to come. Ten thirty, Roaring Brook Farms, Stroudwater. Music. Dancing. You know—fun. The stuff we’re supposed to be having, before they cut out half of our brain.”

I ignore the last part of her comment. “I don’t think so, Hana. In case you’ve forgotten, we have other plans for tonight. Have had plans for tonight for, oh, the past fifteen years.”

“Yeah, well, things change.” She turns her back to me, but I feel like she’s reached out and punched me in the stomach.

“Fine.” My throat is squeezing up. This time I know it’s the real deal, and I’m on the verge of crying. I go over to her bed and start gathering up my stuff. Of course my bag has spilled over on its side, and now her comforter is covered with little scraps of paper and gum wrappers and coins and pens. I start stuffing these back into my bag, fighting back the tears. “Go ahead. Do whatever you want tonight. I don’t care.”

Maybe Hana feels bad, because her voice softens a little bit. “Seriously, Lena. You should think about coming. We won’t get in any trouble, I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.” I take a deep breath, wishing my voice would stop quivering. “You don’t know that. You can’t be positive. “

“And you can’t go on being so scared all the time.”

That’s it: That does it. I whirl around, furious, something deep and black and old rising inside of me. “Of course I’m scared. And I’m right to be scared. And if you’re not scared it’s just because you have the perfect little life, and the perfect little family, and for you everything is perfect, perfect, perfect. You don’t see. You don’t know.”

“Perfect? That’s what you think? You think my life is perfect?” Her voice is quiet but full of anger.

I’m tempted to move away from her but force myself to stay put. “Yeah. I do.”

Again she lets out a barking laugh, a quick explosion. “So you think this is it, huh? As good as it gets?” She turns a full circle, arms extended, like she’s embracing the room, the house, everything.

Her question startles me. “What else is there?”

“Everything, Lena.” She shakes her head. “Listen, I’m not going to apologize. I know you have your reasons for being scared. What happened to your mom was terrible—”

“Don’t bring my mom into this.” My body goes tight, electric.

“But you can’t go on blaming her for everything. She died more than ten years ago.”

Anger swallows me, a thick fog. My mind careens wildly like wheels over ice, bumping up against random words: Fear. Blame. Don’t forget. Mom. I love you. And now I see that Hana is a snake—has been waiting a long time to say this to me, has been waiting to squirm her way in, as deep and painful as she can go, and bite.

“Fuck you.” In the end, these are the two words that come.

She holds up both hands. “Listen, Lena, I’m just saying you have to let it go. You’re nothing like her. And you’re not going to end up like her. You don’t have it in you.”

“Fuck you.” She’s trying to be nice, but my mind is closed up and the words come out on their own, cascading over one another, and I wish every single one was a punch so that I could hit her in the face, bambambambam. “You don’t know a single thing about her. And you don’t know me. You don’t know anything.”

“Lena.” She reaches for me.

“Don’t touch me.” I’m stumbling backward, grabbing my bag, bumping against her desk as I move toward the door. My vision is cloudy. I can barely make out the banisters. I’m tripping, half falling down the stairs, finding the front door by touch. I think Hana might be calling to me, but everything is lost to a roaring, rushing in my ears, inside my head. Sunshine, brilliant, brilliant white light—cool biting iron under my fingers, the gate—ocean smells, gasoline. Wailing, growing louder. A punctuated shriek: beep, beep, beep.

My head clears all at once and I jump out of the middle of the street just before I’m squashed by a police car, which barrels past me, horn still blaring, siren whirling, leaving me coughing up dirt and dust. The ache in my throat gets so bad it feels like I’m gagging, and when I finally let the tears come it’s a huge relief, like dropping something heavy after you’ve been carrying it for a long time. Once I start crying I can’t stop, and all the way home I have to keep mashing my palm into my eyes every few seconds, smearing away the tears just so I can see where I’m going. I comfort myself by thinking that in less than two months this will seem like nothing to me. All of it will fall away and I’ll rise up new and free, like a bird winging up into the air.

That’s what Hana doesn’t understand, has never understood. For some of us, it’s about more than the deliria. Some of us, the lucky ones, will get the chance to be reborn: newer, fresher, better. Healed and whole and perfect again, like a misshapen slab of iron that comes out of the fire glowing, glittering, razor sharp.

That is all I want—all I have ever wanted. That is the promise of the cure.