five
The morning after the raids, I wake up to a message from Lena.
"Hana, you need to call me. I'm working today. You can reach me at the store."
I listen to it twice, and then a third time, trying to judge her tone. Her voice has none of its usual singsong, no teasing lilt. I can't tell whether she's angry or upset or just irritated.
I am dressed and on my way to the Stop-N-Save before realizing I've made the decision to see her. I still feel as though a great block of ice has been lodged inside me, in my very center, making me feel numb and clumsy. Somehow, miraculously, I managed to sleep when I at last made it home, but my dreams were full of screams, and dogs drooling blood.
Stupid: That is what I've been. A child, a fairy-tale chaser. Lena was right all along. I flash to Steve's face--bored, detached, waiting for me to finish my tantrum--to his silken voice, like an unwanted touch: Don't be upset. You're so pretty.
A line from The Book of Shhh comes back to me: There is no love, only disorder.
I've had my eyes closed all this time. Lena was right. Lena will understand--she'll have to, even if she's still angry at me.
I slow my bike as I pedal past Lena's uncle's storefront, where Lena works shifts all through the summer. I don't spot anyone but Jed, though, a huge lump of a man who can barely string a sentence together to ask you whether you'd like to buy a Big Gulp soda for a dollar. Lena always thought he must have been damaged by the cure. Maybe she's right. Or maybe he was just born that way.
I pull around to the narrow alley in back, which is crowded with Dumpsters and smells sickly sweet, like old, rotten trash. A blue door halfway down the alley marks the entrance to the storeroom in the back of the Stop-N-Save. I can't think of how many times I've come here to hang with Lena while she's supposed to be doing inventory, snacking on a stolen bag of chips and listening to a portable radio I snagged from my parents' kitchen. For a moment, I get a fierce ache underneath my ribs, and I wish I could go back--vacuum over this summer and the underground parties and Angelica. There were so many years when I didn't think about amor deliria nervosa at all, or question The Book of Shhh or my parents.
And I was happy.
I prop my bike against a Dumpster and knock softly on the door. Almost immediately, it scrapes inward.
Lena freezes when she sees me. Her mouth falls open a little. I've been thinking about what I wanted to say to her all morning, but now--confronted by her shock--the words shrivel up. She was the one who told me to find her at the store, and now she's acting like she's never seen me before.
What comes out is, "Are you going to let me in, F"jures nor what?"
She starts, as though I've just interrupted a daydream. "Oh, sorry. Yeah, come in." I can tell she's just as nervous as I am. There's a jumpy, hopped-up energy to her movements. When I enter the storeroom, she practically slams the door behind me.
"Hot in here." I'm biding time, trying to shake loose all the words I planned on saying. I was wrong. Forgive me. You were right about everything. They're coiled like wires in the back of my throat, electric-hot, and I can't get them to unwind. Lena says nothing. I pace the room, not wanting to look at her, worried that I'll see the same expression I saw on Steve's face last night--impatience, or worse, detachment. "Remember when I used to come and hang out with you here? I'd bring magazines and that stupid old radio I used to have? And you'd steal--"
"Chips and soda from the cooler," she finishes. "Yeah, I remember."
Silence stretches uncomfortably between us. I continue circling the small space, looking everywhere but at her. All those coiled words are flexing and tightening their metal fingers, shredding at my throat. Unconsciously, I've brought my thumb to my mouth. I feel small sparks of pain as I begin ripping at the cuticles, and it brings back an old comfort.
"Hana?" Lena says softly. "Are you okay?"
That single stupid question breaks me. All the metal fingers relax at once, and the tears they've been holding back come surging up at once. Suddenly I am sobbing and telling her everything: about the raid, and the dogs, and the sounds of skulls cracking underneath the regulators' nightsticks. Thinking about it again makes me feel like I might puke. At a certain point, Lena puts her arms around me and starts murmuring things into my hair. I don't even know what she's saying, and I don't care. Just having her here--solid, real, on my side--makes me feel better than I have in weeks. Slowly I manage to stop crying, swallowing back the hiccups and sobs that are still running through me. I try to tell her that I've missed her, and that I've been stupid and wrong, but my voice is muffled and thick.
Then somebody knocks on the door, very clearly, four times. I pull away from Lena quickly.
"What's that?" I say, dragging my forearm across my eyes, trying to get control of myself. Lena tries to pass it off as though she hasn't heard. Her face has gone white, her eyes wide and terrified. When the knocking starts up again, she doesn't move, just stays frozen where she is.
"I thought nobody comes in this way." I cross my arms, watching Lena narrowly. There's a suspicion needling, pricking at some corner of my mind, but I can't quite focus on it.
"They don't. I mean--sometimes--I mean, the delivery guys--"
As she stammers excuses, the door opens, and he pokes his head in--the boy from the day Lena and I jumped the gate at the lab complex, just after we had our evaluations. His eyes land on me and he, too, freezes.
At first I think there must be a mistake. He must have knocked on the wrong door. Lena will yell at him now, tell him to clear off. But then my mind grinds slowly into gear and I realize that no, he has just called Lena's name. This was obviously planned.
"You're late," Lena says. My heart squeezes up like a shutter, and for just a second the world goes totally dark. I have been wrong about everything and everyone.
"Come inside and shut the door," I say sharply. The room feels much smaller once he is in it. I've gotten used to boys this summer but never here, like this, in a familiar place and in daylight. It is like discovering that someone else has been using your toothbrush; I feel both dirty and disoriented. I feel myself swivel toward Lena. "Lena Ella Haloway Tiddle." I pronounce her full name, very slowly, partly because I need to reassure myself of her existence--Lena, my friend, the worried one, the one who always pleaded for safety first, who now makes secret appointments to meet with boys. "You have some explaining to do."
"Hana, you remember Alex," Lena says weakly, as though that--the fact of my remembering him--explains anything.
"Oh, I remember Alex," I say. "What I don't remember is why Alex is here."
Lena makes a few unconvincing noises of excuse. Her eyes fly to his. A message passes between them. I can feel it, encoded and indecipherable, like a zip of electricity, as though I've just passed too close to one of the border fences. My stomach turns. Lena and I used to be able to speak like that.
"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.