Delirium

by Lauren Oliver

Page 32

 

  “Thanks,” I say to Jed, taking my spot behind the counter. He mumbles something unintelligible to me and shuffles back toward his clipboard and pen, which he has left lying on the floor in aisle three: CANDY, SODA, CHIPS.

  The guy I made for a regulator has his nose buried in one of the freezer compartments. I’m not sure whether he’s looking for a frozen dinner or just taking advantage of the free cold air. Either way, as I look at him I have a flashback to last night, to the whistling of the air as the clubs came down like scythes, and I feel a rush of hatred for him—for all of them. I fantasize about pushing the old guy inside the freezers and bolting the door over his head.

  Thinking about the raids makes me anxious about Hana again. News of the raids is in all the papers. Apparently hundreds of people all over Portland were taken last night to be interrogated, or summarily shipped off to the Crypts, though I didn’t hear anyone reference the party in the Highlands specifically.

  I tell myself if Hana hasn’t called me back by this evening, I’ll go to her house. I tell myself that in the meantime there’s no point in worrying, but all the same the guilty feeling keeps worming around in my stomach.

  The old guy is still hovering over the freezer compartments and paying me absolutely no attention.

  Good. I slip on the apron again, and then, after checking to see that Jed isn’t watching, reach up and grab all the bottles of ibuprofen— about a dozen of them—and slide them into the apron pocket.

  Then I sigh loudly. “Jed, I need you to cover for me again. ” He looks up with those watery blue eyes. Blink, blink. “I’m reshelving. ” “Well, we’re totally out of painkillers back here. Didn’t you notice?”

  He stares at me for several long seconds. I keep my hands clasped tightly behind my back. Otherwise I’m sure their trembling would give me away. Finally he shakes his head.

  “I’m going to see if I can dig some up in the supply room.

  Grab the register, okay?” I slip out from behind the counter slowly, so I don’t rattle, keeping my body angled slightly away from him. Hopefully he won’t notice the bulge in my apron. This is one symptom of the deliria no one ever tells you about: Apparently the disease turns you into a world-class liar.

  I slip around a teetering pile of sagging cardboard boxes stacked at the back of the store and shoulder my way into the supply room, shutting the door behind me.

  Unfortunately it doesn’t lock, so I drag a crate of applesauce in front of the door, just in case Jed decides to come investigate when my search for the ibuprofen takes longer than usual.

  A moment later there’s a quiet tap on the door that leads out into the alley. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

  The door feels heavier than usual. It takes all my strength just to yank it open.

  “I said to knock four times—” I’m saying, as the sun cuts into the room, temporarily dazzling me. And then the words dry up in my throat and I nearly choke.

  “Hey,” Hana says. She’s standing in the alley, shifting from foot to foot, looking pale and worried. “I was hoping you’d be here. ”

  For a second I can’t even answer her. I’m overwhelmed with relief—Hana is here, intact, whole, fine—and at the same time anxiety starts drumming through me. I scan the alley quickly: no sign of Alex. Maybe he saw Hana and got scared off.

  “Um. ” Hana wrinkles her forehead. “Are you going to let me in, or what?”

  “Oh, sorry. Yeah, come in. ” She scoots past me, and I shoot one last look up and down the alley before closing the door behind me. I’m happy to see Hana but nervous, too. If Alex shows up while she’s here . . .

  But he won’t, I tell myself. He must have seen her. He must know it’s not safe to come now. Not that I’m worried that Hana would tell on me, but still. After all the lectures I gave her about safety and being reckless, I wouldn’t blame her for wanting to bust me.

  “Hot in here,” Hana says, lifting her shirt away from her back. She’s wearing a white billowy shirt and loose- fitting jeans with a thin gold belt that picks up the color of her hair. But she looks worried, and tired, and thin.

  As she turns a circle, checking out the storeroom, I notice tiny scratches crisscrossing the backs of her arms. “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,” I finish. “Yeah, I remember. ” That was how we got through summers in middle school, when I first started logging time at the store. I used to fabricate reasons to come back here all the time, and Hana would show up at some point in the early afternoon and knock on the door five times, really soft. Five times. I should have known.

  “I got your message this morning,” Hana says, turning toward me. Her eyes look even bigger than usual. Maybe it’s that the rest of her face looks smaller, drawn inward somehow. “I walked by and didn’t see you at the register, so I figured I’d come around this way. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with your uncle. ”

  “He’s not here today. ” I’m beginning to relax. Alex would have been here already if he was planning on coming. “It’s just me and Jed. ”

  I’m not sure if Hana hears me. She’s chewing on her thumbnail—a nervous habit I thought she’d kicked years ago—and staring down at the floor like it’s the most fascinating bit of linoleum she’s ever seen.

  “Hana?” I say. “Are you okay?”

  An enormous shudder goes through her all at once, and her shoulders cave forward and she starts to sob. I’ve seen Hana cry only twice in my life—once when someone pegged her directly in the stomach during dodgeball in second grade, and once last year, after we saw a diseased girl getting wrestled to the street by police in front of the labs, and they accidentally cracked her head so hard against the pavement we heard it all the way up where we were standing, two hundred feet away—and for a moment I’m totally frozen and unsure of what to do. She doesn’t bring her hands to her face or try to wipe her tears or anything. She just stands there, shaking so hard I’m worried she’ll fall over, her hands clenched at her sides.

  I reach out and skim her shoulder with one hand.

  “Shhh, Hana. It’s okay. ”

  She jerks away from me. “It’s not okay. ” She draws a long, shaky breath and starts speaking in a rush: “You were right, Lena. You were right about everything. Last night—it was horrible. There was a raid. . . . The party got broken up. Oh God. There were people screaming, and dogs—Lena, there was blood. They were beating people, just cracking them over the head with their nightsticks like nothing. People were dropping right and left and it was—oh, Lena. It was so awful, so awful. ”

  Hana wraps her arms around her stomach and doubles forward like she’s about to be sick.

  She starts to say something else, but the rest of her words get lost: Huge, shuddering sobs run through her whole body. I step forward and wrap her in a hug. For a second she tenses up—it’s very rare for us to hug, since it has always been discouraged—but then she relaxes and presses her face into my shoulder and lets herself cry. It’s kind of awkward, since she’s so much taller than I am; she has to hunch over. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful.

  “Shhh,” I say. “Shhh. It’s going to be okay. ” But the words seem stupid even as I say them. I think of holding Grace in my arms and rocking her to sleep, saying the same thing, as she screamed silently into my pillow. It’s going to be okay. Words that mean nothing, really, just sounds intoned into vastness and darkness, little scrabbling attempts to latch on to something when we’re falling.

  Hana says something else I don’t understand. Her face is mashed into my shoulder blade and her words are garbled.

  And then the knocking begins. Four soft but deliberate knocks, one right after the other.

  Hana and I step away from each other immediately. She draws an arm across her face, leaving a slick of tears from wrist to elbow.

  “W
hat’s that?” she says. Her voice is trembling.

  “What?” My first thought is to pretend I haven’t heard anything—and pray to God that Alex goes away.

  Knock, knock, knock. Pause. Knock. Again.

  “That. ” Irritation creeps into Hana’s voice. I guess I should be happy she’s not crying anymore. “The knocking. ” She narrows her eyes, staring at me suspiciously. “I thought nobody comes in this way. ”

  “They don’t. I mean—sometimes—I mean, the delivery guys—” I’m stumbling over my words, praying for Alex to go away, grasping for a lie that isn’t coming. So much for my newfound skills.

  Then Alex pokes his head in the door and calls out, “Lena?” He catches sight of Hana first and freezes, half- in and half-out of the alley.

  For a minute nobody speaks. Hana’s mouth literally falls open. She whips around from Alex to me and then back to Alex, so quickly it looks like her head is going to fly off her neck. Alex doesn’t know what to do either. He just stands completely still, like he can go invisible if he doesn’t move.

  And it’s the stupidest thing in the world, but all I can blurt out is, “You’re late. ”

  Hana and Alex both speak at once. “You told him to meet you?” she says, as he says, “I got stopped by patrol. Had to show my cards. ”

  Hana gets businesslike all at once. This is why I admire her: One second she’s sobbing hysterically, the next second she’s completely in control.

  “Come inside,” she says, “and shut the door. ”

  He does. Then he stands there awkwardly, shuffling his feet. His hair is sticking up all weirdly, and in that second he looks so young and cute and nervous I have a crazy urge to walk right up to him, in front of Hana, and kiss him.

  But she quashes that urge really quickly. She turns to me and folds her arms and gives me a look I swear she stole from Mrs. McIntosh, the principal of St. Anne’s.

  “Lena Ella Haloway Tiddle,” she says. “You have some explaining to do. ”

  “Your middle name is Ella?” Alex blurts.

  Hana and I both shoot him a death stare, and he takes a step backward and ducks his head.

  “Um. ” Words still aren’t coming very easily. “Hana, you remember Alex. ”

  She keeps her arms locked in place and narrows her eyes. “Oh, I remember Alex. What I don’t remember is why Alex is here. ”

  “He . . . well, he was going to drop off . . . ” I’m still searching for a convincing explanation but, as usual, my brain picks that second to conveniently die on me. I look at Alex helplessly.

  He gives a minute shrug of his shoulders, and for a moment we just stare at each other. I’m still not used to seeing him, to being around him, and again I have the sensation of falling into his eyes. But this time it’s not dizzying. It’s the opposite—grounding, like he’s whispering to me wordlessly, saying he’s there and he’s with me and we’re fine.