Delirium dt-1

by Lauren Oliver

“Someday you’ll understand,” Carol says. Both she and Rachel are advancing toward me, and then I see that they are holding, stretched between them, coils of nylon cord. “Someday you’ll thank us.”

  I try to thrash out but my body is impossibly heavy and my vision starts to blur. Clouds roll through my mind; the world goes to fuzz. I think, So she was lying about the Advil—and then I think, That hurts, as something sharp digs deep into my wrists, and then I don’t think anything at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  here is the deepest secret nobody knows

  (here is the root of the root

  and the bud of the bud

  and the sky of the sky

  of a tree called life;

  which grows higher

  than the soul can hope

  or mind can hide)

  and this is the wonder

  that’s keeping the stars apart

  i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

  — From “i carry your heart with me (i carry it in),” a poem by e. e. cummings, banned, listed in the Comprehensive Compilation of Dangerous Words and Ideas, www.ccdwi.gov.org

  When I wake up again it’s because someone is repeating my name. As I struggle into consciousness I see wisps of blond hair, like a halo, and for a confused moment think maybe I’ve died. Maybe the scientists were wrong and heaven isn’t just for the cured.

  Then Hana’s features sharpen, and I realize she’s leaning over me. “Are you awake?” she’s saying. “Can you hear me?”

  I groan and she sits back a little, exhaling. “Thank God,” she says. She’s keeping her voice to a whisper and she looks frightened. “You were so still I thought for a minute that you—that they—” She breaks off. “How do you feel?”

  “Shitty,” I croak loudly, and Hana winces and looks over her shoulder. I notice a shadow flitting just outside the bedroom door. Of course. Her visit is being monitored. Either that or someone is on 24/7 guard duty. Probably both.

  My headache is slightly better, at least, although now there’s a searing pain in both of my shoulders. I’m still pretty groggy, and I try to adjust my position before remembering Carol, and Rachel, and the nylon cord, and realizing that both of my arms are stretched above my head and secured to the headboard, like a real honest-to-God prisoner. The anger comes again, waves of it, followed by panic as I remember what Carol said: My procedure has been moved to Sunday morning.

  I swivel my head to one side. Sunlight is streaming in through the thin plastic blinds, which have been drawn down over the windows, lighting up dust motes in the room.

  “What time is it?” I struggle to sit up and yelp as the cords bite farther into my wrists. “What day is it?”

  “Shhh.” Hana presses me back against the bed, holding me there as I squirm underneath her. “It’s Saturday. Three o’clock.”

  “You don’t understand.” Every word grates against my throat. “They’re taking me to the labs tomorrow. They moved my procedure—”

  “I know. I heard.” Hana is staring at me intently, like she’s trying to communicate something important. “I came as soon as I could.”

  Even the brief struggle has left me exhausted. I sink back against the pillows.

  My left arm has gone totally numb from being elevated all night and the numbness seeps through me, turning my insides to ice. Hopeless. The whole thing is hopeless. I’ve lost Alex forever.

  “How did you hear?” I ask Hana.

  “Everyone’s talking about it.” She gets up, goes to her bag, and rummages around before pulling out a water bottle. Then she comes back and kneels by the bed so we’re eye-to-eye. “Drink this,” she says. “It will make you feel better.”

  She has to hold the bottle to my lips like I’m an infant. Kind of embarrassing, but I’m long past caring.

  The water kills some of the fire in my throat. She’s right; it does make me feel slightly better. “Do people know… are they saying…?” I lick my lips and shoot a glance over Hana’s shoulder. The shadow is there; as it shifts, I make out the flicker of a candy-striped apron. I drop my voice to a whisper. “Are they saying who…?”

  Hana says, overly loud, “Don’t be stubborn, Lena. They’ll find out who infected you sooner or later. You might as well just tell us who it was now.” This little speech is for Carol’s benefit, obviously. As she speaks Hana gives me a little wink and a minute shake of her head. So Alex is safe. Maybe there’s hope after all.

  I mouth to Hana, Alex. Then I jut my chin at her, hoping she’ll understand that I want her to go find him, and tell him what happened.

  Her eyes flicker, and the little smile dies from her lips. I can tell she’s about to give me bad news. Still enunciating her words loudly and clearly, she says, “It’s not just stubborn, Lena. It’s selfish. If you tell them, maybe they’ll realize I had nothing to do with it. I don’t like being babysat twenty-four seven.” My heart sinks: Of course they’ve put a tail on Hana. They must suspect her of being involved in some way, or at least of having information.

  Maybe it’s selfish, but at that moment I can’t even feel sorry for her, or for the trouble I’ve caused. I can only feel bitterly disappointed. There’s no way for her to get word to Alex without bringing the whole Portland police force down on his head. And if they find out he’s been masquerading as a cured and helping the resistance… well, I doubt they’d bother with a trial. They’d skip straight to the execution.

  Hana must read the despair on my face. “I’m sorry, Lena,” she says, this time in a whisper. “You know I would help if I could.”

  “Yeah, well, you can’t.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Hana looks terrible, almost as bad as I feel. Her eyes are puffy and her nose is red, like she’s recently been crying, and it’s obvious she really did rush here as soon as she heard. She’s wearing her running shoes, a pleated skirt, and the oversized tank top she usually sleeps in, as though she got dressed in the first items of clothing she pulled off her floor.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, less sharply. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

  “That’s okay.” She moves off the bed and starts pacing, like she always does when she’s thinking. For one second—one tiny fraction of a second—I almost wish I had never met Alex at all. I wish I could rewind back to the very beginning of the summer, when everything was so clear and simple and easy; or rewind even further, to the late fall, when Hana and I did our loops around the Governor and studied for calculus exams on the floor of her room and the days clicked forward toward my procedure like dominoes falling in a line.

  The Governor. Where Alex first saw me; where he left a note for me.

  And then, just like that, I have an idea.

  I struggle to keep my voice casual. “So what happened to Allison Doveney?”

  I say. “She didn’t want to say good-bye?”

  Hana whips around to stare at me. Allison Doveney was always our code, our name for Alex whenever we needed to talk about him on the phone or in emails.

  She draws her eyebrows together. “I haven’t been able to get in touch with her,” she says carefully. The look on her face says I explained this to you already.

  I raise my eyebrows at her, like, Trust me. “It would be nice to see her before the procedure tomorrow.” I hope Carol is listening, and takes this as a sign that I’ve resigned myself to the change in plans. “Things will be different after the cure.”

  Hana shrugs, spreads her arms. What do you want me to do?

  I heave a sigh, and seemingly switch topics. “Do you remember Mr. Raider’s class? In fifth grade? How we used to pass notes back and forth all day?”

  “Yeah,” Hana says warily. She still looks confused. I can tell she’s beginning to worry that the bump on my head has affected my ability to think clearly.

  I sigh again, exaggeratedly, like just reliving all the good times we had together is making me nostalgic. “Do you remember how he caught us and made us sit across the room from each other? So
every time we wanted to say something to each other we would get up and sharpen our pencils, and leave a little note in that empty flower pot in the back of the class.” I force a laugh. “One day I must have sharpened my pencil seventeen times. And he never caught on, not once.”

  A little light goes on in Hana’s eyes, and she grows very still and super alert, the way that deer do when they are listening for predators, right before boltingeven as she laughs and says, “Yeah, I remember. Poor Mr. Raider. So clueless.”

  Despite her offhanded tone, Hana lowers herself onto Grace’s bed, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and staring at me intently. And now I know she knows what I’m really telling her, while I’m rambling about Allison Doveney and Mr. Raider’s class: She needs to get a note to Alex.

  I switch topics again. “And do you remember the first time we ever did a long run? Afterward my legs were like jelly. And the first time we ever ran from West End to the Governor? And I jumped up and slapped his hand like I was giving him a high five.”

  Hana narrows her eyes at me ever so slightly. “We’ve been abusing him for years,” she says carefully, and I know she doesn’t quite get it, not yet.

  I make sure to keep all tension and excitement out of my voice. “You know, someone told me that he used to be carrying something. The Governor, I mean. A torch or a scroll or something. Now he just has that little empty space in his fist.”

  That’s it: I’ve said it. Hana inhales sharply and I know now she understands, but just to make sure I say, “Will you do me a favor? Will you do that run for me today? One last time?”

  “Don’t be melodramatic, Lena. The cure works on your brain, not your legs.

  You’ll still be able to run after tomorrow.” Hana answers flippantly, just the way she should, but she’s smiling now, and nodding at me. Yes. I’ll do it. And I’ll hide the note there. Hope pulses through me, a warm glow, burning off some of the pain.

  “Yeah, but it will be different,” I whine. Carol’s face flashes momentarily at the door, which is open just a crack. She looks satisfied. It must seem to her like I’ve come to terms with having the procedure after all. “Besides, something could go wrong.”

  “It won’t go wrong.” Hana stands up and stares at me for a moment. “I promise,” she says slowly, giving each word weight, “that everything will go perfectly.”

  My heart skips a beat. This time, she was giving me a message, and I know she wasn’t talking about the procedure.

  “I should get out of here,” she says, moving to the door, practically skipping now. I realize that if this works—if Hana does somehow manage to transmit a message to Alex, and if he somehow manages to break me out of my house-turned-prison-cell—this really will be the last time I ever see Hana.

  “Wait,” I call out, when she’s almost at the door.

  “What?” She whips around. Her eyes are shining; she’s excited now, ready to go. For a moment, standing in the fuzzy haze of sunlight still penetrating the blinds, she appears to be glowing, as though lit up by some internal flame. And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It’s the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.

  “What’s wrong?” Hana repeats impatiently, jogging a little in place. I know she’s eager to get going and put the plan into action. I love you, I think, but what I say, gasping a little, is: “Have a good run.”

  “Oh, I will,” she says, and then, just like that, she’s gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  He who leaps for the sky may fall, it’s true.

  But he may also fly.

  — Ancient saying, provenance unknown, listed in the Comprehensive Compilation of Dangerous Words and Ideas, www.ccdwi.gov.org

  I’ve known time to stretch out like rings expanding outward over water; I’ve also known it to rush by with such force it leaves me dizzy. But until today I’ve never known it to do both at the same time. The minutes seem to swell around me, to stifle me with their sluggishness. I watch the light move by centimeters over the ceiling. I fight the pain in my head and my shoulder blades. The numbness radiates from my left arm to my right. A fly circles the room, buzzing up against the blinds over and over, trying to fight its way outside. Eventually it drops from the air, exhausted, hitting the floor with a tiny pinging sound.

  Sorry, buddy. I sympathize.

  At the same time, I’m terrified when I see how many hours have gone by since Hana’s visit. Every hour brings me closer to the procedure, closer to leaving Alex, and even as each minute seems to take an hour, each hour seems to fly by in a minute. I wish I had some way of knowing whether Hana successfully hid a note at the Governor. Even if she did, there’s only the barest hope that Alex will think of looking there for word from me—the skinniest hope, the edge of an edge.

  But still hope.

  I haven’t even thought about the other obstacles that stand in the way of my escape—like the fact that I’m strung up like a salami, or the fact that either Carol or Uncle William or Rachel or Jenny is always stationed just outside the door.

  Call it denial or stubbornness or craziness, but I just have to believe that Alex will come and rescue me—like in one of the fairy tales he told me about on our walk back from the Wilds, where the prince springs a princess from a locked tower, slaying dragons and fighting forests of poisonous thorns just to get to her.

  In the late afternoon Rachel comes in with a bowl of steaming soup. She sits down on my bed wordlessly.

  “More Advil?” I ask her sarcastically, as she offers me a spoonful.

  “You feel better now that you’ve slept, don’t you?” she returns.

  “I’d feel better if I weren’t tied up.”

  “It’s for your own good,” she says, making another gesture to my mouth with the spoon.

  The last thing I want to do is accept food from Rachel, but if Alex does come for me (when; when he comes for me; I have to keep believing), I’ll need to have my strength up. Besides, maybe if Carol and Rachel really believe that I’ve given up on the idea of resisting, they’ll loosen up my restraints or stop standing watch outside the bedroom door, giving me the opportunity to escape.

  So I take a long slurp of soup, force a tight smile, and say, “Not bad.”

  Rachel beams at me. “You can have as much as you want,” she says. “You need to be in good shape for tomorrow.”

  Amen, sister, I think, and drain the whole bowl before asking for seconds.

  More minutes: a slow drag, like a weight pulling me under. But then, suddenly, the light in the bedroom turns the warm color of honey, and then the trembling yellow of fresh cream, and then begins swirling away from the walls altogether, like water going down a drain. I haven’t really expected Alex to show up before night—that would be suicide—but pain throbs deep in my chest anyway. There’s almost no time left.

  Dinner is more soup, topped with soggy chunks of bread. This time it’s Carol who brings the meal to me while Rachel stands outside. Carol unties my hands briefly after I beg her to let me use the bathroom, but she insists on accompanying me to the toilet and standing there while I pee, which is more than humiliating. My legs are unsteady and the pain in my head worsens when I stand.

  There are deep grooves in my wrists—the nylon cord has left its mark—and my arms are like two dead weights, swinging lifelessly from my shoulders. When Carol goes to restrain me again I consider resisting—even though she’s taller than I am, I’m definitely stronger—but think better of it. The house is full of people, my uncle included, and for all I know there are still some regulators hanging out downstairs. They’d have me secured and sedated within minutes, and I can’t afford to be put under again. I have to be awake and alert tonight. If Alex doesn’t come I’ll need to generate a plan of my own.

  One thing is certain: I won’t have the procedure tomorrow. I’d rather die.

  Inste
ad I concentrate on tensing my muscles as hard as I can while Carol ties me up. When I relax again there’s a tiny bit of wiggle room, just a fraction of an inch. Maybe enough to give me the chance to work my way out of my makeshift handcuffs. More good news: As the day has worn on, everyone has gotten a little more lax about guarding the bedroom constantly, just as I’d hoped. Rachel abandons her shift for five minutes to go to the bathroom; Jenny spends most of the time lecturing Grace about the rules to some game she has invented; Carol leaves her post for half an hour when she goes to do the dishes. After dinner, Uncle William takes over. I’m glad of it. He has a little portable radio with him. I hope he’ll nod off the way he usually does after eating.

  And then maybe—just maybe—I’ll be able to bust out of here.

  By nine o’clock all the light in the room has swirled away and I’m left in darkness, shadows draped like fabric over the walls. The moon is large and bright, coming through the blinds and barely outlining everything in a hazy silver glow. Uncle William is still outside, listening to the radio on low, an indecipherable static. Noises float up through the floor—water rushing in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom, voices murmuring downstairs and the scuffling of padded feet—the final coughs and shakes before the house will fall silent for the night, like a person in the middle of death throes. Jenny and Grace still aren’t allowed to sleep in the room with me. I assume they’re all settling down to sleep in the living room.

  Rachel comes in one last time, carrying a glass of water. It’s difficult to tell in the darkness, but it looks suspiciously cloudy, like someone has dissolved something in it.

  “I’m not thirsty,” I say.

  “Just a few sips.”

  “Seriously, Rachel. I’m not thirsty.”

  “Don’t be difficult, Lena.” She sits down on the bed and forces the water to my lips. “You’ve been so good all day.”

  I have no choice but to take a few mouthfuls—tasting, as I do, the acrid sting of medication. Definitely laced with something—more sleeping pills, no doubt. I hold the water in my mouth, refusing to swallow, and as soon as she stands and turns back to the door, I turn my head and let the water run out onto my pillow, into my hair. It’s kind of gross, but better than the alternative. Wetness seeps into my pillow, temporarily cooling the sting of pain in my shoulders.