Delirium: The Complete Collection (16 page)

At night I sleep dreamlessly. In the mornings I wake to fog.

Chapter Twelve

O
ne hot evening toward the end of July I’m walking home from the Stop-N-Save when I hear someone call my name. I turn around and see Hana jogging up the hill toward me.

“So what?” she says as she gets closer, panting a little. “You’re just going to walk by me now?”

The obvious hurt in her voice surprises me. “I didn’t see you,” I say, which is the truth. I’m tired. Today we did inventory at the store, unshelving and reshelving packages of diapers, canned goods, rolls of paper towels, counting and recounting everything. My arms are aching, and whenever I close my eyes I see bar codes. I’m so tired I’m not even embarrassed to be out in public wearing my paint-spotted Stop-N-Save T-shirt, which is about ten sizes too big for me.

Hana looks away, biting her lip. I haven’t spoken to her since that night at the party and I’m searching desperately for something to say, something casual and normal. It suddenly seems incredible to me that this was my best friend, that we could hang out for days and never run out of things to talk about, that I would come home from her house with my throat sore from laughing. It’s like there’s a glass wall between us now, invisible but impenetrable.

I finally come up with, “I got my matches,” at the same time that Hana blurts out, “Why didn’t you call me back?”

Both of us pause, startled, and then again start up at the same time. I say, “You called?” and Hana says, “Did you accept yet?”

“You first,” I say.

Hana actually seems uncomfortable. She looks at the sky, at a small child standing across the street in a baggy swimsuit, at the two men loading buckets of something into a truck down the street—everywhere but at me. “I left you, like, three messages.”

“I never got any messages,” I say quickly, my heart speeding up. For weeks I’ve been pissed that Hana didn’t try to reach out to me after the party—pissed, and hurt. But I told myself it was better this way. I told myself Hana had changed, and she probably wouldn’t have much to say to me anymore.

Hana is looking at me like she’s trying to judge whether I’m telling the truth. “Carol didn’t tell you that I called?”

“No, I swear.” I’m so relieved I laugh. In that second, it hits me just how much I’ve missed Hana. Even when she’s mad at me, she’s the only person who’s ever really looked out for me by choice, not because of family obligation and duty and responsibility and all the other stuff that
The Book of Shhh
says is so important. Everyone else in my life—Carol and all my cousins, the other girls at St. Anne’s, even Rachel—have only spent time with me because they had to. “I had no idea.”

Hana doesn’t laugh, though. She frowns. “No worries. It’s no big deal.”

“Listen, Hana—”

She cuts me off. “Like I said, it’s no big deal.” She crosses her arms and shrugs. I don’t know whether she believes me or not but it’s clear that, after all, things
are
different. This isn’t going to be some big, happy reunion. “So you got matched?”

Her voice is polite now, and slightly formal, so I take on the same tone. “Brian Scharff. I accepted. You?”

She nods. A muscle flexes at the corner of her mouth, almost imperceptible. “Fred Hargrove.”

“Hargrove? Like the mayor?”

“His son.” Hana nods, looks away again.

“Wow. Congratulations.” I can’t help sounding impressed. Hana must have killed at the evaluations. Not that that’s any surprise, really.

“Yeah. Lucky me.” Hana’s voice is completely toneless. I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic. But she
is
lucky, whether she knows it or not.

And there it is: Even though we’re standing in the same patch of sun-drenched pavement, we might as well be a hundred thousand miles apart.

You came from different starts and you’ll come to different ends
: That’s an old saying, something Carol used to repeat a lot. I never really understood how true it was until now.

This must be why Carol didn’t tell me Hana called. Three phone calls is a lot of phone calls to forget, and Carol’s pretty careful about stuff like that. Maybe she was trying to hurry up the inevitable, skip us both to the ending, the part where Hana and I aren’t friends anymore. She knows that after the procedure—once the past and all our shared history has loosened its grip on us, once we don’t feel our memories so much—we won’t have anything in common. Carol was probably trying to protect me, in her own way.

There’s no point in confronting her about it. She won’t try and deny it. She’ll just give me one of her blank looks and rattle off a proverb from
The
Book of Shhh
.
Feelings aren’t forever
.
Time waits for no man, but progress waits for man to enact it
.

“You walking home?” Hana is still looking at me like I’m a stranger.

“Yeah,” I say. I gesture to my T-shirt. “I figured I should probably get inside before I blind someone with this.”

A smile flits over Hana’s face. “I’ll walk with you,” she says, which surprises me.

For a while we walk in silence. We’re not that far from my house, and I’m worried we’ll go the whole way back without speaking at all. I’ve never seen Hana so quiet, and it’s making me nervous.

“Where are you coming from?” I say, just to say something.

Hana starts next to me, as though I’ve woken her from a dream. “East End,” she says. “I’m on a strict tanning schedule.”

She presses her arm next to mine. It’s at least seven shades darker than mine, which is still pale, maybe a little more freckled than it is in the winter. “Not you, huh?” This time she smiles for real.

“Um, no. Haven’t gotten down to the beach very much.” I will away a blush.

Thankfully, Hana doesn’t notice, or if she does she doesn’t say anything. “I know. I was looking for you.”

“You were?” I shoot her a look from the corner of my eye.

She rolls her eyes. I’m glad to see her attitude is coming back online. “I mean, not actively. But I’ve been down there a few times, yeah. Haven’t seen you.”

“I’ve been working a lot,” I say. I don’t add,
to avoid East End, actually.

“You still running?”

“No. Too hot.”

“Yeah, me too. Figured I’d give it a rest until fall.” We walk a few more paces in silence and then Hana squints at me, tilting her head. “So what else?”

Her question catches me off guard. “What do you mean,
what else
?”

“That
is
what I mean. I mean, what else
?
Come on, Lena. It’s the last summer, remember? The last summer of no responsibilities and all that good stuff. So what have you been doing? Where have you been?”

“I—nothing. I haven’t done anything.” This was the whole point—to stay out of trouble, to do as little as possible—but saying the words makes me feel kind of sad. The summer seems to be narrowing rapidly, shrinking down to a fine point before I’ve even had a chance to enjoy it. It’s already almost August. We’ll have another five weeks of this weather before the wind starts cutting in at night and the leaves get trimmed with edges of gold. “What about you?” I say. “Good summer so far?”

“The usual.” Hana shrugs. “I’ve been going to the beach a lot, like I said. Been babysitting for the Farrels some.”

“Really?” I wrinkle my nose. Hana’s always had a thing against children. She’s always saying they’re too sticky and clingy, like Jolly Ranchers that have been left too long in a hot pocket.

She makes a face. “Yeah, unfortunately. My parents decided I needed to ‘practice managing a household,’ or some crap like that. You know they’re actually making me work out a budget? Like figuring out how to spend sixty dollars a week is going to teach me about paying bills, or responsibility or something.”

“Why? It’s not like you’ll even
have
a budget.” I don’t mean to sound bitter but there it is, the difference in our futures cutting between us again.

We go silent after that. Hana looks away, squinting slightly against the sunlight. Maybe I’m just feeling depressed about how quickly the summer is cycling by, but memories start coming thick and fast, like a deck of cards being reshuffled in my head: Hana swinging open the bathroom door that first day in second grade, folding her arms as she blurted out,
Is it because of your mom?
; staying up past midnight one of the few times we were ever allowed to have a sleepover, giggling and imagining amazing and impossible people for our matches some day, like the president of the United States or the stars of our favorite movies; running side by side, legs beating in tandem on the pavement, like the rhythm of a single heartbeat; bodysurfing at the beach and buying triple cones of ice cream on the way home, arguing about whether vanilla or chocolate was better.

Best friends for more than ten years and in the end it all comes down to the edge of a scalpel, to the motion of a laser beam through the brain and a flashing surgical knife. All that history and its importance gets detached, floats away like a severed balloon. In two years—in two
months
—Hana and I will pass each other on the streets with nothing more than a nod—different people, different worlds, two stars revolving silently, separated by thousands of miles of dark space.

Segregation has it all wrong. We should be protected from the people who will leave us in the end, from all the people who will disappear or forget us.

Maybe Hana’s feeling nostalgic too, because she suddenly comes out with, “Remember all our plans for this summer? All the things we said we’d finally do?”

I don’t even skip a beat. “Break into the Spencer Prep pool—”

“—and go swimming in our underwear,” Hana finishes.

I crack a smile. “Hop the fence at Cherryhill Farms—”

“—and eat the maple syrup straight out of the barrels.”

“Run all the way from the Hill to the old airport.”

“Ride our bikes down Suicide Point.”

“Try and find that rope swing Sarah Miller told us about. The one above Fore River.”

“Sneak into the movie theater and see four movies back to back.”

“Finish off the Hobgoblin Sundae at Mae’s.” I’m fully smiling now and Hana is too. I start quoting, “‘A gargantuan sundae for enormous appetites only, featuring thirteen scoops, whipped cream, hot fudge—’”

Hana jumps in, “‘And all the toppings your little monsters can handle!’”

Both of us laugh. We’ve probably read that sign a thousand times. We’ve been debating making a second attack on the Hobgoblin since fourth grade: That’s when we tried the first time. Hana insisted on going there for her birthday and took me along. Both of us spent the rest of the night rolling around on the floor of her bathroom, and we’d only made it through
seven
of the thirteen scoops.

We’ve reached my street. A few kids are playing in the middle of the road. It’s a makeshift game of soccer: They’re kicking a can around and shouting, bodies brown and shiny with sweat. I see Jenny among them. As I’m watching, a girl tries to elbow her out of the way, and Jenny turns around and pushes her to the ground. The younger girl starts to wail. No one comes out of any of the houses, even as the girl’s voice crescendos to a high-pitched scream, like a siren going off. A curtain or a dish towel flutters in a window: Other than that, the street is silent, motionless.

I’m desperate to keep riding the wave of good feeling, to fix things between Hana and me, even if it’s only for a month. “Listen, Hana”—I feel like I’m working the words past an enormous lump in my throat; I’m almost as nervous as I was before the evaluations—“they’re playing
The Defective Detective
in the park tonight. Double feature, Michael Wynn. We could go if you want.”
The Defective Detective
is this film franchise Hana and I used to love when we were little, about a famous detective who’s actually incompetent, and his dog sidekick: The dog always ends up solving the crimes. A lot of actors have played the lead role, but our favorite was Michael Wynn. When we were kids, we used to pray to get matched with him.

“Tonight?” Hana’s smile falters, and my stomach sinks.
Stupid, stupid,
I think.
It doesn’t matter anyway.

“It’s okay if you can’t. No worries. Just an idea,” I say quickly, looking away so she won’t see how disappointed I am.

“No—I mean, I
want
to, but—” Hana sucks in a breath. I hate this, hate how awkward we both are. “I kind of have this party”—she corrects herself quickly—“this
thing
I’m supposed to go to with Angelica Marston.”