Lauren Oliver - Delirium (24 page)

"Lena." My aunt calls me sharply back into the kitchen just as I'm headed upstairs to get ready.

"Yes?"

She comes forward a few steps. Something in her expression makes me anxious.

"Are you limping?"she asks. I've been trying as hard as possible to walk normally.

I look away. It's easier to lie when I'm not staring in her eyes. "I don't think so."

"Don't lie to me." Her voice turns cold. "You think I don't know what this is about, but I do." For one terrified second I think she's going to ask me to roll up my pajama pants, or tell me she knows about the party. But then she says, "You've been running again, haven't you? Even though I told you not to."

"Only once," I blurt out, relieved. "I think I may have twisted my ankle."

Carol shakes her head and looks disappointed. "Honestly, Lena. I don't know when you started disobeying me. I thought that you of all people--" She breaks off. "Oh, well. Only five weeks to go, right? Then all of this will be worked out."

"Right." I force myself to smile.

All morning, I oscillate between worrying about Hana and thinking of Alex. I ring up the wrong charge for customers twice and have to call for Jed, my uncle's general manager, to come override it. Then I knock down a whole shelf of frozen pasta dinners, and mislabel a dozen cartons of cottage cheese. Thank God my uncle's not in the store today; he's out doing deliveries, so it's just Jed and me. And Jed hardly looks at me or speaks to me except in grunts, so I'm pretty sure he's not going to notice that I've suddenly turned into a clumsy, incompetent mess.

I know part of the problem, of course. The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing--all classic Phase One signs of deliria. But I don't care. If pneumonia felt this good I'd stand out in the snow in the winter with bare feet and no coat on, or march into the hospital and kiss pneumonia patients.

I've told Alex about my work schedule and we've agreed to meet up at Back Cove directly after my shift, at six o'clock. The minutes crawl toward noon. I swear I've never seen time go more slowly. It's like every second needs encouragement just to click forward into the next. I keep willing the clock to go faster, but it seems to be resisting me deliberately. I see a customer picking her nose in the tiny aisle of (kind of) fresh produce; I look at the clock; look back at the customer; look back at the clock--and the second hand still hasn't moved. I have this terrible fear that time will stop completely, while this woman has her pinkie finger buried up her right nostril, right in front of the tray of wilted lettuce.

At noon I get a fifteen-minute break, and I go outside and sit on the sidewalk and choke down a few bites of a sandwich, even though I'm not hungry. The anticipation of seeing Alex again is messing with my appetite big-time. Another sign of the deliria.

Bring it.

At one o'clock Jed starts restocking the shelves, and I'm still stuck behind the counter. It's wickedly hot, and there's a fly trapped in the store that keeps buzzing around and bumping up against the overhanging shelf above my head, where we keep a few packs of cigarettes and bottles of Mylanta and things like that. The droning of the fly and the tiny fan whirring behind my back and the heat all make me want to sleep. If I could, I would rest my head on the counter and dream, and dream, and dream. I would dream I was back in the shed with Alex. I would dream of the firmness of his chest pressed against mine and the strength of his hands and his voice saying, "Let me show you."

The bell above the door chimes once and I snap out of my reverie.

And there he is, walking through the door with his hands stuffed in the pockets of a pair of raggedy board shorts, and his hair sticking up all crazy around his head like it really is made out of leaves and twigs. Alex.

I nearly topple off my stool.

He shoots me a quick sideways grin and then starts walking the aisles lazily, picking up really random things--like a bag of pork skin cracklings and a can of really gross cauliflower soup--and making exaggerated noises of interest, like "This looks delicious," so it's all I can do to keep from cracking up laughing. He has to squeeze by Jed at one point--the aisles at the store are pretty narrow, and Jed's not exactly a lightweight--and when Jed barely glances at him, a thrill shoots through me. He doesn't know. He doesn't know that I can still taste Alex's lips against mine, can still feel his hand sliding over my shoulders.

For the first time in my life I've done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad. As Alex walks through the store, I think that there's an invisible thread tethering us together, and somehow it makes me feel more powerful than ever before.

Finally Alex comes up to the counter with a pack of gum, a bag of chips, and a root beer.

"Will that be all?" I say, careful to keep my voice steady. But I can feel the color rising to my cheeks. His eyes are amazing today, almost pure gold.

He nods. "That's all."

I ring him up, my hands shaking, desperate to say something more to him but worried that Jed will hear. At that moment another customer comes in, an older man who has the look of a regulator. So I count out Alex's change as slowly and carefully as I can, trying to keep him standing in front of me for as long as possible.

But there are only so many ways you can count change for a five-dollar bill. Eventually I pass him his change. Our hands connect as I place the bills in his palm, and a shock of electricity goes through me. I want to grab him, pull him toward me, kiss him right there.

"Have a great day." My voice sounds high-pitched, strangled. I'm surprised I can even get the words out.

"Oh, I will." He shoots me his amazing, crooked smile as he backs up toward the door. "I'm going to the Cove."

And then he's gone, pivoting out into the street. I try to watch him go, but the sun blinds me as soon as he's out the door and he turns into a winking, blurry shadow, wavering and disappearing.

I can't stand it. I hate thinking of him weaving through the streets, getting farther and farther away. And I have five more hours to get through before I'm supposed to meet him. I'll never make it. Before I can think about what I'm doing, I duck around the counter, peeling off the apron I've been wearing since dealing with a leak in one of the freezer cases.

"Jed, grab the register for a second, okay?" I call.

He blinks at me confusedly. "Where are you going?"

"Customer," I say. "I gave him the wrong change."

"But--," Jed starts to say. I don't stop to hear his objections. I can imagine what they'll be, anyway. But you counted his change for five minutes. Oh well. So Jed will think I'm stupid. I can live with it.

Down the street Alex is paused on the corner, waiting for a city truck to grumble past.

"Hey!" I shout out, and he turns. A woman pushing a stroller on the other side of the street stops, raises her hand to shield her eyes, and follows my progress down the street. I'm going as fast as I can, but the pain in my leg makes it difficult to do more than hobble along. I can feel the woman's gaze pricking up and down my body like a series of needles.

"I gave you the wrong change," I call out again, even though I'm close enough to him now to speak normally. Hopefully it will get the woman off my back. But she keeps watching us.

"You shouldn't have come," I whisper, when I catch up to him. I pretend to press something into his hand. "I told you I'd meet you later."

He moves his hand easily to his pocket, picking up seamlessly on our little charade, and whispers back, "I couldn't wait."

Alex waggles his hand in my face and looks stern, like he's scolding me for being careless. But his voice is soft and sweet. Again I have the sensation that nothing else is real--not the sun, or the buildings, or the woman across the street, still staring at us.

"There's a blue door around the corner, in the alley," I say quietly as I back away, raising my hands like I'm apologizing. "Meet me there in five. Knock four times." Then, more loudly, I say, "Listen, I'm really sorry. Like I said, it was an honest mistake."

Then I turn and limp back to the store. I can't believe what I've just done. I can't believe the risks I'm taking. But I need to see him. I need to kiss him. I need it as much as I've ever needed anything. I have that same pressing feeling in my chest like when I'm at the very end of one of my sprints and I'm just dying, screaming to stop, to catch my breath.

"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.