Delirium - Lauren Oliver [136]
“Hana—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“Or maybe I won’t miss you.” She heaves herself to her feet, slapping the sand off her shorts. “That’s one of the promises of the cure, right? No pain. Not that kind of pain, anyway.”
“You don’t have to go through with it.” I scramble to my feet. “Come to the Wilds.”
She lets out a hollow laugh. “And leave all this behind?” She gestures around her. I can tell she’s half joking, but only half. In the end, despite all her talk, and the underground parties and forbidden music, Hana doesn’t want to give up this life, this place: the only home we’ve ever known. Of course, she has a life here: family, a future, a good match. I have nothing.
The corners of Hana’s mouth are trembling and she drops her head, kicking at the sand. I want to make her feel better but can’t think of anything to say. There’s a frantic aching in my chest. It seems like as we stand there I’m watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her father’s old glasses, and bang on her desk with a ruler whenever I got an answer wrong, and we always started choking with laughter halfway through; the time she put a fist, hard, in Jillian Dawson’s face because Jillian said my blood was diseased; eating ice cream on the pier and dreaming of being paired and living in identical houses, side by side. All of it is being sucked into nothing, like sand getting swept up by a current.
“You know it’s not about you,” I say. I have to force the words out, past a lump in my throat. “You and Grace are the only people who matter to me here. Nothing else—” I break off. “Everything else is nothing.”
“I know,” she says, but she still won’t look at me.
“They—they took my mother, Hana.” I wasn’t planning to tell her, initially. I didn’t want to talk about it. But the words rush out.
She glances up at me sharply. “What are you talking about?”
I tell her the story of the Crypts then. Amazingly, I keep it together. I just tell her about everything in detail. Ward Six and the escape, the cell, the words. Hana listens in frozen silence. I’ve never seen her so still and serious.
When I’m finished speaking, Hana’s face is white. She looks exactly like she did when we were little and used to stay up at night, trying to freak each other out by telling ghost stories. In a way, I guess my mother’s story is a ghost story. “I’m sorry, Lena,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m so sorry.”
I nod, staring out at the ocean. I wonder whether what we learned about the other parts of the world—the uncured parts—is accurate, whether they’re really as wild and ravaged and savage and full of pain as everyone has always said. I’m pretty sure this, too, is a lie. Easier, in many ways, to imagine a place like Portland—a place with its own walls and barriers and half-truths, a place where love still flickers into existence but imperfectly.
“You see why I have to leave,” I say. It’s not really a question, but she nods.
“Yeah.” Hana gives her shoulders a tiny shake, as though trying to rouse herself from a dream. Then she turns to me. Even though her eyes are sad, she manages a smile. “You, Lena Haloway,” she says, “are a legend.”
“Yeah, right.” I roll my eyes. But I feel better. She has called me by my mother’s name, so I know she understands. “A cautionary tale, maybe.”
“I’m serious.” She brushes her hair out of her face, staring at me intently. “I was wrong, you know. Remember what I said at the beginning of the summer? I thought you were afraid. I thought you were too scared to take any chances.” The sad smile tugs at her lips again. “Turns out you’re braver than I am.”
“Hana—”
“That’s okay.” She waves a hand, cutting me off. “You deserve it. You deserve more.”
I don’t really know what to say to