Delirium - Lauren Oliver [140]
She shrugs again. “You were unconscious when they brought you home,” she says matter-of-factly, as though this is a natural fact of life, or something I did—and not because a bunch of regulators clubbed me on the back of the head. That’s the irony of it. She’s looking at me like I’m the crazy one, the dangerous one. Meanwhile, the guy downstairs who nearly fractured my skull and bled my brains all over the pavement is the savior.
I can’t stand to look at her, so I turn toward the wall. “Where’s Grace?”
“Downstairs,” she says. Some of the normal whine returns to her voice. “We had to set up sleeping bags in the living room.”
Of course they’d want to keep Grace away from me: young, impressionable Grace, safely sheltered from her crazed, sick cousin. I do feel sick too, with anxiety and disgust. I think of the fantasy I had earlier, of burning the whole house down. It’s lucky for Aunt Carol I don’t have any matches. Otherwise I just might do it.
“So who was it?” Jenny’s voice drops to a sinuous whisper, like a little snake forking its tongue in my ear. “Who was it who infected you?”
“Jenny.”
I turn my head, surprised to hear Rachel’s voice. She’s standing in the doorway, watching us, her expression completely unreadable.
“Aunt Carol wants you downstairs,” she says to Jenny, and Jenny scurries eagerly for the door, shooting one last look over her shoulder at me, her face a mixture of fear and fascination. I wonder if that’s how I looked all those years ago when Rachel got the deliria and had to be pinned down on the floor by four regulators before she could be dragged to the labs.
Rachel comes over to the bed, still watching me with that same unreadable expression. “How are you feeling?” she asks.
“Fabulous,” I say sarcastically, but she just blinks at me.
“Take these.” She lays out two white pills on the table.
“What are those? Tranquilizers?”
Her eyelids flutter. “Advil.” Irritation has crept into her voice, and I’m glad of it. I don’t like that she’s standing there, composed and detached, evaluating me like I’m a taxidermy specimen.
“So . . . Carol called you?” I’m debating whether to trust her about the Advil, but decide to risk it. My head is killing me, and at this point I’m not sure how much more damaging a tranquilizer would be. It’s not exactly like I can make a break for the door in this condition, anyway. I swallow the two pills with a large gulp of water.
“Yes. I came right away.” She sits on the bed. “I was sleeping, you know.”
“Sorry to inconvenience you. I didn’t exactly ask to get knocked out and dragged here.” I’ve never spoken to Rachel this way, and I can see it surprises her. She rubs her forehead tiredly, and for a second a glimpse of the Rachel I used to know—my older sister Rachel, the one who tortured me with tickles and braided my hair and complained that I always got bigger scoops of ice cream—flickers through.
Then the blankness is back, like a veil. It’s amazing how I’ve always just accepted it, the way that most cureds seem to walk through the world as though wrapped in a thick cloak of sleep. Maybe it’s because I, too, was sleeping. It wasn’t until Alex woke me up that I could see things clearly.
For a while Rachel doesn’t say anything else. I have nothing to say to her, either, so we just sit there. I close my eyes, waiting for the pain to begin ebbing away, trying to sort out words from the tangle of voices downstairs and the sounds of footsteps and muffled exclamations and the television going in the kitchen, but I can’t make out any specific conversations.
Finally Rachel says, “What happened tonight, Lena?”
When I open my eyes, I see she’s staring at me again. “You think I’ll tell you?”
She gives a minute shake of her head. “I’m your sister.”
“As if that means something to you.”
She recoils slightly, just a fraction of an inch. When she speaks again her voice is flinty. “Who was he? Who infected you?”
“That’s the question of the evening, isn’t it?” I roll away from her, facing the wall,