Delirium - Lauren Oliver [15]
William smiles. “I was caulking the window in the bathroom. Carol, you remember I said there was a draft the other day? Anyway, I was piping in the caulk, but every time I finished, it would just flake away—almost like it was snow—and the wind would come in and I’d have to start all over. On and on and on—for hours, it felt like.”
“How strange,” my aunt says, smiling, coming to the table with a plate of fried eggs. My uncle likes them super runny, and they sit on the plate, their yolks jiggling and quivering like hula-hoop dancers, spotted with oil. My stomach twists.
William says, “No wonder I’m so tired this morning. I was doing housework all night.”
Everyone laughs but me. I choke down another bit of toast, wondering whether I’ll dream once I’ve been cured.
I hope not.
This year is the first year since sixth grade that I don’t have a single class with Hana, so I don’t see her until after school, when we meet up in the locker room to go running, even though cross-country season ended a couple of weeks ago. (When the team went to Regionals it was only the third time I’d ever been out of Portland, and even though we went just forty miles along the gray, bleak municipal highway, I could still hardly swallow, the butterflies in my throat were so frantic.) Still, Hana and I try to run together as much as we can, even during school vacations.
I started running when I was six years old, after my mom committed suicide. The first day I ever ran a whole mile was the day of her funeral. I’d been told to stay upstairs with my cousins while my aunt prepared the house for the memorial service and laid out all the food. Marcia and Rachel were supposed to get me ready, but in the middle of helping me dress they’d started arguing about something and had stopped paying me any attention at all. So I had wandered downstairs, my dress zipped halfway up my back, to ask my aunt for help. Mrs. Eisner, my aunt’s neighbor at the time, was there. As I came into the kitchen she was saying, “It’s horrible, of course. But there was no hope for her anyway. It’s much better this way. It’s better for Lena, too. Who wants a mother like that?”
I wasn’t supposed to have heard. Mrs. Eisner gave a startled little gasp when she saw me, and her mouth shut quickly, like a cork popping back into a bottle. My aunt just stood there, and in that second it was as though the world and the future collapsed down into a single point, and I understood that this—the kitchen, the spotless cream linoleum floors, the glaring lights, and the vivid green mass of Jell-O on the counter—was all that was left now that my mother was gone.
Suddenly I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t stand the sight of my aunt’s kitchen, which I now understood would be my kitchen. I couldn’t stand the Jell-O. My mother hated Jell-O. An itchy feeling began to work its way through my body, as though a thousand mosquitoes were circulating through my blood, biting me from the inside, making me want to scream, jump, squirm.
I ran.
Hana, one foot on a bench, is lacing up her shoes when I come in. My awful secret is that I like to run with Hana partly because it’s the single, sole, solitary shred of a thing that I can do better than she can, but I would never admit that out loud in a million years.
I haven’t even had a chance to put my bag down before she’s leaning forward and grabbing my arm.
“Can you believe it?” She’s fighting a smile, and her eyes are a pinwheel of color—blue, green, gold—flashing like they always do when she’s excited about something. “It was definitely the Invalids. That’s what everybody’s saying, anyway.”
We’re the only people in the locker room—all the sports teams have finished their seasons—but I instinctively whip my head around when she says the