Delirium - Lauren Oliver [40]
For the first time, really, I wonder what she must have been feeling, thinking, the night she walked out to the cliffs and kept walking, feet pedaling the air. I wonder whether she was scared. I wonder whether she thought of me or Rachel. I wonder whether she was sorry for leaving us behind.
I start thinking about my father, too. I don’t remember him at all, though I have some dim, ancient impression of two warm, rough hands and a large looming face floating above mine, but I think that’s just because my mother kept a framed portrait in her bedroom of my father and me. I was only a few months old and he was holding me, smiling, looking at the camera. But there’s no way I’m remembering for real real. I wasn’t even a year old when he died. Cancer.
The heat is horrible, thick, clotting on the walls. Jenny is rolled over on her back, arms and legs flung open on top of her comforter, breathing silently with her mouth gaping open. Even Grace is fast asleep, murmuring soundlessly into her pillow. The whole room smells like a wet exhalation, skin and tongues and warm milk.
I ease out of bed, already dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt. I didn’t even bother to change into my pajamas. I knew I would never be able to sleep tonight. And earlier in the evening, I’d come to a decision. I was sitting at the dinner table with Carol and Uncle William and Jenny and Grace, while everyone chewed and swallowed in silence, staring blankly at one another, feeling as though the air was weighing down on me, constricting my breath, like two fists squeezing tighter and tighter around a water balloon, when I realized something.
Hana said I didn’t have it in me, but she was wrong.
My heart is beating so loudly I can hear it, and I’m positive that everyone else will too—that it will make my aunt sit bolt upright in her bed, ready to catch me and accuse me of trying to sneak out. Which is, of course, exactly what I am trying to do. I didn’t even know a heart could beat so loudly, and it reminds me of an Edgar Allan Poe story we had to read in one of our social studies classes, about this guy who kills this other guy and then gives himself up to the police because he’s convinced he can hear the dead guy’s heart beating up from beneath his floorboards. It’s supposed to be a story about guilt and the dangers of civil disobedience, but when I first read it I thought it seemed kind of lame and melodramatic. Now I get it, though. Poe must have snuck out a lot when he was young.
I ease open the bedroom door, holding my breath, praying it doesn’t squeak. At one point Jenny lets out a shout and my heart freezes. But then she rolls over, flinging one arm across her pillow, and I exhale slowly, realizing she’s just fussing in her sleep.
The hall is totally dark. The room my aunt and uncle share is dark too, and the only sound comes from the whispering of the trees outside and the low ticks and groans from the walls, the usual old-house arthritic noises. I finally work up the courage to slip out into the hall and slide the bedroom door shut behind me. I go so slowly that it almost feels like I’m not moving at all, feeling my way by the bumps and ripples in the wallpaper over to the stairs, then sliding my hand inch by inch over the banister, walking on my very tiptoes. Even so, it seems like the house is fighting me, like it’s just screaming for me to be caught. Every step seems to creak, or shriek, or moan. Every single floorboard quivers and shudders under my feet, and I start mentally bargaining with the house: If I make it to the front door without waking up Aunt Carol, I swear to God I’ll never slam another door. I’ll never call you “an old piece of turd” again, not even in my head, and I’ll never curse the basement when it floods, and I will never, ever, ever kick the bedroom wall when I’m annoyed at Jenny.
Maybe the house hears me, because, miraculously, I do make it to the front door. I pause for a second longer, listening for the sounds