Delirium - Lauren Oliver [69]
“Lena!” she calls out to me, just before I reach the gate.
I spin around, heart leaping, thinking maybe she’ll be the one to say it. I miss you. Let’s go back.
Even from a distance of fifty feet, I can see Hana hesitating. Then she makes this fluttering gesture with her hand and calls out, “Never mind.” This time when she turns around she doesn’t waver. She walks straight and quickly, turns a corner, and is gone.
But what did I expect?
That’s the whole point, after all: There’s no going back.
Chapter Thirteen
In the years before the cure was perfected, it was offered on a trial basis only. The risks attached to it were great. At the time one out of every hundred patients suffered a fatal loss of brain function after the procedure.
Nonetheless, people swarmed the hospitals in record number, demanding to be cured; they camped outside the laboratories for days at a time, hoping to secure a procedural slot.
These years are also known as the Miracle Years because of the quantity of lives that were healed and made whole, and the number of souls brought out of sickness.
And if there were people who died on the operating table, they died for a good cause, and no one can lament them. . . .
—From “The Miracle Years: The Early Science of the Cure,” A Brief History of the United States of America, by E. D. Thompson, p. 87
When I get into the house it’s even hotter than usual: a wet, suffocating wall of heat. Carol must be cooking. The house smells like browned meat and spices—mixed with the normal summer smells of sweat and mildew, it’s kind of nauseating. For the past few weeks we’ve been eating dinner out on the porch: runny macaroni salads, cold cuts, and sandwiches from my uncle’s deli counter.
Carol pokes her head out of the kitchen as I go by. Her face is red and she’s sweating big-time. Dark swaths of sweat have left pit stains on her pale blue blouse, navy crescents.
“Better get changed,” she says. “Rachel and David will be here any second.”
I’d completely forgotten my sister and her husband were coming over for dinner. Normally I see Rachel four or five times a year, tops. When I was younger, especially after Rachel had first moved out of Carol’s house, I used to count the days until she would come and see me. I don’t think I fully understood then about the procedure and what it meant for her—for me—for us. I knew that she’d been saved from Thomas, and from the disease, but that was it. I think I thought that otherwise things would be exactly the same. I thought that as soon as she came to see me it would be like old times again, that we would bust out our socks to have a dance party, or she would pull me onto her lap and start braiding my hair, launch into one of her stories—of distant places and witches who could change into animals.
But she only skimmed a hand over my head as she came through the door, and applauded politely when Carol made me recite my multiplication and division tables.
“She’s grown up now,” Carol told me, when I asked her why Rachel didn’t like to play anymore. “Someday you’ll see.”
After that I stopped paying attention to the notation that appeared every few months on the kitchen wall calendar: R to visit.
At dinner the big topics of conversation are Brian Scharff—Rachel’s husband, David, works with Brian’s cousin’s friend, so David feels like he’s an expert on the family—and Regional College of Portland, where I’ll be starting in the fall. It’s the first time in my life I’ll be in class with members of the opposite sex, but Rachel tells me not to worry.
“You won’t even notice,” she says. “You’ll be so busy with work and studying.”
“There are safeguards,” says Aunt Carol. “All the students are vetted.” Code for: All the students are