Delirium - Lauren Oliver [80]
Goose bumps pop up all over my arms when he says this.
“My point is that it’s possible to get in and out. Difficult, but possible. I moved in with two strangers—sympathizers, both of them—and was told to call them my aunt and uncle.” He shrugs ever so slightly next to me. “I didn’t care. I’d never known my real parents, and I’d been raised by dozens of different aunts and uncles. It didn’t make a difference to me.”
His voice has gotten super quiet, and he seems almost to have forgotten that I’m there. I’m not exactly sure where his story is going but I hold my breath, afraid that if I even so much as exhale he’ll stop speaking entirely.
“I hated it here. I hated it here so much you can’t even imagine. All the buildings and the people looking so dazed and the smells and the closeness of everything and the rules—rules everywhere you turned, rules and walls, rules and walls. I wasn’t used to it. I felt like I was in a cage. We are in a cage: a bordered cage.”
A little shock pulses through me. In all the seventeen years and eleven months of my life I have never, not once, thought of it that way. I’ve been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven’t considered that they’re also penning us in. Now I see it through Alex’s eyes, see what it must have been like for him.
“At first I was angry. I used to light things on fire. Paper, handbooks, school primers. It made me feel better somehow.” He laughs softly. “I even burned my copy of The Book of Shhh.”
Another shock pulses through me: Defacing or destroying The Book of Shhh is sacrilege.
“I used to walk along the borders for hours every day. Sometimes I cried.” He squirms next to me, and I can tell he’s embarrassed. It’s the first sign he has given in a while that he knows I’m still there, that he’s talking to me, and the urge to reach out and grab his hand, to squeeze him or give him some kind of reassurance, is almost overwhelming. But I keep my hands glued to the floor. “After a while, though, I would just walk. I liked to watch the birds. They would lift off from our side and soar over into the Wilds, as easily as anything. Back and forth, back and forth, lifting and curling through the air. I could watch them for hours at a time. Free: They were totally free. I’d thought that nothing and nobody was free in Portland, but I was wrong. There were always the birds.”
He falls silent for a while, and I think maybe he’s done with his story. I wonder if he’s forgotten about my original question—why me?—but I’m too embarrassed to remind him, so I just sit there and imagine him standing at the border, motionless, watching the birds swoop above his head. It calms me down.
After what seems like forever he starts talking again, this time in a voice so quiet I have to shift nearer to him just to hear. “The first time I saw you, at the Governor, I hadn’t been to watch the birds at the border in years. But that’s what you reminded me of. You were jumping up, and you were yelling something, and your hair was coming loose from your ponytail, and you were so fast. . . .” He shakes his head. “Just a flash, and then you were gone. Exactly like a bird.”
I don’t know how—I hadn’t intended to move and hadn’t noticed moving—but somehow we’ve ended up face-to-face in the dark, only inches apart.
“Everyone is asleep. They’ve been asleep for years. You seemed . . . awake.” Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. “I’m tired of sleeping.”
My insides are lifting and fluttering like they’ve done what he said and been transformed into swooping, soaring birds: The rest of my body seems to be floating away on massive currents of warmth, as though a hot wind is pushing through me, breaking me apart,