Delirium (Delirium #1)(43)
“You mean it didn’t work?” I say. My body is tingling, going numb, and I realize then how cold it is. “You had the procedure and it didn’t work? Like what happened to my mom?”
“No, Lena. I—” He looks away, squinting, says under his breath, “I don’t know how to explain.”
Everything from the tips of my fingers through the roots of my hair now feels as if it’s encased in ice. Disconnected images run through my head, a skipping movie reel: Alex standing on the observation deck, his hair like a crown of leaves; turning his head, showing the neat three-pronged scar just beneath his left ear; reaching out to me and saying, I’m safe. I won’t hurt you. The words start rattling out of me again but I don’t feel them, hardly feel anything. “It didn’t work and you’ve been lying about it. Lying so you could still go to school, still get a job, still get paired and matched and everything. But really you’re not—you’re still—you might still be—” I can’t bring myself to say the word. Diseased. Uncured. Sick. I feel like I’ll be sick.
“No.” Alex’s voice is so loud it startles me. I take a step back, sneakers slipping on the slick and uneven bottom of the ocean floor, and nearly go under, but when Alex makes a move to touch me I jerk backward, out of his reach. Something hardens in his face, like he’s made a decision. “I’m telling you I was never cured. Never paired or matched or anything. I was never even evaluated.”
“Impossible.” The word barely squeezes itself out, a whisper. The sky is whirling above me, all blues and pinks and reds swirling together until it looks like parts of the sky are bleeding. “Impossible. You have the scars.”
“Scars,” he corrects me, a little more gently. “Just scars. Not the scars.” He looks away then, giving me a view of his neck. “Three tiny scars, an inverted triangle. Easy to replicate. With a scalpel, a penknife, anything.”
I close my eyes again. The waves swell around me and the motion, the lift and the drop, convinces me I really will throw up, right here in the water. I choke down the feeling, trying to hold back the realization that is battering at the back of my mind, threatening to overwhelm me—fighting back the feeling of drowning. I open my eyes and croak out, “How . . . ?”
“You have to understand. Lena, I’m trusting you. Do you see that?” He’s staring at me so intently I can feel his eyes like a touch, and I keep my eyes averted. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t want to lie to you.”
“How?” I repeat, louder now. Somehow my brain gets stuck on the word lie and makes an endless loop: No way to avoid evaluations unless you lie. No way to avoid procedure unless you lie. You must lie.
For a moment Alex is silent, and I think he’s going to chicken out, refuse to tell me anything more. I almost wish he would. I’m desperate to rewind time, go back to the moment before he said my name in that strange tone of voice, go back to the triumphant, surging feeling of beating him to the buoys. We’ll race back to the beach. We’ll meet up tomorrow, try to wheedle some fresh crabs from the fishermen at the dock.
But then he speaks. “I’m not from here,” he says. “I mean, I wasn’t born in Portland. Not exactly.” He’s speaking in the tone of voice that everyone uses when they’re about to break you apart. Gentle—kind, even—like they can make the news sound better just by speaking in a lullaby voice. I’m sorry, Lena, but your mother was a troubled woman. Like you won’t somehow hear the violence underneath.
“Where are you from?” I don’t have to ask. I know already. The realization has broken, spilled, overrun me. But a little part of me believes that as long as he doesn’t say it, it’s not true.
His eyes are steady on mine, but he tilts his head back—back toward the border, beyond the bridge, to that endlessly moving arrangement of branches and leaves and vines and tangled, growing things. “There,” he says, or maybe I just think he says it. His lips barely move. But the meaning is clear.
He comes from the Wilds.
“An Invalid,” I say. The word feels like it’s grating against my throat. “You’re an Invalid.” I’m giving him a final chance to deny it.
But he doesn’t. He just winces slightly and says, “I’ve always hated that word.”
Standing there, I realize something else: that it wasn’t a coincidence whenever Carol made fun of me for still believing in the Invalids, whenever she would shake her head without bothering to look up from her knitting needles—tic, tic, tic, they went together, flashing metal—and say, “I suppose you believe in vampires and werewolves, too?”
Vampires and werewolves and Invalids: things that will rip into you, tear you to shreds. Deadly things.
I’m suddenly so frightened a desperate pressure starts pushing down in the bottom of my stomach and between my legs, and for one wild and ridiculous second I’m positive that I’m about to pee. The lighthouse on Little Diamond Island clicks on, cuts a wide swath across the water, an enormous, accusatory finger: I’m terrified I’ll get caught up in its beam, terrified it will point in my direction and then I’ll hear the whirling of the state helicopters and the megaphone voices of the regulators shouting, “Illegal activity! Illegal activity!” The beach looks hopelessly and impossibly remote. I can’t imagine how we got out so far. My arms feel heavy and useless, and I think of my mother, and her jacket filling slowly with water.