Delirium (Delirium #1)(63)

He stares at me for several long seconds. I keep my hands clasped tightly behind my back. Otherwise I’m sure their trembling would give me away. Finally he shakes his head.

“I’m going to see if I can dig some up in the supply room. Grab the register, okay?” I slip out from behind the counter slowly, so I don’t rattle, keeping my body angled slightly away from him. Hopefully he won’t notice the bulge in my apron. This is one symptom of the deliria no one ever tells you about: Apparently the disease turns you into a world-class liar.

I slip around a teetering pile of sagging cardboard boxes stacked at the back of the store and shoulder my way into the supply room, shutting the door behind me. Unfortunately it doesn’t lock, so I drag a crate of applesauce in front of the door, just in case Jed decides to come investigate when my search for the ibuprofen takes longer than usual.

A moment later there’s a quiet tap on the door that leads out into the alley. Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

The door feels heavier than usual. It takes all my strength just to yank it open.

“I said to knock four times—” I’m saying, as the sun cuts into the room, temporarily dazzling me. And then the words dry up in my throat and I nearly choke.

“Hey,” Hana says. She’s standing in the alley, shifting from foot to foot, looking pale and worried. “I was hoping you’d be here.”

For a second I can’t even answer her. I’m overwhelmed with relief—Hana is here, intact, whole, fine—and at the same time anxiety starts drumming through me. I scan the alley quickly: no sign of Alex. Maybe he saw Hana and got scared off.

“Um.” Hana wrinkles her forehead. “Are you going to let me in, or what?”

“Oh, sorry. Yeah, come in.” She scoots past me, and I shoot one last look up and down the alley before closing the door behind me. I’m happy to see Hana but nervous, too. If Alex shows up while she’s here . . .

But he won’t, I tell myself. He must have seen her. He must know it’s not safe to come now. Not that I’m worried that Hana would tell on me, but still. After all the lectures I gave her about safety and being reckless, I wouldn’t blame her for wanting to bust me.

“Hot in here,” Hana says, lifting her shirt away from her back. She’s wearing a white billowy shirt and loose-fitting jeans with a thin gold belt that picks up the color of her hair. But she looks worried, and tired, and thin. As she turns a circle, checking out the storeroom, I notice tiny scratches crisscrossing the backs of her arms. “Remember when I used to come and hang out with you here? I’d bring magazines and that stupid old radio I used to have? And you’d steal—”

“Chips and soda from the cooler,” I finish. “Yeah, I remember.” That was how we got through summers in middle school, when I first started logging time at the store. I used to fabricate reasons to come back here all the time, and Hana would show up at some point in the early afternoon and knock on the door five times, really soft. Five times. I should have known.

“I got your message this morning,” Hana says, turning toward me. Her eyes look even bigger than usual. Maybe it’s that the rest of her face looks smaller, drawn inward somehow. “I walked by and didn’t see you at the register, so I figured I’d come around this way. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with your uncle.”

“He’s not here today.” I’m beginning to relax. Alex would have been here already if he was planning on coming. “It’s just me and Jed.”

I’m not sure if Hana hears me. She’s chewing on her thumbnail—a nervous habit I thought she’d kicked years ago—and staring down at the floor like it’s the most fascinating bit of linoleum she’s ever seen.

“Hana?” I say. “Are you okay?”

An enormous shudder goes through her all at once, and her shoulders cave forward and she starts to sob. I’ve seen Hana cry only twice in my life—once when someone pegged her directly in the stomach during dodgeball in second grade, and once last year, after we saw a diseased girl getting wrestled to the street by police in front of the labs, and they accidentally cracked her head so hard against the pavement we heard it all the way up where we were standing, two hundred feet away—and for a moment I’m totally frozen and unsure of what to do. She doesn’t bring her hands to her face or try to wipe her tears or anything. She just stands there, shaking so hard I’m worried she’ll fall over, her hands clenched at her sides.

I reach out and skim her shoulder with one hand. “Shhh, Hana. It’s okay.”

She jerks away from me. “It’s not okay.” She draws a long, shaky breath and starts speaking in a rush: “You were right, Lena. You were right about everything. Last night—it was horrible. There was a raid. . . . The party got broken up. Oh God. There were people screaming, and dogs—Lena, there was blood. They were beating people, just cracking them over the head with their nightsticks like nothing. People were dropping right and left and it was—oh, Lena. It was so awful, so awful.” Hana wraps her arms around her stomach and doubles forward like she’s about to be sick.

She starts to say something else, but the rest of her words get lost: Huge, shuddering sobs run through her whole body. I step forward and wrap her in a hug. For a second she tenses up—it’s very rare for us to hug, since it has always been discouraged—but then she relaxes and presses her face into my shoulder and lets herself cry. It’s kind of awkward, since she’s so much taller than I am; she has to hunch over. It would be funny if it weren’t so awful.