—From Genesis: A Complete History of the World and the Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD, Harvard University
The next day, a Saturday, I wake up thinking of Alex. Then I try to stand up, and pain shoots through my leg. Hitching up my pajamas, I see a small spot of blood has seeped through the T-shirt Alex wrapped around my calf. I know I should wash it or change the bandage or do something, but I’m too scared to see how bad the damage is. The details from the party—of screaming and shoving and dogs and batons whirling through the air, deadly—come flooding back, and for a moment I’m sure I’m going to be sick. Then the dizziness subsides and I think of Hana.
Our phone is in the kitchen. My aunt is at the sink, washing dishes, and gives me a small look of surprise when I come downstairs. I catch a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror. I look terrible—hair sticking up all over my head, big bags under my eyes—and it strikes me as unbelievable that anyone could ever find me pretty.
But someone does. Thinking of Alex makes a golden glow spread through me.
“Better hurry,” Carol says. “You’ll be late for work. I was just about to wake you.”
“I just have to call Hana,” I say. I snake the cord as far as it will go and back up into the pantry, so at least I’ll have some privacy.
I try Hana’s house first. One, two, three, four, five rings. Then the answering machine clicks on. “You’ve reached the Tate residence. Please leave a message of no more than two minutes. . . .”
I hang up quickly. My fingers have begun to tremble, and I have trouble punching in Hana’s cell phone number. Straight to voice mail.
Her greeting is exactly the same as it’s always been (“Hey, sorry I couldn’t get to the phone. Or maybe I’m not sorry I couldn’t get to the phone—it depends on who’s calling.”), her voice coming in fuzzy, bubbling with suppressed laughter. Hearing it—the normalcy of it—after last night gives me a jolt, like suddenly dreaming yourself back into a place you haven’t thought about for a while. I remember the day she recorded it. It was after school and we were in her room, and she went through about a million greetings before she settled on that one. I was bored and kept whacking her with a pillow whenever she wanted to try just one more.
“Hana, you need to call me,” I say into the phone, keeping my voice as low as possible. I’m far too aware that my aunt is listening. “I’m working today. You can reach me at the store.”
I hang up, feeling dissatisfied and guilty. While I was in the shed last night with Alex, she could have been hurt or in trouble; I should have done more to find her.
“Lena.” My aunt calls me sharply back into the kitchen just as I’m headed upstairs to get ready.
“Yes?”
She comes forward a few steps. Something in her expression makes me anxious.
“Are you limping?”she asks. I’ve been trying as hard as possible to walk normally.
I look away. It’s easier to lie when I’m not staring in her eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“Don’t lie to me.” Her voice turns cold. “You think I don’t know what this is about, but I do.” For one terrified second I think she’s going to ask me to roll up my pajama pants, or tell me she knows about the party. But then she says, “You’ve been running again, haven’t you? Even though I told you not to.”
“Only once,” I blurt out, relieved. “I think I may have twisted my ankle.”
Carol shakes her head and looks disappointed. “Honestly, Lena. I don’t know when you started disobeying me. I thought that you of all people—” She breaks off. “Oh, well. Only five weeks to go, right? Then all of this will be worked out.”
“Right.” I force myself to smile.
All morning, I oscillate between worrying about Hana and thinking of Alex. I ring up the wrong charge for customers twice and have to call for Jed, my uncle’s general manager, to come override it. Then I knock down a whole shelf of frozen pasta dinners, and mislabel a dozen cartons of cottage cheese. Thank God my uncle’s not in the store today; he’s out doing deliveries, so it’s just Jed and me. And Jed hardly looks at me or speaks to me except in grunts, so I’m pretty sure he’s not going to notice that I’ve suddenly turned into a clumsy, incompetent mess.
I know part of the problem, of course. The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing—all classic Phase One signs of deliria. But I don’t care. If pneumonia felt this good I’d stand out in the snow in the winter with bare feet and no coat on, or march into the hospital and kiss pneumonia patients.
I’ve told Alex about my work schedule and we’ve agreed to meet up at Back Cove directly after my shift, at six o’clock. The minutes crawl toward noon. I swear I’ve never seen time go more slowly. It’s like every second needs encouragement just to click forward into the next. I keep willing the clock to go faster, but it seems to be resisting me deliberately. I see a customer picking her nose in the tiny aisle of (kind of) fresh produce; I look at the clock; look back at the customer; look back at the clock—and the second hand still hasn’t moved. I have this terrible fear that time will stop completely, while this woman has her pinkie finger buried up her right nostril, right in front of the tray of wilted lettuce.
At noon I get a fifteen-minute break, and I go outside and sit on the sidewalk and choke down a few bites of a sandwich, even though I’m not hungry. The anticipation of seeing Alex again is messing with my appetite big-time. Another sign of the deliria.
Bring it.
At one o’clock Jed starts restocking the shelves, and I’m still stuck behind the counter. It’s wickedly hot, and there’s a fly trapped in the store that keeps buzzing around and bumping up against the overhanging shelf above my head, where we keep a few packs of cigarettes and bottles of Mylanta and things like that. The droning of the fly and the tiny fan whirring behind my back and the heat all make me want to sleep. If I could, I would rest my head on the counter and dream, and dream, and dream. I would dream I was back in the shed with Alex. I would dream of the firmness of his chest pressed against mine and the strength of his hands and his voice saying, “Let me show you.”
The bell above the door chimes once and I snap out of my reverie.
And there he is, walking through the door with his hands stuffed in the pockets of a pair of raggedy board shorts, and his hair sticking up all crazy around his head like it really is made out of leaves and twigs. Alex.
I nearly topple off my stool.
He shoots me a quick sideways grin and then starts walking the aisles lazily, picking up really random things—like a bag of pork skin cracklings and a can of really gross cauliflower soup—and making exaggerated noises of interest, like “This looks delicious,” so it’s all I can do to keep from cracking up laughing. He has to squeeze by Jed at one point—the aisles at the store are pretty narrow, and Jed’s not exactly a lightweight—and when Jed barely glances at him, a thrill shoots through me. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know that I can still taste Alex’s lips against mine, can still feel his hand sliding over my shoulders.
For the first time in my life I’ve done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad. As Alex walks through the store, I think that there’s an invisible thread tethering us together, and somehow it makes me feel more powerful than ever before.