“I’ll be home,” I say. It occurs to me that this numbness, this feeling of separation, must be what she and every cured experiences all the time: as though there is a thick, muffling pane of glass between you and everybody else. Hardly anything penetrates. Hardly anything matters. They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn’t, and it never was. It’s about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear—a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.
For the first time in my life I actually feel sorry for Carol. I’m only seventeen years old, and I already know something she doesn’t know: I know that life isn’t life if you just float through it. I know that the whole point—the only point—is to find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.
“Okay.” Carol stands there, kind of awkwardly, like she always does when she wants to say something meaningful but can’t quite remember how to do it. “Two weeks until your cure,” she says finally.
“Sixteen days,” I say, but in my head I’m counting: Seven days. Seven days until I’m free, and away from all these people and their sliding, superficial lives, brushing past one another, gliding, gliding, gliding, from life to death. For them, there’s hardly a change between the two.
“It’s okay to be nervous,” she says. This is the difficult thing she has been trying to say, the words of comfort it has cost her so much effort to remember. Poor Aunt Carol: a life of dishes and dented cans of green beans and days that bleed forever into one another. It occurs to me, then, how old she looks. Her face is deeply lined, and her hair has patches of gray. It’s only her eyes that have convinced me she is ageless: those staring, filmy eyes that all cureds share, as though they’re always looking off into some vast distance. She must have been pretty when she was young, before she was cured—as tall as my mother at least, and probably just as thin—and a mental image flashes of two teenage girls, both slender black parentheses separated by a span of silver ocean, kicking water at each other, laughing. These are the things you do not give up.
“Oh, I’m not nervous,” I tell her. “Trust me. I can’t wait.”
Only seven more days.
Chapter Twenty-Four
What is beauty? Beauty is no more than a trick; a delusion; the influence of
excited particles and electrons colliding in your eyes, jostling in your brain
like a bunch of overeager schoolchildren, about to be released on break. Will
you let yourself be deluded? Will you let yourself be deceived?
—“On Beauty and Falsehood,”The New Philosophy, by Ellen Dorpshire
Hana’s already there when I arrive, leaning up against the chain-link fence that encircles the track, head tilted back and eyes closed against the sun. Her hair is loose and spilling down her back, nearly white in the sun. I pause when I’m fifteen feet away from her, wishing I could memorize her exactly like that, hold that precise image in my mind forever.
Then she opens her eyes and sees me. “We haven’t even started to run yet,” she says, pushing off the fence and making a big show of checking her watch, “and you’re already coming in second.”
“Is that a challenge?” I say, closing the last ten feet between us.
“Just a fact,” she says, grinning. Her smile flickers a little as I get closer. “You look different.”
“I’m tired,” I say. It feels strange to greet each other with no hug or anything, even though this is how things have always been between us, how things have always had to be. It feels strange that I’ve never told her how much she means to me. “Long day.”
“You want to talk about it?” She squints at me. The summer has made her tan. The sun-freckles on her nose bunch up like a constellation of stars collapsing. I really think she might be the most beautiful girl in Portland, maybe in the whole world, and I feel a sharp pain behind my ribs, thinking of how she’ll grow older and forget me. Someday she’ll hardly think of all the time we spent together—when she does, it will seem distant and faintly ridiculous, like the memory of a dream whose details have already started to ebb away.
“After we run, maybe,” I say, the only thing I can think to say. You have to go forward: It’s the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.
“After you eat dirt, you mean,” she says, bending forward to stretch out her hamstrings.
“You talk a big game for someone who’s been lying on her ass all summer.”
“You’re one to talk.” She tilts her head up to wink at me. “I don’t think what you and Alex have been doing really counts as exercise.”
“Shhh.”
“Relax, relax. No one’s around. I checked.”
It all seems so normal—so deliciously, wonderfully normal—that I’m filled from head to toe with a joy that makes me dizzy. The streets are striped with golden sun and shadow, and the air smells like salt and the odor of frying things and, faintly, seaweed washed up onto the beaches. I want to hold this moment inside of me forever, keep it safe, like a shadow-heart: my old life, my secret.
“Tag,” I say to Hana, giving her a tap on the shoulder. “You’re it.”
And then I’m off and she’s yelping and leaping to catch up, and we’re rounding the track and heading down to the piers without hesitating or debating our route. My legs feel strong, steady; the bite I got on the night of the raids has healed well and completely, leaving just a thin red mark along the back of my calf, like a smile. The cool air pumps in and out of my lungs, aching, but it’s the good kind of pain: the pain that reminds you how amazing it is to breathe, to ache, to be able to feel at all. Salt stings my eyes and I blink rapidly, not sure whether I’m sweating or crying.
It’s not the fastest run we’ve ever been on, but I think it might be one of our best. We keep up the same exact rhythm, running almost shoulder to shoulder, drawing a loop from the old harbor all the way out to Eastern Prom.
We’re slower than we were at the start of the summer, that’s for sure. At about the three-mile mark both of us are starting to lag, and by silent agreement we both cut down the sloping lawn onto the beach, flinging ourselves onto the sand, starting to laugh.
“Two minutes,” Hana says, gasping. “I just need two minutes.”
“Pathetic,” I say, even though I’m just as grateful for the pause.
“Right back at you,” she says, lobbing a handful of sand in my direction. Both of us flop onto our backs, arms and legs flung apart like we’re about to make snow angels. The sand is surprisingly cool on my skin, and a little damp. It must have rained earlier after all, maybe when Alex and I were in the Crypts. Thinking again of that tiny cell and the words drilled straight through the wall, sun revolving through the O as though beamed through a telescope, makes that thing constrict in my chest again. Even now, this second, my mother is out there somewhere—moving, breathing, being.
Well, soon I’ll be out there too.