I was named after Mary Magdalene, who was nearly killed from love: “So infected with deliria and in violation of the pacts of society, she fell in love with men who would not have her or could not keep her.” (Book of Lamentations, Mary 13:1).
We learned all about it in Biblical Science. First there was John, then Matthew, then Jeremiah and Peter and Judas, and many other nameless men in-between.
Her last love, they say, was the greatest: a man named Joseph, a bachelor all his life, who found her on the street, bruised and broken and half-crazy from deliria. There’s some debate about what kind of man Joseph was—whether he was righteous or not, whether he ever succumbed to the disease—but in any case, he took good care of her. He nursed her to health and tried to bring her peace.
By this time, however, it was too late. She was tormented by her past, haunted by the loves lost and damaged and ruined, by the evils she had inflicted on others and that others had inflicted on her. She could hardly eat; she wept all day; she clung to Joseph and begged him never to leave her, but couldn’t find comfort in his goodness.
And then one morning, she woke and Joseph was gone—without a word or an explanation. This final abandonment broke her at last and she fell to the ground, begging God to put her out of her misery.
He heard her prayers, and in his infinite compassion he instead removed from her the curse of deliria, with which all humans had been burdened as punishment for the original sin of Eve and Adam. In a sense, Mary Magdalene was the very first cured.
“And so after years of tribulation and pain, she walked in righteousness and peace until the end of her days” (Book of Lamentations, Mary 13:1).
I always thought it was strange that my mother named me Magdalena. She didn’t even believe in the cure. That was her whole problem. And the Book of Lamentations is all about the dangers of deliria. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and in the end I guess I’ve figured out that despite everything, my mother knew that she was wrong: that the cure, and the procedure, were for the best. I think even then she knew what she was going to do—she knew what would happen. I guess my name was her final gift to me, in a way. It was a message.
I think she was trying to say, Forgive me. I think she was trying to say, Someday, even this pain will be taken away.
You see? No matter what everyone says, and despite everything, I know she wasn’t all bad.
The next two weeks are the busiest of my life. Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color—the greens were still pale and tentative, the mornings had a biting coolness—but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as bright as spots of blood. Every day after school there’s an assembly, or ceremony, or graduation party to go to. Hana gets invited to all of them; I get invited to most, which surprises me.
Harlowe Davis—who lives with Hana in the West End, and whose father does something for the government—invites me to come over for a “casual good-bye thing.” I didn’t even think she knew my name—whenever she’s talking to Hana her eyes have always skated past me, like I’m not worth focusing on. I go anyway. I’ve always been curious about her house, and it turns out to be as spectacular as I imagined. Her family has a car, too, and electric appliances everywhere that obviously get used every day, washers and dryers and huge chandeliers filled with dozens and dozens of lightbulbs. Harlowe has invited most of the graduating class—there are sixty-seven of us in total and probably fifty at the party—which makes me feel less special, but it’s still fun. We sit in the backyard while the housekeeper runs in and out of the house with plates and plates of food—coleslaw and potato salad and other barbecue stuff—and her father turns out spare ribs and hamburgers on the enormous smoking grill. I eat until I feel like I’m about to burst and have to roll backward onto the blanket I’m sharing with Hana. We stay there until almost curfew, when the stars are peeking through a curtain of dark blue and the mosquitoes rise up all at once and we all go shrieking and laughing back into the house, slapping them away. Afterward I think it’s one of the nicest days I’ve had in a long time.
Even girls I don’t really like—like Shelly Pierson, who has hated me since sixth grade, when I won the science fair and she took second place—start being nice. I guess it’s because we all know the end is close. Most of us won’t see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We’ll be different. We’ll be adults—cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.
Theresa Grass turns eighteen before school ends and gets cured; so does Morgan Dell. They’re absent for a few days and come back to school just before graduation. The change is amazing. They seem peaceful now, mature and somehow remote, like they’re encased in a thin layer of ice. Only two weeks ago Theresa’s nickname was Theresa Gross, and everyone made fun of her for slouching and chewing on the ends of her hair and generally being a mess, but now she walks straight and tall with her eyes fixed straight in front of her, her lips barely curled in a smile, and everyone shifts a little in the halls so she can pass easily. Same thing goes for Morgan. It’s like all their anxiety and self-consciousness has been removed along with the disease. Even Morgan’s legs have stopped trembling. Whenever she used to have to speak in class, the trembling would get so bad it would rock the desk. But after the procedure, just like that—whoosh! The shaking stops. Of course they’re not the first girls in our class to get cured—Eleanor Rana and Annie Hahn were both cured way back in the fall, and half a dozen other girls have had the procedure this past semester—but in them the difference is somehow more pronounced.
I keep going with my countdown. Eighty-one days, then eighty, then seventy-nine.
Willow Marks never comes back to school. Rumors filter back to us—that she had her procedure and it turned out fine; that she had her procedure and now her brain is going haywire, and they’re talking about committing her to the Crypts, Portland’s combo prison-and-mental-ward; that she ran away to the Wilds. Only one thing is for sure: The whole Marks family is under constant surveillance now. The regulators are blaming Mr. and Mrs. Marks—and the whole extended family—for not instilling in her a proper education, and only a few days after she was supposedly found in Deering Oaks Park, I overhear my aunt and uncle whispering that both of Willow’s parents have been fired from their jobs. A week later we hear that they’ve had to move in with a distant relative. Apparently people kept throwing rocks at their windows, and a whole side of their house was written over with a single word: SYMPATHIZERS. It makes no sense, because Mr. and Mrs. Marks were on record insisting that their daughter have the procedure early, despite the risks, but as my aunt says, people get like that when they’re scared. Everyone is terrified that the deliria will somehow find its way into Portland on a large scale. Everyone wants to prevent an epidemic.