When Lena turns to me, her eyes are pleading. “I didn’t mean to” is how she starts. And then, after a second’s pause, she spills. She tells me about seeing Alex at the party at Roaring Brook Farms (the party I invited her to; she wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t for me), and meeting him down by Back Cove just before sunset.
“That’s when—that’s when he told me the truth. That he was an Invalid,” she says, keeping her eyes locked on mine and forcing out the word, Invalid, in a normal volume. I unconsciously suck in a breath. So it’s true; all this time, while the government denied and denied, there have been people living on the fringes of our cities, uncured and uncontrolled.
“I came to find you last night,” Lena says more quietly. “When I knew there was going to be a raid . . . I snuck out. I was there when—when the regulators came. I barely made it out. Alex helped me. We hid in a shed until they were gone. . . .”
I close my eyes and reopen them. I remember wiggling into the damp earth, bumping my hip against the window. I remember standing, and seeing the dark forms of bodies lying like shadows in the grass, and the sharp geometry of a small shed, nestled in the trees.
Lena was there. It is almost unimaginable.
“I can’t believe that. I can’t believe you snuck out during a raid—for me.” My throat feels thick again, and I will myself not to start crying. For a moment I am overwhelmed by a feeling so huge and strange, I have no name for it: It surges over the guilt and the shock and the envy; it plunges a hand into the deepest part of myself and roots me to Lena.
For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I’ve always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point—last summer? last year?—she became beautiful. Her eyes seem to have grown even larger, and her cheekbones have sharpened. Her lips, on the other hand, look softer and fuller.
I’ve never felt ugly next to Lena, but suddenly I do. I feel tall and ugly and bony, like a straw-colored horse.
Lena starts to say something when there’s a loud knock on the door that opens into the store, and Jed calls out, “Lena? Are you in there?”
Instinctively I shove Alex sideways so he stumbles behind the door just as it begins to open from the other side. Fortunately, Jed manages to get it open only a few inches before the door collides with a large crate of applesauce. I wonder, fleetingly, whether Lena placed it there for that purpose.
Behind me, I can feel Alex: He is both very alert and very still, like an animal just before bolting. The door muffles the sound of Jed’s voice. Lena keeps a smile on her face when she replies to him. I can’t believe this is the same Lena who used to hyperventilate when she was asked to read in front of the class.
My stomach starts twisting, knotted up with conflicting admiration and resentment. All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie.
She was learning to love.
I can’t stand to be so close to this boy, this Invalid, who is now Lena’s secret. My skin is itching.
I pop my head around the door. “Hi, Jed,” I say brightly. Lena gives me a grateful look. “I just came by to give Lena something. And we started gossiping.”
“We have customers,” Jed says dully, keeping his eyes locked on Lena.
“I’ll be out in a second,” she says. When Jed withdraws again with a grunt, closing the door, Alex lets out a long breath. Jed’s interruption has restored tension to the room. I can feel it crawling along my skin, like heat.
Perhaps sensing the tension, Alex kneels down and begins unpacking his backpack. “I brought some things for your leg,” he says quietly. He has brought medical supplies. When Lena rolls up one leg of her jeans to her knee, she reveals an ugly wound on the back of her calf. I feel a quick, swinging sense of vertigo and a surge of nausea.
“Damn, Lena,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. I don’t want to freak her out. “That dog got you good.”
“She’ll be fine,” Alex says dismissively, as though I shouldn’t worry about it—as though it’s none of my concern. I have the sudden urge to kick him in the back of his head. He is kneeling in front of Lena, dabbing antibacterial cream on her leg. I’m mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to treat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.
“Maybe you should go to the hospital.” I direct the words to Lena, but Alex jumps in.
“And tell them what? That she got hurt during a raid on an underground party?”