Hana and I run next to each other, reviewing all the day’s gossip. We don’t talk about the botched evaluations yesterday, or the rumors of the Invalids. There are too many people around. Instead she tells me about her ethics exam, and I tell her about Cora Dervish’s fight with Minna Wilkinson. We talk about Willow Marks, too, who has been absent from school since the previous Wednesday. Rumor is that Willow was found by regulators last week in Deering Oaks Park after curfew—with a boy.
We’ve been hearing rumors like that about Willow for years. She’s just the kind of person people talk about. She has blond hair, but she’s always coloring different streaks into it with markers, and I remember once on a freshman class trip to a museum, we passed a group of Spencer Prep boys and she said, so loud one of our chaperones could have easily heard, “I’d like to kiss one of them straight on the lips.” Supposedly she was caught hanging out with a boy in tenth grade and got off with a warning because she showed no signs of the deliria. Every so often people make mistakes; it’s biological, a result of the same kind of chemical and hormonal imbalances that occasionally lead to Unnaturalism, to boys being attracted to boys and girls to girls. These impulses, too, will be resolved by the cure.
But this time it is serious, apparently, and Hana drops the bomb just as we turn onto Center: Mr. and Mrs. Marks have agreed to move the date of Willow’s procedure up by a full six months. She’ll be missing graduation day to get cured.
“Six months?” I repeat. We’ve been running hard for twenty minutes, so I’m not sure if the heavy thumping in my chest is a result of the exercise or the news. I’m feeling more out of breath than I should be, like someone’s sitting on my chest. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
Hana tips her head to the right, gesturing the way to a shortcut through an alley. “It’s been done before.”
“Yeah, but not successfully. What about all the side effects? Mental problems? Blindness?” There are a few reasons why the scientists won’t let anyone under the age of eighteen have the procedure, but the biggest one is that it just doesn’t seem to work as well for people younger than that, and in the worst cases it’s been known to cause all kind of crazy problems. Scientists speculate that the brain and its neuro-pathways are still too plastic before then, still in the middle of forming themselves. Actually, the older you are when you have the procedure, the better, but most people are scheduled for the procedure as close as possible to their eighteenth birthday.
“I guess they think it’s worth the risk,” Hana says. “Better than the alternative, you know? Amor deliria nervosa. The deadliest of all deadly things.” This is the catchphrase that’s written on every mental health pamphlet ever written about the deliria; Hana’s voice is flat as she repeats it, and it makes my stomach dip. All of yesterday’s craziness has made me forget Hana’s comment to me before the evaluations. But now I remember, and remember how strange she looked too, eyes cloudy and unreadable.
“Come on.” I feel a straining in my lungs and my left thigh is starting to cramp. The only way to push through it is to run harder and faster. “Let’s pick it up, Slug.”
“Bring it.” Hana’s face splits into a grin, and both of us start pumping faster. The pain in my lungs swells up and blossoms until it feels like it’s everywhere, tearing through all my cells and muscles at once. The cramp in my leg makes me wince every time my heel hits the pavement. It’s always like this on miles two and three, like all the stress and anxiety and irritation and fear get transformed into little needling points of physical pain, and you can’t breathe or imagine going farther or think anything but: I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
And then, just as suddenly, it’s gone. All the pain lifts away, the cramp vanishes, the fist eases off my chest, and I can breathe easily. Instantly a feeling of total happiness bubbles up inside of me: the solid feeling of the ground underneath me, the simplicity of the movement, rocketing off my heels, pushing forward in time and space, total freedom and release. I glance over at Hana. I can tell from her expression that she’s feeling it too. She has made it through the wall. She senses me looking and whips around, her blond ponytail a bright arc, to give me the thumbs-up.
It’s strange. When we run I feel closer to Hana than at any other time. Even when we’re not talking, it’s like there’s an invisible cord tethering us together, matching our rhythms, our arms and our legs, as though we’re both responding to the same drumbeat. More and more it has been occurring to me that this, too, will change after our procedures. She’ll retreat to the West End and make friends with her neighbors, with people richer and more sophisticated than I am. I’ll stay in some crappy apartment on Cumberland, and I won’t miss her, or remember what it felt like to run side by side. They’ve warned me that after my procedure I may not even like running anymore, period. Another side effect of the cure: People often change their habits afterward, lose interest in their former hobbies and things that had given them pleasure.