Aunt Carol is standing at the field’s periphery with my uncle, Grace, and Jenny, talking to Mrs. Springer, my history teacher. I fall into step beside Rachel. She is only a few inches taller than I am and we walk together, in sync, but separated by three feet of space. She is quiet. I can tell she’s already wondering when she can go home and get on with her life.
I let myself look back once. I can’t help it. I watch the girls circulating in their orange gowns like flames. Everything seems to zoom back, recede away at once. All the voices intermingle and become indistinguishable from one another—like the constant white noise of the ocean running underneath the rhythm of the Portland streets, so constant you hardly notice it. Everything looks stark and vivid and frozen, as though drawn precisely and outlined in ink—parents’ smiles frozen, camera flashes blinding, mouths open and white teeth glistening, dark glossy hair and deep blue sky and unrelenting light, everyone drowning in light—everything so clear and perfect I’m sure it must already be a memory, or a dream.
Chapter Eight
H is for hydrogen, a weight of one;
When fission’s split, as brightly lit
As hot as any sun.
He is for helium, a weight of two;
The noble gas, the ghostly pass
That lifts the world anew.
Li is for lithium, a weight of three;
A funeral pyre, when touched with fire—
And deadly sleep for me.
Be is for beryllium, a weight of four . . .
—From the Elemental Prayers
(“Prayer and Study,” The Book of Shhh)
During the summers I have to help my uncle at the Stop-N-Save on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, mostly stocking shelves and working behind the deli counter and occasionally helping with filing and accounting in the little office behind the cereal and dry goods aisle. Thankfully, in late June, Andrew Marcus gets cured and reassigned to a permanent position at another grocery store.
On the Fourth of July I head to Hana’s house in the morning. Every year we go to see the fireworks at the Eastern Promenade. A band is always playing and vendors set up their carts, selling fried meat on skewers and corn on the cob and apple pie floating in a puddle of ice cream, served in little paper boats. The Fourth of July—the day of our independence, the day we commemorate the closing of our nation’s border
forever—is one of my favorite holidays. I love the music that pipes through the streets, love the way the steam rising thick from the grills makes the streets look cloudy, the people shadowy and unclear. I especially love the temporary extension of curfew: Instead of being home at nine o’clock, all uncureds are allowed to stay out until eleven. In recent years Hana and I have made it a kind of game to stay out until the last possible second, cutting it closer and closer every year. Last year I stepped into the house at 10:58 exactly, heart hammering in my chest, shaking with exhaustion—I’d had to sprint home. But as I lay in bed I couldn’t stop grinning. I felt like I’d gotten away with something.
I type in Hana’s four-digit gate code—she gave it to me in eighth grade, saying it was “a sign of trust” and also that she’d slit me “from the top of the head to the heels” if I shared it with anyone else —and slip in through the front door. I never bother knocking. Her parents are hardly ever home, and Hana never answers the door. I’m pretty much the only person who comes over to see her. It’s weird. Hana was always really popular in school—people looked up to her and wanted to be like her—but even though she was really friendly with everybody, she never really got close close with anyone besides me.
Sometimes I wonder whether she wishes she’d been assigned a different desk partner in Mrs. Jablonski’s second-grade class, which is how we first became friends. Hana’s last name is Tate, and we were linked up by alphabetical order (by then I was already going by my aunt’s last name, Tiddle). I wonder whether she wishes she’d been placed with Rebecca Tralawny, or Katie Scarp, or even Melissa Portofino. Sometimes I feel like she deserves a best friend who is just a little more special. Once Hana told me that she likes me because I’m for real—because I really feel things. But that’s the whole problem: how much I feel things.