“Good luck,” I say to Hana.
She turns and gives me a quick smile. But I can tell she is nervous, finally. There is a fine crease between her eyebrows, and she is chewing on the corner of her lip.
She starts to enter the lab and then turns abruptly and walks back to me, her face wild and unfamiliar-looking, grabbing me with both shoulders, putting her mouth directly to my ear. I’m so startled I drop my clipboard.
“You know you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes, right?” she whispers, and her voice is hoarse, as though she’s just been crying.
“What?” Her nails are digging into my shoulders, and at that moment I’m terrified of her.
“You can’t be really happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes. You know that, right?”
Before I can respond she releases me, and as she pulls away, her face is as serene and beautiful and composed as ever. She bends down to scoop up my clipboard, which she passes to me, smiling. Then she turns around and is gone behind the glass doors, which open and close behind her as smoothly as the surface of water, sucking closed over something that is sinking.
Chapter Four
The devil stole into the Garden of Eden.
He carried with him the disease—amor deliria nervosa—
in the form of a seed. It grew and flowered into a
magnificent apple tree, which bore apples as bright as blood.
—From Genesis: A Complete History of the World
and the Known Universe, by Steven Horace, PhD,
Harvard University
By the time the nurse admits me into the waiting room, Hana is gone—vanished down one of the antiseptic white hallways and whisked behind one of the dozens of identical white doors—although there are about a half-dozen other girls milling around, waiting. One girl is sitting in a chair, hunched over her clipboard, scribbling and crossing out her answers, and then rescribbling. Another girl is frantically asking a nurse about the difference between “chronic medical conditions” and “pre-existing medical conditions.” She looks like she’s on the verge of having some kind of fit—a vein is standing out on her forehead and her voice is rising hysterically—and I wonder whether she’s going to list a tendency toward excessive anxiety on her sheet.
It’s not funny, but I feel like laughing. I bring my hand to my face, snorting into my palm. I tend to get giggly when I’m extremely nervous. During tests at school I’m always getting in trouble for laughing. I wonder if I should have marked that down.
A nurse takes my clipboard from me and flips through the pages, checking to see that I haven’t left any answers blank.
“Lena Haloway?” she says in the bright, clipped voice that all nurses seem to share, like it’s part of their medical training.
“Uh-huh,” I say, and then quickly correct myself. My aunt has told me that the evaluators will expect a certain degree of formality. “Yes. That’s me.” It’s still strange to hear my real name, Haloway, and a dull feeling settles at the bottom of my stomach. For the past decade I’ve gone by my aunt’s name, Tiddle. Even though it’s a pretty stupid last name—Hana once said it reminded her of a little-kid word for peeing—at least it isn’t associated with my mother and father. At least the Tiddles are a real family. The Haloways are nothing but a memory. But for official purposes I have to use my birth name.
“Follow me.” The nurse gestures down one of the hallways, and I follow the neat tick-tock of her heels down the linoleum. The halls are blindingly bright. The butterflies are working their way up from my stomach into my head, making me feel dizzy, and I try to calm myself by imagining the ocean outside, its ragged breathing, the seagulls turning pinwheels in the sky.
It will be over soon, I tell myself. It will be over soon and then you’ll go home, and you’ll never have to think about the evaluation again.
The hallway seems to go on forever. Up ahead a door opens and shuts, and a moment later, as we turn a corner, a girl brushes past us. Her face is red and she’s obviously been crying. She must be done with her evaluation already. I recognize her, vaguely, as one of the first girls admitted.