“Pathetic,” I say, even though I’m just as grateful for the pause.
“Right back at you,” she says, lobbing a handful of sand in my direction. Both of us flop onto our backs, arms and legs flung apart like we’re about to make snow angels. The sand is surprisingly cool on my skin, and a little damp. It must have rained earlier after all, maybe when Alex and I were in the Crypts. Thinking again of that tiny cell and the words drilled straight through the wall, sun revolving through the O as though beamed through a telescope, makes that thing constrict in my chest again. Even now, this second, my mother is out there somewhere—moving, breathing, being.
Well, soon I’ll be out there too.
There are only a few people on the beach, mostly families walking, and one old man, plodding slowly by the water, staking his cane into the sand. The sun is sinking farther beyond the clouds, and the bay is a hard gray, just barely tinged with green.
“I can’t believe in only a few weeks we won’t have to worry about curfew anymore,” Hana says, then swivels her head to look at me. “Less than three weeks, for you. Sixteen days, right?”
“Yeah.” I don’t like to lie to Hana so I sit up, wrapping my arms around my knees.
“I think on my first night cured I’m going to stay out all night. Just because I can.” Hana props herself up on her elbows. “We can make a plan to do it together—you and me.” There’s a pleading note in her voice. I know I should just say, Yeah, sure, or That sounds great. I know it would make her feel better—it would make me feel better—to pretend that life will go on as usual.
But I can’t force the words out. Instead I start blotting bits of sand from my thighs with a thumb. “Listen, Hana. I have to tell you something. About the procedure . . .”
“What about it?” She squints at me. She’s heard some note of seriousness in my voice, and it has worried her.
“Promise you won’t be mad, okay? I won’t be able to—” I stop myself before I can say, I won’t be able to leave if you’re mad at me. I’m getting ahead of myself.
Hana sits up completely, holding up a hand, forcing a laugh. “Let me guess. You’re jumping ship with Alex, making a run for it, going all rogue and Invalid on me.” She says it jokingly but there’s an edge to her voice, an undercurrent of neediness. She wants me to contradict her.
I don’t say anything, though. For a minute we just stare at each other, and all the light and energy drains from her face at once.
“You’re not serious,” she says finally. “You can’t be serious.”
“I have to, Hana,” I tell her quietly.
“When?” She bites her lip and looks away.
“We decided today. This morning.”
“No. I mean—when. When are you going?”
I hesitate for only a second. After this morning, I feel like I don’t know very much about the world or anything in it. But I do know that Hana would never, ever betray me—not now, at least, not until they stick needles into her brain and pick her apart, tease her into pieces. I realize now that that’s what the cure does, after all: It fractures people, cuts them off from themselves.
But by then—by the time they get to her—it will be too late. “Friday,” I say. “A week from now.”
She breathes out sharply, the air whistling between her teeth. “You can’t be serious,” she repeats.
“There’s nothing for me here,” I say.
She looks back at me then. Her eyes are enormous, and I can tell I’ve hurt her. “I’m here.”
Suddenly the solution comes to me—simple, ridiculously simple. I almost laugh out loud. “Come with us,” I burst out. Hana scans the beach anxiously, but everyone has dispersed: The old man has plodded on, halfway down the beach by now and out of earshot. “I’m serious, Hana. You could come with us. You’d love it in the Wilds. It’s incredible. There are whole settlements there—”
“You’ve been?” she cuts in sharply.
I blush, realizing I’d never told her about my night with Alex in the Wilds. I know she’ll see this, too, as a betrayal. I used to tell her everything. “Just once,” I say. “And only for a couple of hours. It’s amazing, Hana. It’s not like we imagined it at all. And the crossing . . . The fact that you can cross at all . . . So much is different from what we’ve been told. They’ve been lying to us, Hana.”
I stop, temporarily overwhelmed. Hana looks down, picking at the seam of her running shorts.
“We could do it,” I say, more gently. “The three of us together.”
For a long time Hana doesn’t say anything. She looks out at the ocean, squinting. Finally she shakes her head, an almost imperceptible movement, shooting me a sad smile. “I’ll miss you, Lena,” she says, and my heart sinks.
“Hana—” I start to say, but she cuts me off.
“Or maybe I won’t miss you.” She heaves herself to her feet, slapping the sand off her shorts. “That’s one of the promises of the cure, right? No pain. Not that kind of pain, anyway.”
“You don’t have to go through with it.” I scramble to my feet. “Come to the Wilds.”
She lets out a hollow laugh. “And leave all this behind?” She gestures around her. I can tell she’s half joking, but only half. In the end, despite all her talk, and the underground parties and forbidden music, Hana doesn’t want to give up this life, this place: the only home we’ve ever known. Of course, she has a life here: family, a future, a good match. I have nothing.
The corners of Hana’s mouth are trembling and she drops her head, kicking at the sand. I want to make her feel better but can’t think of anything to say. There’s a frantic aching in my chest. It seems like as we stand there I’m watching my whole life with Hana, our entire friendship, fall away: sleepover parties with forbidden midnight bowls of popcorn; all the times we rehearsed for Evaluation Day, when Hana would steal a pair of her father’s old glasses, and bang on her desk with a ruler whenever I got an answer wrong, and we always started choking with laughter halfway through; the time she put a fist, hard, in Jillian Dawson’s face because Jillian said my blood was diseased; eating ice cream on the pier and dreaming of being paired and living in identical houses, side by side. All of it is being sucked into nothing, like sand getting swept up by a current.
“You know it’s not about you,” I say. I have to force the words out, past a lump in my throat. “You and Grace are the only people who matter to me here. Nothing else—” I break off. “Everything else is nothing.”
“I know,” she says, but she still won’t look at me.
“They—they took my mother, Hana.” I wasn’t planning to tell her, initially. I didn’t want to talk about it. But the words rush out.
She glances up at me sharply. “What are you talking about?”
I tell her the story of the Crypts then. Amazingly, I keep it together. I just tell her about everything in detail. Ward Six and the escape, the cell, the words. Hana listens in frozen silence. I’ve never seen her so still and serious.
When I’m finished speaking, Hana’s face is white. She looks exactly like she did when we were little and used to stay up at night, trying to freak each other out by telling ghost stories. In a way, I guess my mother’s story is a ghost story. “I’m sorry, Lena,” she says, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t know what else to say. I’m so sorry.”
I nod, staring out at the ocean. I wonder whether what we learned about the other parts of the world—the uncured parts—is accurate, whether they’re really as wild and ravaged and savage and full of pain as everyone has always said. I’m pretty sure this, too, is a lie. Easier, in many ways, to imagine a place like Portland—a place with its own walls and barriers and half-truths, a place where love still flickers into existence but imperfectly.
“You see why I have to leave,” I say. It’s not really a question, but she nods.