Lauren Oliver - Delirium by Lauren Oliver Read Free Book Online Page B

rumble past, and one or two cars squeeze by. Cars are considered good luck. As they pass, people reach out their hands and brush along the shiny hoods, the clean, bright windows, which will soon be smudged with fingerprints.

    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