Delirium by Lauren Oliver EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Author: Lauren Oliver
- ISBN: 978-0062112439
- Language: English
- Genre: Teen & Young Adult Historical Romance eBooks
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Page: 480
- Price: Free
It has been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium
identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a
cure. Everyone else in my family has had the procedure already. My older
sister, Rachel, has been disease free for nine years now. She’s been safe
from love for so long, she says she can’t even remember its symptoms. I’m
scheduled to have my procedure in exactly ninety-five days, on September
3. My birthday.
Many people are afraid of the procedure. Some people even resist. But
I’m not afraid. I can’t wait. I would have it done tomorrow, if I could, but
you have to be at least eighteen, sometimes a little older, before the
scientists will cure you. Otherwise the procedure won’t work correctly:
People end up with brain damage, partial paralysis, blindness, or worse.
I don’t like to think that I’m still walking around with the disease running
through my blood. Sometimes I swear I can feel it writhing in my veins like
something spoiled, like sour milk. It makes me feel dirty. It reminds me of
children throwing tantrums. It reminds me of resistance, of diseased girls
dragging their nails on the pavement, tearing out their hair, their mouths
dripping spit.
And of course it reminds me of my mother.
After the procedure I will be happy and safe forever. That’s what
everybody says, the scientists and my sister and Aunt Carol. I will have the
procedure and then I’ll be paired with a boy the evaluators choose for me.
In a few years, we’ll get married. Recently I’ve started having dreams about
my wedding. In them I’m standing under a white canopy with flowers in
my hair. I’m holding hands with someone, but whenever I turn to look at
him his face blurs, like a camera losing focus, and I can’t make out any
features. But his hands are cool and dry, and my heart is beating steadily in
my chest—and in my dream I know it will always beat out that same
rhythm, not skip or jump or swirl or go faster, just womp, womp, womp,
until I’m dead.
Safe, and free from pain.
Things weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that
in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease
love was. For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to
be celebrated and pursued. Of course that’s one of the reasons it’s so
dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make
rational decisions about your own well-being. (That’s symptom number
twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of
The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we
call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases—stress, heart
disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder—
never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority
of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.
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