Free to Fall

15

VILLAGE PIZZA WAS PACKED when we walked in. Rachel and Izzy had gotten there early and scored a booth by the window. We shrugged out of our coats and slid in next to them. “We’ve deemed this a no-thinking weekend,” Izzy announced. “So we’re auto-ordering.”

“No argument here,” Hershey replied, handing Rachel her Gemini. “My brain is fried.” Rachel touched each of our handhelds to the scanner on the wall, and a few seconds later our order popped up on the screen. “Anybody good here?” Hershey asked, craning her neck to scan the crowded room.

“Eh,” Rachel replied with a disinterested shrug. “Mostly townies.”

“Your boyfriend is here,” Hershey announced. I thought she was talking to Izzy, but she was looking at me. I followed her gaze. North was at the take-out counter, paying cash for a large pizza. I quickly looked away.

“You mean your boyfriend,” I corrected, keeping my voice light.

Rachel turned to look. “He’s the guy?”

Hershey made a face. “He is most definitely not the guy. But he has a thing for Rory. You should see the way he flirts with her.”

Annoyance shot through me. I didn’t want to rock the boat with Hershey since we were getting along so well, but this charade was a little much.

“If you don’t want to talk about your hookup, that’s fine,” I said evenly. “But please don’t make crap like that up just to cover it up.”

Hershey blinked, stunned. “Wait, you think I’m hooking up with North?”

She looked so surprised that I faltered. “Aren’t you?”

“No!” she replied. Then what were you doing at his apartment with your dress off? I almost fired back. But I didn’t want to let on that I knew, or explain why I was at his apartment that night. Not in front of Rachel and Izzy.

“Two Hansen’s, a lemonade, and a diet Z Cola,” our waitress said, passing out our drinks. Instead of putting my napkin on the table, she handed it to me, folded once in half. I noticed the handwriting inside right away.

I need to talk to you. It’s important.—N. P.

I quickly crumpled up the napkin and shoved it into my pocket. The other girls were discussing the ingredients lists on their soda cans and didn’t notice. I turned my own can in my hands and wondered what North could possibly need to say to me. If whatever it was was so important, why didn’t he come over here and say it to my face, instead of sending me a cryptic napkin note? The answer, of course, had to be Hershey. What game was he playing here? What game was she? I watched her across the table as the four of us devoured our extra-large deep-dish, unanimously ignoring Lux’s suggestion that we stop at two pieces each, and wondered.

Rachel and Izzy were meeting some guys on the debate team for brownies after dinner, but I was too stuffed and too tired to do anything but sleep, preferably for about a day and a half.

“You guys go ahead,” I told them as we took turns swiping our handhelds to split the bill. “I’ve gotta go to bed.”

“I’ll go back with you,” Hershey said. When it was my turn to pay, she waved my phone away and double-swiped hers. “My treat.”

As we parted ways on the sidewalk, Hershey linked her arm through mine. As if on cue, we yawned in perfect unison then immediately lapsed into exhausted, slightly maniacal giggles.

“I’m so tired, I can barely feel my legs,” Hershey said as we crossed the street to cut through the park, arms still linked.

“I’m so tired, I think I’m already asleep,” I said.

We giggled again then fell into a comfortable silence. Just as I was about to ask her about North, Hershey cleared her throat. “Can we talk about the voice?” she asked. I felt myself stiffen. Hershey had to have felt it too, which is probably why she didn’t wait for my answer. “I’ve never heard it,” she said before I could shut her down. “Even when I was little. I used to envy the kids that did.”

“Why?”

Hershey looked thoughtful. “I figured I was missing out, I guess. Everyone would talk about being ‘led’ and feeling ‘guided.’ It seemed so . . . easy. To not have to weigh the options and decide for yourself. To be given the answers without having to take the test.”

I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Easy? Yeah, right. Listening to the Doubt meant completely setting yourself aside. Even as a kid, I’d understood that. The voice would whisper not to worry when reason said I should. It’d tell me to slow down when I needed to hurry, to be kind when I was angry, to listen when I so desperately wanted to be heard. “Guided” was the euphemism for being chastised and corrected and coaxed.

“I mean, obviously the answers are wrong,” Hershey said then. “They have to be, right? It’s not the Doubt unless it’s irrational, so—”

I interrupted her. “It’s not irrational. It’s arational.” That had been the most surprising discovery in my APD research—other than finding out that my mom had it. The “irrational inkling” was another nickname for it, but the empirical evidence suggested that the voice was much less predictable than that.

“Arational?”

“Not rational or irrational,” I explained. “Sort of outside the realm of reason, I guess.”

She considered this. “Is it weird when it speaks to you?” she asked then.

“It’s hard to remember,” I lied. “It’s been so long.”

“Rory.” Her voice was gentle but chiding. “I know you still hear it. Talk to me about it. I’m not going to tell anyone.”

I looked over at her and hesitated, wavering. I hadn’t planned on ever telling anyone about the voice, not my dad, not even Beck. And here I was about to spill it to Hershey, a girl with secrets of her own she insisted on keeping, a girl who hardly inspired a great deal of trust. There was no way that was a good idea. I should’ve asked her how she could possibly know what I’d barely admitted to myself, but I was too caught up in my response to wonder about the question.

Hershey kept pressing. “It told you to help me study, didn’t it?”

I started to shake my head to deny it, but Hershey barreled on. “It’s the only explanation. Why else would you do it? It’s not like I had some compelling sob story to win you over. I blew off school. I deserved to fail.”

“No, you didn’t,” I said, more for my own benefit than hers.

“Rory, come on,” she said, swinging around in front of me to look me in the eye.

“The voice did tell me to help you,” I said finally. “But that’s not why I did it. I helped you because you’re my friend.” This was the truth. It struck me in that moment how disturbing that should be—that my mind and the Doubt’s had been completely in sync.

Hershey burst into tears. Instinctively, I reached for her hand. It sat limply in mine as she cried.

“Hersh, it’s really not a big deal,” I said softly. “You needed help, I helped. It’s not like it hurt me at all. I did fine on my tests.”

“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head.

“So tell me. What’s going on?”

She shook her head again. “I can’t,” she whispered. “You’d hate me.”

For a second I forgot she didn’t know anything about me and North. That had to be what she couldn’t bring herself to tell me—that she was hooking up with the guy I liked. So I made it easy for her.

“Hershey, I already know.”

Her eyes jerked up. “What?”

“Not the details, but I know something happened. I came by his apartment that night. I saw your dress on his floor.”

Confusion flashed in her eyes. “Huh?”

“You and North,” I said. “The night of the Masquerade Ball.”

Finally it registered. “So that’s why you thought we were hooking up!”

“If you weren’t, why was your dress on his floor?”

“Because I puked on it,” she replied. “I went to Paradiso thinking coffee would sober me up. Ugh, I could throw up again just thinking about it.” She grimaced. “Anyway, North loaned me some clothes and gave me a bag for the dress. That was it. Really.” I believed her, but it didn’t completely make sense. If it was so innocent, why didn’t North just tell me that when I showed up at his door? Instead he’d seemed so cagey, so concerned that Hershey would find out I was there. I can explain, he’d said. So why hadn’t he? The wad of napkin felt like lead in my pocket. “So does he know you like him?” she asked.

“I don’t like him,” I said quickly.

“Mm-hm. Whatever. But he’d be lucky to have you.” She slipped her arm through mine and laid her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a sucky friend,” she said after a minute.

“You haven’t been that bad,” I said, squeezing her arm. I waited for her to laugh or make a joke, but she didn’t. She was quiet after that.

We stayed like that the whole way back to campus, my hand on her arm, her head on my shoulder. I’ve never had this, I thought. Having a boy BFF has its perks—less drama, less gossip, more action movies—but I’d missed out on the sisterhood of girlfriends. The comfort of sameness. I’d envied other girls, their ease with one another, the way they occupied the same physical space, touching one another’s hair and faces, clinging to arms and waists. With a boy, there had to be margin. Distance. You couldn’t hold hands or sit on laps or walk arm in arm like this. Unless, of course, you were more than friends, but Beck and I never were. With a pang I realized that I hadn’t spoken to my best friend in weeks. We’d texted a few times, but he hadn’t returned any of my calls. It wasn’t entirely unlike him—he hated the phone—but still, it stung. We caught up with two girls from my pod in the courtyard. Dana and Maureen. They were carrying bags of movie theater popcorn and jumbo-size boxes of candy.

“What’d you guys see?” I asked as we fell in stride with them.

“Sugar Sword Four,” Dana replied, making a face. “So bad.”

“Serves us right for not asking Lux before spending twenty-three dollars on the fourth installment of a franchise about a girl who fights crime with candy,” Maureen chimed in. “Then again, the only other choice at the theater downtown was a war movie. After our practicum midterm, I couldn’t watch another explosion.” She shuddered a little.

I felt the smile fade from my lips. Going out with Hershey had made me forget my practicum midterm, but the mention of it brought the horrible images rushing back. I’d gotten so caught up in celebrating my grades that I’d forgotten to search for the real incident online. Was Liam right? Was the scenario based on something that had actually happened? My stomach squeezed at the thought.

I waited until we were back in our room to start looking. “Want to watch Forensic Force?” Hershey asked from her bed. I was lying across mine, typing the words “dock explosion faulty firework island” into GoSearch, and I didn’t look up.

“Sure.”

“What are you doing?” Hershey asked. In my peripheral vision, I could see her craning her neck to see my screen.

“Trying to find the news story Tarsus used for our practicum exam today.”

“The people on the dock?”

I glanced at her and nodded.

Hershey looked at me like I’d said I wanted to rip my nails off with rusty pliers. “Why?”

“I just . . . want to know what really happened, I guess.” I was barely acknowledging this to myself and definitely wouldn’t admit it to Hershey, but the truth was, I was looking for absolution. In some weird and twisted way, if more people died in the real version than did in my simulation, I could let myself off the hook. If I’d done better for those people onscreen than they’d fared in life, maybe I’d stop feeling guilty about the ones I didn’t save.

“Well, I think it’s a bad idea,” Hershey declared, aiming her handheld at the wallscreen. “Shitty things happen in the world. There’s no use dwelling on them.” She scrolled down to the most recent episode of Forensic Force and pressed play.

“I’m not dwelling,” I muttered as I scanned the first page of search results. When I didn’t see anything that looked remotely like our exam, the tension I’d been carrying around started to give way. Until I tapped over to the next page and was staring at an image identical to the scene I’d seen in class. The same green mountains in the distance, the same floating bridge leading to the same white sand beach, the same wooden crates of fireworks and crowded dock. It was a “before” photo, obviously, pre-explosion, when the platform was still intact. But it had to be from the same day. I double-tapped the photo and read the caption beneath it: INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION IN FIJI, OCTOBER 10, 2030.

Less than a week ago. The photo wasn’t attached to an article, so I searched again, with the date this time. The top hit was a story from the day after, with the headline “Dock Accident Cuts Fiji Freedom Fest Short.” I tapped my screen to open the page. I had to read the first paragraph three times before I understood what happened.

In a fortuitous accident, a floating platform holding a crowd of natives and tourists in Fiji collapsed on Sunday, dropping celebrants into the South Pacific Ocean just moments before the event’s arsenal of fireworks exploded. With more than eight hundred in attendance for the island’s annual Fiji Freedom Fest, it is believed that the weight on the dock moments before the collapse was nearly three times its posted limit.

“Thank God they broke the rules,” John Smith, an American tourist on his honeymoon, remarked afterward. “If the dock hadn’t collapsed, we all would’ve been standing on it when the fireworks blew.”

Instead the wooden crates that held the more than two tons of aerial-display fireworks caught fire just as they sunk below the surface of the water, killing hundreds of tropical fish but no humans.

I swallowed hard. In real life the dock had broken apart just moments before the fireworks caught fire. But I’d evacuated at least half of the weight by then, preventing the collapse and thus ensuring the explosion. The relief I should’ve felt that no real people had died was sucked away by a stilling reverence for the voice that had known how to save them.

The Doubt had been right.

If I hadn’t done anything—if I’d only waited—every single person on that dock would’ve survived. But how could the voice have known that? The Doubt didn’t belong to some external, omniscient force. It was an auditory hallucination my brain produced. But if that’s all it was, then how could it have told me something I didn’t know? Because there was no way I could’ve known that platform would collapse when it did.

I sat there, staring at my screen until it went dark, emotions rushing through me like river water. What was I supposed to do now?

I reached for the pendant around my neck, pinching it between finger and thumb. Is this what my mother had gone through, this same internal debate? In the end, she’d chosen to trust the voice, and look how it had ended for her. With a permanent diagnosis and a ticket back to Seattle.

“Find it?” I heard Hershey ask.

“The dock collapsed before the explosion,” I told her, tossing my tablet onto her bed. She scanned the story then tossed it back.

“That’s good news, right?”

When I didn’t answer, Hershey looked at me. “What?” I hesitated. So long that she asked again. “Rory. What?”

“I heard the Doubt during the exam,” I said finally, regretting it as soon as the words were out. But I needed to tell someone, and Beck wasn’t there. He also hadn’t returned yet another one of my voice messages, which my brain didn’t have space to analyze at that moment. Hershey didn’t react. She just picked up the remote to pause the TV.

“Okay,” she said. “And?”

“And it told me to wait.”

“To wait?”

“We were supposed to save as many people as possible,” I explained in a hushed, hurried voice, even though we were alone in our room. “And I didn’t know what to do. There were all these little kids . . . I just kind of froze. And then I panicked, because obviously the test was timed, and we didn’t know when the dock would explode, just that it would.”

“Ugh, your exam sounds so cool. Ours was so lame. But keep going.”

“The point is I thought I had to hurry. Everyone did. How else were we supposed to get those people off the dock before it exploded? But the voice, it told me not to do anything. It said to wait. Which made no sense. Except—”

“The dock would’ve collapsed before the explosion,” Hershey said. “You would’ve saved them all.” She exhaled, her breath whistling through her teeth. “And there’s no way your brain could’ve figured that out somehow?”

“No.”

Hershey looked thoughtful. “So the Doubt, it—”

“It knew something I didn’t,” I said. “Which is impossible. Scientifically, empirically impossible.”

“Yeah. You’re right. So it must’ve just been a fluke, then.” She was baiting me, because she could tell I didn’t believe that.

I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. “Do you think it’s possible that the Doubt isn’t as bad as people think?”

Hershey was quiet. I glanced over at her again. She was on her back too, staring at the ceiling. “But there’s science,” she said finally, but without her usual conviction. “Studies that prove that the Doubt isn’t rational.” She turned her head and met my gaze. “Right?”

There were studies. I’d read most of them. But as I’d pointed out in my research paper, none were particularly complete. The most famous one compared life outcomes between people like my mom and people like Hershey—people who professed to trust the Doubt and people who claimed never to have heard it—and concluded that the second group fared much better in terms of happiness, stability, and prosperity. It was a splashy headline, but it hardly said anything about the Doubt itself. “I guess I’m just not convinced,” I said finally. “But even that freaks me out, because that’s probably how it started for my mom, too, and look what happened to her.”

“What did happen to her?” Hershey asked.

“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “I know she started hearing the Doubt, and she saw a psychiatrist about it. It got pretty bad, I guess—her grades were suffering and stuff—and her doctor wanted to commit her. So they expelled her.”

“Wow,” Hershey said. “That’s heavy.”

I rolled onto my side, toward her. “Please don’t say anything to anyone. About my mom, or what I heard today.”

“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.” But she didn’t meet my gaze.