Free to Fall

19

I SLEPT THROUGH BREAKFAST and only barely made it to practicum. I thought I’d feel better after a couple more hours of sleep, but I woke up shivering and achy. Fortunately, Hershey either hadn’t come back or had slipped in and out of the room without waking me, so at least I didn’t have to deal with her on top of everything else.

We were working in teams in practicum, which was good because I was useless on my own. My head was pounding and my eye sockets felt like they were radiating heat. Meanwhile my brain was on a screaming loop: My dad is not my dad! My dad is not my dad!

“Rory, could you stay after class for a few moments, please?” Dr. Tarsus said at the end of the period. She phrased it as a question, as if I could refuse.

“Sure,” I said, making my way to her desk as everyone else filed out.

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” Tarsus said when we were alone. “But as your adviser, I thought you should hear it from me first.” She pinned her beady black eyes on mine. “Hershey Clements is no longer a student here.”

The words didn’t register. “What?”

Tarsus was watching me carefully. “She was taken to the health center early this morning for a psychiatric evaluation. Her doctors made the recommendation for dismissal a few hours ago.”

I stared at her. “What’s wrong with her?”

Tarsus pursed her lips. “I obviously can’t share those details with you, Rory. But it appears that the stress of our rigorous academic program caused Hershey to become a bit . . . confused.”

It was her word choice that tipped me off. If she’d said any other adjective, I might’ve believed her. But Hershey wasn’t “confused” about anything.

“Trust me when I say it’s in everyone’s best interest—including yours—that she not be on campus anymore. Out of respect for Hershey’s privacy, I’d ask that you’d leave it at that.” Trust her? Not on my life.

“Where is she now?” I asked. “I want to talk to her.”

“I strongly suggest that you focus your energy on your own well-being and let Hershey attend to hers.” How was it that the woman could make everything sound like a threat?

I expected her to turn away then, the way she always did when she was finished with me, but she reached out and took hold of my necklace instead, examining it in her palm. I resisted the urge to step back, out of her reach, knowing how it would look to her if I did.

“Pythagoras’s letter,” she said, raising her eyes to meet mine.

I put on a bland smile, refusing to give her the satisfaction of a reaction. “Oh?”

“The upsilon,” she replied, letting go of the pendant at last. “Pythagoras saw it as an emblem of the choice between the path of virtue and the path of vice. One leads to happiness, the other to self-annihilation.” She cocked her head, the corners of her mouth turning up a little. “A fitting choice for someone like you.”

“I have class,” I said abruptly. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Though I wanted to sprint from the room, I forced myself to walk until I made it to the courtyard. When I hit the grass, I broke into a run, charging toward the woods.

I arrived at Paradiso out of breath and light-headed, my eyes like little fireballs in my skull.

“You look awful,” North said when he saw me, coming around the counter to meet me.

“Gee, thanks.”

He put his palm on my forehead. “You have a fever.”

“I do not,” I said, pushing his hand out of the way and putting mine there instead. “I don’t even feel hot.”

“That’s because your hand is as warm as your forehead, genius.” I punched him in the arm and he laughed. “So what are you doing here?” he asked. “Don’t you have class?”

“Hershey got kicked out of school.”

North’s mouth dropped. “What?”

“Dismissed for ‘psychological reasons.’ It’s a complete load of crap, obviously. Tarsus just got rid of her because Hershey stood up to her.”

“And Tarsus is who, again?”

“The teacher Hershey was spying for. She doesn’t think I should be at Theden because of my mom. Hershey told me she was going to tell Tarsus she wouldn’t do it anymore. I guess this is where that got her.”

North looked skeptical. “Does this Tarsus woman really have the power to get Hershey kicked out like that? I’d think there’d be a whole process, doctors’ signatures, stuff like that.”

“That’s why I need to see Hershey’s psych eval,” I told him. “Can you h—” I stopped myself before I said “hack” and lowered my voice. “Can you help me get it?”

“I’ll try,” North said. “She was at the campus health center?”

I nodded.

He glanced over his shoulder. “I should probably get back to work,” he said apologetically. “Kate has the flu, so we’re understaffed. But I get off at four and can look into the Hershey stuff then. You want to come over after your last class and we can do it together?”

“That would be great,” I said, pulling out my handheld to check the time. “I should get going anyway. My calculus class started five minutes ago.”

“Will you please stop at the drugstore first and get something for your fever? It’ll take two minutes. I’d give you something, but Kate cleaned out our medicine drawer last night.”

“You’re worried about me,” I said, and smiled.

“Nah. It’s purely selfish. I want to be able to kiss you without infecting myself.”

I punched him in the arm. He caught my fist and touched it to his lips. “I’ll see you later,” he said, then jogged backward toward the register, as if he didn’t want to take his eyes off me. “Go get some medicine,” he instructed, pointing at the door.

“Yes, sir,” I said, giving him a little salute.

The drugstore was just at the corner, so I stopped in for a bottle of Tylenol and a Powerade. There was a crowd of people at the pharmacy window, lined up for the flu vaccine. Crap. I hadn’t gotten mine yet. My dad had sent a text to remind me, but I’d just spaced, mostly because I’d never had to think about it before. At Roosevelt, the school nurse came around with a cart at the start of flu season. I’d seen something in the Theden Herald about a free flu clinic on campus, but obviously I hadn’t followed through. And now I was paying for it.

“I guess Lux is good for some things,” I muttered as I stood in the ridiculous line to pay. If I’d been syncing the app to my calendar like I normally did, Lux would’ve reminded me that I was due for my vaccine.

I took four Tylenol and pounded the Powerade, then tossed the empty bottle into a trash can on the green. It sunk into the bin without hitting the metal rims. In my head, I heard Beck doing his crowd-goes-wild sound and smiled.

It was just before seven in Seattle. Beck always left for school at 6:45. I turned off the sidewalk into the woods and dialed his number, resigned to the fact that I wasn’t going to make it to calculus. One skipped class wouldn’t kill me. I was sick after all.

Beck picked up on the third ring. “I’ve discovered the most perfect breakfast food ever invented.”

“Hello to you, too,” I said, the top layer of my anxiety melting away as soon as I heard his voice.

“Egg white frittata. It tastes like an omelet, but—” His voice got muffled as he took a bite. “You can eat it with your hands. While walking to school.”

“A revelation,” I said. “Hey, why haven’t you returned any of my calls?”

“You’ve been busy,” Beck said between bites.

“How would you know? You haven’t called.”

“Ah, but if I had, I would’ve gotten your voicemail, and that would’ve been inefficient.” I had never, in our eight years of friendship, heard Beck use the word inefficient.

“Come again?”

“I had Lux schedule a call back. Since we haven’t called you back yet, I can assume there hasn’t been a good time.”

I would’ve thought he was joking, but there wasn’t a punch line. “You’re using Lux?”

“I know. Your world is officially rocked right now. But part of the deal for the beta test was that we had to use all the preinstalled apps. Lux is even more integrated with the operating system on the Gold, so it’s hard not to. Not that I would try to avoid it now. How did I ever get by without it? I’m actually sort of pissed at you for not making me use it before.”

That one was definitely a joke. I’d gone as far as offering to clean out Beck’s locker if he’d commit to using Lux for a week, and he’d turned me down.

“Wait, so you’re using it, and liking it?”

“What’s not to like? My life is like a well-oiled machine. I haven’t been late to school in a month, I’m a day ahead in all my classes, and I no longer get the shits after lunch.” Beck used to insist on eating a ham and cheese sandwich from the coffee cart every day despite the fact that he’s severely lactose intolerant. “It’s amazing. I’m operating at, like, eight hundred and forty-eight percent. I don’t even have to think anymore.”

I don’t even have to think. It’d never bothered me before, how little thinking Lux users had to do. How little thinking Lux users wanted to do. That’s why we used the app, after all. It did the work for us. But when did decision-making become such a chore? I shivered, wrapping my bare arms around my rib cage.

“Hey, Beck,” I said, interrupting him. “I—I have to tell you something. It’s about my dad.” I took an unsteady breath.

“I definitely want to hear about it, Ro, but I’ve got trig in two minutes, and Lux is pinging me to hurry. Talk later?”

“Sure,” I said, hiding my disappointment. There was a click and he was gone.

I called Hershey next. My call went straight to voicemail so I logged on to Forum to see where she was.

@HersheyClements: Even the bathrooms are better in first class

was Hershey’s most recent status update, sent ten minutes ago from somewhere over Nebraska. I messaged her. Call me when u land.

The dorms were quiet as I mounted the steps to our room. Our room. There was no “our” anymore, despite the fact that the space looked the same as it always had, with Hershey’s stuff everywhere. All at once, the reality of the past twenty-four hours descended like a heavy cloak around me. My dad—the man who’d taught me how to ride a bike and who’d worn a tiara to my ninth birthday because I told him only princesses were allowed—wasn’t actually my dad. My mom was a pregnant high school dropout. And a liar. My faculty adviser was out to get me. My roommate had betrayed me, which was bad enough, and then gotten kicked out of school when she tried to make it right, which was ten times worse. And, to top it all off, I had the freaking flu.

The tears I’d been holding back came pouring out of me in giant, racking sobs. I pressed my face to my pillow, letting myself scream. When my throat was raw, I sat up, wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my sweater, and resolved that I wouldn’t cry again. I’d wanted the truth, and the truth was what I’d gotten. Some of it, anyway. And if I wanted the rest, I couldn’t back down now.

“I’m listening,” I said to the voice. But there was only silence. Then I curled up in a fetal position and went to sleep.

I stared at him. “What do you mean she never went to the health center?”

After a two-hour nap and another two Tylenol, I was wrapped in a blanket on North’s couch while he worked on his laptop beside me. He’d managed to hack the health center’s patient records database but hadn’t found a psych eval in Hershey’s file, so he’d tracked her Gemini’s GPS instead.

“She was in your dorm building all night,” North replied, pointing at the GPS log on his screen. “She left early this morning and went to a house on High Street, then went straight from there to the airport less than thirty minutes later.”

“But she wasn’t in our room last night,” I told him. “Unless she somehow came in while I was sleeping?” I thought about it then shook my head. “Her bed was made this morning.”

“Then maybe she just left her phone there and came to get it before you woke up,” North suggested.

That seemed plausible. Every time Hershey had snuck out to meet her mystery guy, she left her phone behind. “Okay, so where’d she go after that?”

North reached for the tablet on the coffee table. “That one doesn’t even take any hacking skills. It’s all public record.” He launched a property finder app and typed in the address from his computer screen. “Whoa,” he said when the results popped up. He handed me the tablet.

My eyes went straight to the word owner then went wide when I saw the last name. Tarsus.

“She went to confront her,” I said. “Just like I thought. But there’s no record of her checking into the health center, and no evaluation in her file?”

“Nope. She went straight from that address to Logan Airport.”

“So Tarsus lied.”

“From what you’ve told me about this woman, are you surprised?”

He had a point.

“How did Tarsus get her to leave, then?” It didn’t make any sense. Hershey wouldn’t give up Theden voluntarily, not after she’d survived midterms and made the decision to focus. I pictured her tearstained face the night before the second day of exams. No, she wouldn’t have gone without a fight. So what did Tarsus have on her? “Ugh,” I said, nearly shaking with frustration. “Every time I think I’ve gotten more of the truth I realize how little of it I have.” I threw the blanket off and stood up. I instantly felt dizzy and put my hand on the arm of the couch to steady myself. “Why does that woman hate me so much?”

“You think it’s all connected?” North asked. “Your mom, this Tarsus woman, the stuff in your Lux profile?” I hadn’t yet told North what I’d pieced together about my dad not being my dad. It was too fresh a wound to make it permanent with spoken words.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “I wish there was a way to find out who those social security numbers belong to.”

“I’ll try to get into the Social Security Administration’s database,” offered North.

“I thought you said you’d tried that already.”

“Not the SSA directly. The kind of thing I do, my clients give me their social security numbers going in. I try not to go anywhere I don’t need to go. It just increases the risk of detection.”

“I don’t want you to do anything risky for me,” I said quickly.

“Good thing I’m not doing it for you, then,” he said. He pulled up the website for the Social Security Administration on his tablet.

“You can do it right from there?” I asked.

“No, this is just research,” he explained, finger scrolling to the bottom of the page. “See that G? That means they use a Gnosis firewall.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It makes it harder. Maybe not impossible. It’ll take me a couple of days.” He set his tablet on the coffee table then reached for my hand. As soon as his skin touched mine, he shot to his feet. “Rory, you’re burning up,” he said, laying his palm on my forehead. “When was the last time you took something?”

“An hour ago,” I said. “Have you gotten the flu spray? I’m probably infecting you.”

“I don’t do vaccinations,” North said. “But my immune system is superhuman. I’ll be fine. You, on the other hand, worry me. You need medicine.”

“I’m fine.” But the truth was, I didn’t feel fine. I felt awful.

“Rory, if you want to fight the forces of evil, you need your strength.” He said it with a completely straight face. I laughed lightly.

“Is that what I’m doing?”

“I wouldn’t rule it out,” he said, and helped me to my feet.