Free to Fall

21

I SET MY ALARM as an afterthought, certain I wouldn’t sleep well enough to need it, and it was a good thing I did because I’m not sure I would’ve woken up before noon without it. I slept deeply and dreamlessly that night and woke up in the same position I’d been in when I’d lain down. My mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls, but otherwise I felt pretty good. Better, at least. I touched my handheld to my head to check if I had a fever. “Your temperature is in the normal range” came Lux’s reply. I hadn’t heard her voice in more than a week. There was a time when I talked to Lux more than I talked to anyone else.

Clearly, those days were gone. I’d been consulting Lux so infrequently that I spaced on dropping my dirty clothes at the campus laundry service on Friday. I had nothing clean. After hesitating for a split second at the door of her closet, I put on Hershey’s stretch velvet pants, which were too long but looked okay tucked into boots, and one of the four gray cashmere sweaters I found wadded up on her shelf.

Izzy was in the courtyard when I came out of the building, drinking coffee from a paper cup and reading something on her tablet, her cheeks red from the cold. She wasn’t wearing a jacket. “Hey,” I said coming up to her. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to get through three more chapters before lit. We have a quiz on the first half of Atlas Shrugged today.” She looked up at me with tired eyes. “I kept falling asleep in my room,” she explained. “I thought the cold would keep me up.”

I clapped my hand to my mouth. We were in the same class. I’d forgotten about the quiz. Izzy saw the look on my face.

“You haven’t finished either?”

“Haven’t even started.”

Izzy scooted over on the bench. “Room for one more,” she said. “We’ve got an hour till practicum and all of lunch period. If you skim, you’ll finish.”

“I can’t right now,” I said. “I have to meet someone.” I had to know what North had uncovered about my mom. I’d deal with the quiz later.

“Oooh, a guy?” Izzy put her tablet down and gave me a once-over. “Is that why you look so nice?”

“Sort of.”

“It’s sort of a guy, or that’s sort of why you look nice?”

“I can’t really talk about it,” I said. Then, because that sounded too cryptic, I said, “We’re not telling anyone about us yet.”

“What is it with you and Hershey and your secret boyfriends?” Izzy made a pouty face. “Ugh. Can you at least tell me where I can find one? Hey, where’s Hershey been, anyway? I haven’t seen her in days.”

“She, uh, left school.”

Izzy’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “What do you mean she left school? For what?”

“She’s taking some time off,” I said vaguely, not wanting to say too much. “I don’t really know details. I’ll see you later, okay?” Before Izzy could respond, I walked off, taking long strides to get out of earshot before she could ask another question.

As I was cutting across the quad, I spotted Dr. Tarsus coming toward me. Our eyes met, and she pointed at a nearby bench. I walked over to it but didn’t sit. Neither did she.

She cut right to the chase. “Hershey didn’t make it home yesterday afternoon.”

My stomach dropped. “What do you mean?”

“Her family sent a car to the airport, but Hershey never met the driver. A flight attendant found her handheld in the pocket of the seat in front of her on the plane.”

“Her parents sent a car?” Clearly this was not the key piece of information here, but my brain couldn’t get past it. Their only child was kicked out of school for psychological reasons and the Clements couldn’t even be bothered to pick her up from the airport.

“Have you spoken to her?”

I kept my face neutral. “You told me not to contact her.”

“And yet you called and texted her.” Tarsus saw my surprise. “Her parents checked her phone records. Has she responded?”

I shook my head, sick with dread. What if Hershey was dead in a ditch somewhere because of me? “They don’t have any idea where she is?”

“Not yet. They’re calling friends in the area. She withdrew some cash from their account before she got on the plane in Boston, so they assume she had this plan in place before she left.”

I exhaled. “So they think she’s okay?”

“At this point. But, Rory, it’s very important that they find her. If you know where she is—”

“I don’t,” I said quickly. “I haven’t spoken to her since the night before she left.”

This seemed to satisfy Tarsus. “Well, if you hear from her, let me know.”

I nodded. “I will.”

Tarsus eyed me for another moment, then turned and walked off.

I waited until she’d disappeared into the dining hall to cross into the woods toward downtown.

North waved me in when he saw me outside Paradiso’s bay window. I could tell from the look on his face that he’d been successful. He pointed at a corner table. “My break’s in five minutes,” he called. “Want anything?”

“Coffee,” I said. “And one of those.” I pointed at the biggest, stickiest pastry in the display case.

North joined me at the table a few minutes later. “You found her file,” I said, tearing off a piece of the pastry. It was soft and sweet, melting against the roof of my mouth. I hadn’t had a pastry in years. My breakfast options with Lux had ranged from oatmeal with almonds to scrambled egg whites and toast. An eight hundred calorie mountain of sugar, butter, and pastry flour was never the reasonable breakfast choice. I tore off another piece.

“I did. And you were right; there was no mention of a pregnancy anywhere. But I cracked the metadata on all those psych entries. Rory, they weren’t added to your mom’s file until June.”

“I don’t understand. She was expelled in May.”

“Yeah, according to an expulsion notice that was added to her file a whole month after it was supposedly issued.”

“What are you saying?”

“I don’t know. Maybe there’s a reasonable explanation for the delay. Maybe her doctor sucked at charting.” He hesitated. “Or maybe someone was trying to make her look crazy.”

I stared at him, the pastry forgotten on my plate. “Someone like who?”

“I don’t know,” North replied. “But maybe Griffin does.”

“You figured out how to get to him?”

“Turns out the Gemini Gold launch party is this Friday night. Griffin is giving the keynote.”

“Those tickets have to be thousands of dollars.”

“Worse. They’re not even for sale.” He smiled. “Good thing we’re on the guest list.”