Free to Fall (12 page)

I ignored the ache in my chest as he kissed me. I would not think about North right now. I would not picture him in his tomato-stained T-shirt, sitting on his worn-out couch surrounded by obsolete technology and dog-eared paperbacks, Mohawked and tattooed and completely adorable. Liam was nice, and he was smart, and he wasn’t embarrassed to be associated with me. These were not insignificant traits.

I put my palms on his chest and kissed him back. But when I felt his tongue brush my lips, I pulled away. “We should get back to the party,” I said, fumbling for the door behind me.

He started to protest, but I already had the door open. “I’ll meet you back out there,” I said, not meeting his gaze. “I’m just gonna run to the bathroom.” I felt him reach for my hand, but I was already halfway out the door.

“Rory.”

Please don’t ask me why. I don’t want to lie to you, and I can’t tell you the truth. I can’t tell you that the whole time we were kissing, I was wishing you were someone else.

“
Hm?”

“Your mask,” he said, and handed it to me. He was still standing in the booth and had to hold the door open to keep it from springing shut between us.

“Thanks,” I said brightly. “See you in a second.” I had no idea where the ladies’ room was, but I strode with purpose back into the main room as if I did. When I didn’t immediately see it, I hurried toward the stairs on the other side of the rotunda, to the balcony above.
What was I doing? Hiding?

There was a man on the steps, all muscle and dressed in black like a security guard. I hesitated when I saw him, expecting him to tell me I couldn’t be up there. But he just looked me over and stepped aside to let me pass. When I reached the landing, I went to the railing, wrapping my palms around it. The gold plating was cool on my skin. I spotted Liam below me and instinctively stepped back into the shadows.

“They never think to look up,” a voice behind me said. Griffin Payne—
the
Griffin Payne, CEO of Gnosis, Griffin Payne—was leaning against a marble column, a shiny Gemini Gold in his hand. His mask, black and feathered with a pointed beak, was pushed off his face, and his smile was friendly. “Every year I come up here, and I’m always amazed—not so much as a glance.”

“You’ve conditioned them to look down,” I said, with a nod at the Gold in his hand. My mask bobbed a little, knocking against my collarbone.

He laughed. “I suppose that’s true.” He stepped forward and extended his hand. “I’m Griffin, by the way.” Like everyone in America didn’t know who he was.

“Rory,” I said, quickly wiping my palm on my dress before shaking his hand, hoping the sweat wouldn’t stain. As we shook hands, I noticed his ring. It was bulky, like a class ring, but instead of a gemstone there were four symbols in Arabic, or maybe Hebrew. I thought of the Greek letter on my pendant, but these were clearly different.

“You get to play God up here,” Griffin said then, stepping up to the railing. “Silently judging everyone below. Take that guy, for instance”—he pointed down at one of Liam’s friends, a kid whose wild, shaggy hair was sticking up through the blowhole of his orca mask—“he’s gonna regret that do. He thinks it’s cool now, but he’ll look back at his class photo and wonder what in the hell he was thinking.”

I giggled.

“Oh, this isn’t just a guess,” Griffin assured me. “I know from personal experience. If you’re ever in need of a serious gut-busting bout of hilarity, just take a stroll down the fourth floor of Adams Hall. Fifth picture down. I’m the guy with the white-boy Afro. It ain’t pretty.”

I giggled again. On TV Griffin seemed so . . . intense. But in person he was laid-back and funny.

“What year did you grad—?” I was interrupted by the sound of footsteps.

“There you are,” a voice boomed.

Griffin and I both turned. The man’s face was hidden inside the head of a bald eagle, but his voice had given him away. It was Dean Atwater.

“Hiding again?” the dean asked as he strode toward us, his voice echoing a little in his mask.

“Not very well, apparently,” Griffin replied. Dean Atwater chuckled then turned to me. Each eye was two concentric circles, shiny and black inside of white, and though I knew they had to be transparent on his end, they were opaque on mine. I saw no trace of the man inside.

“You look wonderful tonight, Rory. Though I’d encourage you to spend time at the party, not above it.” His tone was light but it felt like an indictment.

“Yes, of course,” I said quickly. “I was on my way back down.” I turned to Griffin. “It was very nice to meet you, Mr. Payne.” He’d introduced himself as Griffin, but I felt weird calling him that in front of the dean.

Griffin smiled kindly. “The pleasure was mine.”

I gave them both an awkward little wave then headed toward the stairs, gripping my dress in both hands so as not to trip over it.

“Rory!” I heard Griffin call. I turned back around. “Keep us in mind when internship time rolls around,” he said. “I’ll look out for your application.”

I bobbed my head. “Will do,” I called back. “Thank you!”

Beaming, I made my way down the steps. An internship with Gnosis meant a very good shot at a
job
at Gnosis.

I stopped on the last step to scan the room. Liam was still with his friends, and didn’t seem to be looking for me. I didn’t see Hershey or the guy in the bear mask. I slipped my phone from my clutch and raised it to my lips. “Should I date Liam Stone?” I asked Lux.

“You’d make a good match” came Lux’s reply. I brought the phone back to my lips, ready to ask about North, when I realized I couldn’t. North didn’t use Lux, so he didn’t have a profile for the app to analyze. If I wanted to assess our compatibility, I’d have to do it myself.

There was a commotion behind me as Griffin and Dean Atwater descended the steps, the man in black at Griffin’s elbow. I stepped aside to let them pass, and pulled out my Gemini. Griffin had topped
Forbes
magazine’s “40 Under 40” list last year, so I knew he had to be in his thirties, which meant there was at least a chance he’d been in my mom’s class. Panopticon had my answer:

At sixteen, Payne was admitted into Theden Academy, an exclusive preparatory school in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts. He graduated from Theden Academy in 2013 and interned that summer in Gnosis’s research and development department. He returned to Gnosis as Director of Product Design after graduating from Harvard College in 2017.

2013. He was in my mom’s class.

Needing to see for myself, I left the rotunda through the side door and went straight to Adams Hall. To my surprise, the main entrance was unlocked. Except for the faint green glow of the emergency lights, the building was pitch-black. Using my phone’s flashlight, I mounted the steps to the fourth floor.

The walls were lined with Theden class photos. The official kind, shot in black-and-white, with a placard proclaiming the year. I stopped at the first one. The image was grainy and the students’ clothing was more conservative than what we wore, but otherwise it looked how my class photo might, smiling teenagers in dressy clothes lined up on risers in front of the Grand Rotunda.
CLASS OF 1954
, the placard at the bottom declared. I kept moving down the hall, counting the frames. The years jumped around. They weren’t in any particular order.

Griffin’s class was exactly where he said it’d be, fifth one down. He stood in the center of the group, smiling broadly, his hair looking like he’d stuck his fingers in an old electrical socket. I slid my light down to the bottom of the frame, looking for the placard with the class year.

CLASS OF 2013.

My light jumped wildly from corner to corner as I looked for my mom, too impatient to scan the rows one by one. The students were all wearing short sleeves, which means the photo could’ve been taken in the early fall or late spring. If it was the latter, my mom may have already been gone.

It was my own face that caught my eye. Standing right next to Griffin in the center of the photo, the very last place I looked. Of course it wasn’t my face, it was hers, but a stranger wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. Her eyes, her cheekbones, the shape of her nose. They were my features on a taller, more willowy frame. Our coloring was different—she was auburn and olive, while I was chestnut and fair—but you couldn’t tell that in black-and-white. I could see my face reflected in the glass between us, painted with Hershey’s makeup, and it looked less like mine than the girl’s in this old photograph did. Stepping closer, I pressed my hand to the glass, not caring about fingerprints, just wanting to connect to the girl on the other side.

I stood there for a few moments, trying to step into the moment the photograph had captured. My mom, standing with her classmates, smiling a confident smile. There was no trace of uncertainty in her eyes, no hint of what would come next. If she was struggling at Theden, this photo didn’t show it.

My Gemini lit up in the dark.

@LiamStone:
where r u?

I sighed audibly. I couldn’t hide out in this dark hallway forever. I snapped a few pics of the class photo with my Gemini, but my built-in flash created a glare on the glass. Without the flash, I couldn’t see the photo at all. The best I could do was hold my handheld at an angle and move in tight on my mom. The shot I ended up with was a close-up of just her. The blue Forum icon popped on screen:
Post photo to your wall?

My finger hovered above my screen. I posted everything to Forum. But this photo couldn’t be summarized in some pithy caption. I tapped the word
NO
and the pop-up box disappeared. Instead I called Beck, the only person other than my dad who would understand what finding the photo meant to me without me having to explain it.

“Hey,” he said, picking up on the second ring. “Aren’t you supposed to be at that fancy dance of yours?”

“I am,” I replied. “But I just found this picture of my mom, and I—”

“Text it to me,” he said.

I heard a ding through the phone as my message popped up on his screen. I was looking at it on my end too.

“Wow,” he said. “She looks just like you.”

“I know, right?”

“You send it to your dad?”

“Not yet,” I said, but the truth was, I wasn’t sure I was going to. I knew how hard it was for him to look at pictures of her. “Well, I should probably get back to the party.”

“I’m glad you found it,” Beck said.

“Me too.”

I walked slowly back to the rotunda, across the grass this time, my heels sinking in the soft ground with each step, thinking about the girl in that photograph. She was a complete enigma to me. She’d walked across this same lawn, yet it felt to me like she’d inhabited a separate universe. Would she ever be more to me than a face that looked like mine?

Liam signaled for me the moment I entered the rotunda. He was standing with a group of faculty members in various reptilian masks. I looked for the serpent mask but didn’t see it.

I pretended not to see Liam and looked for Griffin. He was easy to spot: Surrounded by a group of aging alumni on the far side of the room, Griffin was talking animatedly with his hands. I caught the word
empire
on his lips.

“Hey,” Liam called, coming toward me. “Where’d you go?”

“I was looking for Hershey,” I lied. “Have you seen her?”

“Not in a while,” Liam replied. “Wanna dance?”

He held out his hand and in my mind I decided to take it. To dance with him, to try to enjoy myself. But then I looked down at the hand he held out to me. How different it was from the hand that caught me when I tripped on the sidewalk last week. That one was cracked and stained and caked with coffee grounds, the nails bitten down to the quick. And when it had caught my arm, I’d felt it down my spine.

“I have to go,” I said suddenly.

“Go where?” Liam asked, looking confused.

“I just have to go.”

Liam said something after that, but I didn’t hear it. I was already at the door. I knew I should still be mad at North for how he treated me in front of Hershey, and I was. So mad I could punch him in the face. But that anger did nothing to quell my sudden need to see him.

I stopped by the dorms to drop off my mask and get a jacket, worrying for a sec that Hershey would be there, passed out or puking. But our room was empty. Feeling my confidence wane just a bit, I dug through Hershey’s drawers in search of her stash of airplane alcohol. But she’d either finished it or hidden it well; all I found was a half-empty mini bottle of Kahlúa. I downed the rest of it, gargled some mouthwash, and left.

It was late and dark and cold, and I was missing the most important event of the fall semester. But I didn’t care. I wanted to see North. And now that I let myself want it, I
really
wanted it. I felt it on my skin, in the back of my throat, underneath my ribs. As I walked, I rehearsed what I would say. I’d be casual. I’d joke that I couldn’t live another day without seeing
Rocky
. Then he’d apologize for the way he acted last weekend, promise me it’d never happen again. The whole encounter unfolded so smoothly in my head that I was genuinely surprised when I stepped up to the café’s bay window and didn’t see him inside.

Without thinking, I kept walking. Around the building and through the door and up the stairs to North’s landing where I rapped my knuckles against his cold metal door without a second’s hesitation. The door couldn’t open fast enough.

Until it did.

My stomach, and all the excitement that had been bubbling up in my chest, crashed to my knees when I saw the look on North’s face.

“What are you doing here?” he said in a low voice, stepping into the crack between the door and its frame.

“I, uh . . . ,” Mortified, I dropped my eyes to the ground. There was a parcel there, wrapped in brown paper, addressed to Norvin Pascal. I saw North see it too. He bent quickly to pick it up. My eyes went to the space where he’d been standing, my gaze pulled into his living room by the flash of red I saw there.