Free to Fall (13 page)

Hershey’s dress was draped across his couch.

North straightened up, blocking my view again. “You should go,” he said quietly.

Dumbly, I nodded.
Why is Hershey’s dress on your couch?
my insides were screaming. But my brain knew. It’d already put the pieces in place. This was why North hadn’t wanted me to tell anyone we’d hung out. Why Hershey had wanted to go by Paradiso that morning, and why North had acted so weird when we did. He was the guy Hershey was hooking up with. Her secret scandalous fling.

“I can explain,” he said then, even quieter now.

“No need,” I said, anger burning my throat. “I get it.” I wanted to spin on my heels and stomp out, but the stairs and my stilettos were a dangerous combination. So I simply turned and walked down carefully, praying that he couldn’t see me shaking. A second later I heard the door click shut.

12

I TOOK A LONG SIP OF THE COFFEE
I’d smuggled into the stacks, lukewarm now. You could bring drinks into the library’s main study lounge, but I wanted to be alone today, so I was at a desk in the stacks, eating cereal from a plastic Baggie, drinking weak dining hall coffee, and blinking back tears.

I tried again to focus on my screen, my eyes burning with fatigue. I’d fallen asleep quickly the night before after practically running back to my room, but I’d woken up again when Hershey crept in just after midnight and was still awake when everyone else began trickling back to the dorms a little before one. After that, sleep eluded me. I stared at the ceiling as the hours dragged by until finally, at six, I got up and went here. Except for a quick dining hall run when it opened at eight, I’d been in this chair all day, trying to work on my cog psych paper but mostly thinking about North. I felt like such an idiot. We’d hung out twice, both times alone, and both times he’d kept it completely platonic. I couldn’t even be mad at him. He couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d tried.

Ding! A pop-up box appeared on my screen:
You will be logged out due to inactivity in sixty seconds.

I sighed and tapped
CONTINUE
. How long had I been staring at these same search results? I was clicking through health files of patients with akratic paracusia, looking for subtle connections between them, but all I was finding were not-so-subtle ones. It was the same story over and over. Previously sane person starts hearing a voice in her head. Person starts adhering to the voice’s commands. Person engages in increasingly irrational, self-sacrificing behavior. Suddenly she’s quitting her job or giving all her money away or inviting ex-cons to dinner. Family members freak and intervene. Person resists medication. Person’s life falls apart.

After that, one of two things always happened. Either the person was forced into treatment by a concerned family member or simply fell off the grid. It wasn’t clear where people in this second category went, but the entries in their medical files just stopped. No annual physicals, no checkups, no routine immunizations. They’re unemployable without these things, so it’s not as if they’re off leading normal, productive lives. I couldn’t help but think of the photographs Beck took that day in Tent City, images of men with wild eyes and women with vacant ones. Had they heard the Doubt? Had it led them over the edge?

My handheld buzzed with a text.

@HersheyClements:
where r u? im starving. meet at the dh?

I fired back a reply without thinking:
already ate. studying.

I wasn’t angry with Hershey. I didn’t have a right to be. She didn’t know that North and I had hung out. But I couldn’t act as if nothing had happened, either. So I was avoiding her, at least for now.

My handheld buzzed again.

@NathanKrinsky:
Come by the café. Pls. There’s something u need to c.

The profile pic belonged to another one of North’s coworkers, a guy I’d seen mopping the floors.

My chest fluttered and I hated myself for it. No, I would
not
come by the café. Not today, not ever. I started to punch out a reply but thought better of it. Instead I blocked @NathanKrinsky and buried my handheld in my bag.

Unfortunately, there was no block function in my brain. I couldn’t stop myself from replaying those horrific, mortifying moments in my head, the look on North’s face when he saw me, and worse, the sight of Hershey’s dress on his couch when he bent down to get that package at his door. It struck me now that he’d seemed, at least for a second, more concerned about the package than he had about my presence. Why?

I pictured the brown parcel in my head. Addressed to Norvin Pascal at North’s address.
Was Norvin his real name?

When I searched the name on Forum, only one page popped up. My breath snagged in my throat when I saw the profile pic. Even without enlarging it, I knew it was of North.

In disbelief, I scrolled through his profile. All that stuff about Forum being an “invisible cage”? It was bullshit. He was on all the time. And his status updates were gross.

@NorvinPascal:
When people say they’re having a good hair day, all I can think is “Sometimes you have bad hair days??” And I wonder what that’s like. #rockthehawk #blessed

I almost barfed on my screen.

With another annoying ding, the DPH pop-up box reappeared, blocking my view of North’s page and snapping me out of my stupor. I had work to do.
It
mattered. This other crap didn’t.

I tapped my screen to stay logged in then scrolled back up to the top of my list to remind myself what I was looking at. I’d decided to explore environmental triggers of APD first, so I’d narrowed my results to females in the Pacific Northwest. Next I’d sort by age. As I was tapping the “18–24” button, I accidentally hit the “Sort by Date” tab. The results automatically resorted by death date, putting the oldest files on top. I scrolled down, skimming stats, debating whether to open some of these older cases or go back to the newer ones, when one file in particular caught my eye.

Birth Date: April 13, 1995.

Gender: Female

Date of Death: March 21, 2014

It was the birth date that got my attention first. My mom’s birthday. My dad and I celebrated it every year with cake and ice cream at the diner in Belltown where he took her on their first date. But it was the death date that made the hair on the back of my neck prickle. It was a day we also commemorated with cake.
My
birthday.

Heart pounding, I clicked the link for the full file. The words on the screen ran together as I sped to the bottom of the page. The last entry was dated March 21, 2014. I clicked on it and audibly gasped. It was stamped with the logo of the University of Washington Medical Center, the hospital where I was born. As I scrolled down, my eyes grabbed ahold of words and phrases as my brain struggled to make sense of them.

Patient presented with severe labor pains after twenty-two hours of active labor at home. Ultrasound consistent with fetal post-maturity syndrome and acute oligohydramnios. Patient underwent an emergency cesarean section and delivered a 3.2 kg female. Immediately following the procedure, patient began exhibiting signs of respiratory distress and lost consciousness. CT scan revealed large thromboembolism in right lung. Patient was pronounced dead at 16:05. Cause of death: pulmonary thromboembolism.

My thoughts stalled as I read and reread the words
pulmonary thromboembolism
, over and over. This was my mom’s medical file. It had to be. The birthday, the death date, the baby delivered by cesarean section at UW hospital, the particular cause of death. All of it lined up. But this patient had APD.

My brain, normally so practical, refused to accept the evidence in front of it. There must’ve been some other eighteen-year-old girl who delivered a baby by emergency C-section at UW hospital on my birthday and then died from a blood clot. Or maybe my mom’s file had just been miscoded with the APD diagnosis and showed up in my search results by mistake.

Or my mom was crazy.

All my fears about my own sanity swelled to the surface. I knew from my research that if my mom had APD, then my own risk for developing the disorder was three times the average. Suddenly I saw all my uncertainty about the Doubt in a new light. It wasn’t healthy skepticism. It was neurosis. People with APD didn’t think they were sick.

My pulse was drumming in my ears as I scrolled back up to the top of my mom’s file and clicked on the first entry. Forcing myself to read slowly, I moved through the file methodically, starting with the entry from her birth in 1995, going over yearly checkups and sick visits, a broken ankle at age seven, stitches for a busted elbow at nine, an appendectomy at fourteen. Normal kid stuff. No mention of voices or mental illness or any psychological issues at all. I felt myself begin to relax. Maybe her file had been miscoded, like I’d thought. Maybe she didn’t have APD after all.

I was midway through an entry dated April 2013 when I saw the words that removed any doubt whose file it was.
Theden Health Center.
The paragraphs that followed were a depressing description of a very disturbed young woman who was on the brink of failing out of school. It was a psych eval, signed by a Dr. K. Hildebrand, and at the bottom was a tentative diagnosis:
Behavior symptomatic of acute akratic paracusia and personality disorder.
The next entry, signed by the same doctor, was dated two weeks later and summarized test results from more than a dozen neurological and psychiatric exams, confirming the doctor’s initial diagnosis. At the bottom was the doctor’s prognosis:
Non-curative. Institutionalization recommended.

The next entry was a link to a “Notice of Expulsion” dated May 1, 2013.
Student no longer meets the psychological requirements for enrollment.
The document was signed by Dr. Hildebrand and Dean Atwater.

My mom didn’t drop out of Theden. They’d kicked her out.

Reeling, I went back to the very last entry in my mom’s file, the report from the day she died, and read it more closely. I didn’t know many of the medical terms I saw, but I could piece together what had happened based on what I already knew from my dad. My mom went into labor nearly three weeks early, and there were complications. They needed to do a C-section. A blood clot had formed in her leg, traveled to her lungs, and she was dead.

Before the pop-box reappeared again, I slid my finger to the top of my tablet and pressed the
PRINT SCREEN
button, saving the image of that final entry to my photobox, then I clicked over to look at it there. Then my eyes lost focus as I stared, unblinking, at my screen. Minutes, maybe an hour, passed as I sat there, not moving, not really thinking, just staring. When the pop-box reappeared again, I let the system log me out.

13

“TOMORROW, THEN,”
Liam said, his voice at my shoulder.

I kept my eyes on my tablet. It was the night before day two of fall midterms, and the library’s central reading room was packed. I’d deliberately chosen a corner table so I could be alone, but the water polo team had claimed the one behind me, and Liam’s seat backed up to mine. Right now he was tilted back in his chair, balancing on two legs as he twirled a stylus with his fingers. He’d asked me out at least twenty times in the past month, and each time I’d politely turned him down. If he were anyone else, I would’ve told him straight out to stop asking, but he was a society member and I didn’t know how much sway he had over tap decisions. I was pretty sure that made me gross and calculating, but I wasn’t about to let Liam keep me from getting in. I’d gotten eight more word puzzle texts, the most recent just the night before, and I’d solved all eight.

“Rory.” I could hear him smiling. “I’m willing to beg.”

“I can’t tomorrow,” I said.

“Saturday, then.”

“Let’s talk about it after midterms,” I said. It would be so much easier if he’d just get the picture here and let it go. But for some reason he seemed determined that we date.

I contemplated moving to the stacks, but I’d come without a jacket and it was freezing out, which meant the stacks would be an icebox. The crackle from the fireplace in the center of the reading room made it cozy, and the coziness was calming. Calming was good, since I was hovering on the brink of a major panic attack about our second day of exams. Day one was the left-brain subjects—calculus, comp sci, and Chinese. Tomorrow would be a thousand times worse: lit, history, cog psych, and the test I was dreading the most, our practicum performance exam. There was no way to prepare for it, which had me unhinged. I had no idea what to expect. No one did. The exam changed dramatically from year to year, so the second-years weren’t any help either.

One of Liam’s water polo buddies whispered something that the others found hilarious, and the table erupted into laughter. They were amped up on caffeine and sugar and getting more and more boisterous, and I was getting more and more nervous that I wasn’t prepared for the next day’s tests. I’d spent the past fourteen nights in the library, not leaving until well after midnight, despite Lux’s insistence that I needed at least eight hours of sleep.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Izzy enter the reading room and scan the tables for somewhere to sit. A few seconds later she was heading toward me. Quickly, I started packing up my things. I’d studied with her a few times over the past couple of weeks, and every time we’d talked more than we’d worked.

“Oh, no, you’re leaving already?”

I jumped just a little, as if she’d surprised me. I hated faking it, but our midterm scores were a huge part of our grade and if I wanted to do well, I couldn’t spend the rest of the night chatting about movies or makeup or the caloric value of the vending machine granola bars.

“Hey!” I said. “Yeah, Hershey and I are going to study together back in the room.” Internally, I winced. This wasn’t even remotely true. Hershey and I hadn’t
ever
studied together, and we certainly didn’t have plans to do it that night. As if it would mitigate the lie, I tacked on something true. “She hates the library.”

“Hershey
studies
?” Liam piped up. His teammates snickered.

“See you guys later,” I said, and walked out.

It was freezing outside and it was starting to sprinkle. I sprinted to the dorms, raindrops stinging my face, and was heaving by the time I got to our room. Hershey was at her desk, hunched over her tablet. I assumed she was studying, until I heard her sob.

“Hershey?” She didn’t react. I wondered if she’d even heard me. I dropped my bag onto my bed and moved toward her. She was really crying, her fists clenching and unclenching at her sides. I touched her shoulder and she looked up. Her face was puffy and red. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m going to fail,” she said, sobbing. Her voice was hoarse and raw. “Today was a disaster, and tomorrow—I haven’t even been doing the reading, Rory. Not at all. I thought—God, I don’t know what I thought. That I could just float by, the way I always have, I guess.” She shook her head.

“You’re not going to fail,” I said lamely, because that’s what friends say, and because that’s what we were, as complicated as our relationship had become.

“You think I deserve it,” she said then. Her eyes welled up with fresh tears. “My grandmother will hate me,” she whispered. “My parents. Oh God, my parents.” She pressed her palms to her face and said something else, but her words weren’t intelligible.

Help her.

Ever since finding out about my mom’s illness, I’d been stressing about hearing the Doubt again, afraid of what it would mean for me. Now it had spoken and I wasn’t scared of anything. I was pissed off. I’d already decided to help Hershey half a second before the voice spoke. Now if I did it, I’d be listening to the Doubt.

I looked at Hershey. She was five inches taller than I was, but she looked so small sitting there, her shoulders hunched and shaking.

This isn’t about you,
I snapped at the voice, as if it could hear me, then I put my hand on Hershey’s arm.

“I’ll help you study,” I said. My roommate dropped her hands and looked at me, blinking her swollen eyes in surprise.

“What about
your
exams?”

Hershey and I were on alternate schedules, which meant her second-day tests were the ones I’d already taken. Not a single subject overlapped.

I shrugged. “I’ll be fine,” I said, and tried to believe it. Yes, Hershey had gotten herself into this, and maybe she did deserve it, but I couldn’t let her fail out.

She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Thank you,” she said. Her eyes were glossy with gratitude and hope.

We started with comp sci, Hershey’s strong suit, and then moved to calc, mine. She was as unprepared as she said, but was a fast learner and grasped concepts quickly. Still, there was a lot of material to cover, and as the night drew on, we both began to drag.

At 3:30, we went down to the common room for vending machine coffee. Liam was there, practicing for his history oral exam. I angled my body away from him, keeping my eyes on my screen as I launched Lux. I changed my projected bedtime from midnight to four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, selected the “energy” and “stamina” filters, and then touched my sensor to the vending machine. A paper cup dropped down, followed by a stream of steaming black liquid.

“What’d you get?” Hershey asked.

“No idea,” I replied, lifting the cup from the tray. “I let Lux decide.” I took a sip. It was thick and strong. “A red-eye, tastes like. With stevia instead of sugar.”

“Done.” Hershey typed in her order then touched her Gemini to the vending machine. A second cup dropped down. I kept my back to Liam as we waited for the cup to fill.

I saw her eyes flick from me to him. “Did something happen between you guys?” she asked. “You cooled on him pretty quickly after your big date.”

“Liam and I are fine,” I insisted. “We’re just better as friends.”

“If you say so,” she said, reaching for her coffee. “I still think there’s something you’re not telling me.” My cheeks burned as the image of Hershey’s dress slung over North’s couch popped into my mind. Yes, there was something I wasn’t telling her, but it had nothing to do with Liam.

“We should get back to studying.” I picked up a lid for my cup and turned toward the door.

“Hey, Rory?”

“Hm?” I turned back around.

Hershey was looking down at her cup, her eyes hidden by a wall of dark hair. “Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Helping me.”

I answered instinctively. “Because you’re my friend.”

Hershey grabbed my hand and squeezed it. Her voice broke as she whispered something in reply. It was too quiet for me to make out, and I didn’t want to ask her to repeat it. But I kept replaying the moment as we ran through calc problems and her Chinese vocab list. It sounded like
I’m sorry.

We didn’t sleep. At seven in the morning we were still at it, but I could tell that Hershey was no longer panicking. She was ready. Maybe not for an A+ performance, but she’d pass. I, on the other hand, was screwed. It wasn’t like I hadn’t studied for my day-two exams at all, but I’d been relying on a final night-before push. Not to mention a solid six hours of sleep. Now here I was, an hour before my first test, queasy from the late-night coffee and so tired that my eyes felt like I’d soaked them in bleach and hung them in the desert to dry. I would’ve cried had I not been too dehydrated to produce tears.

I showered and put on a sweaterdress, hoping the outfit would perk me up a little, but I didn’t have the energy to dry my hair, so I twisted it into a knot and clipped it. Hershey was humming as she brushed her cheeks with bronzer, the bags under her eyes hidden behind concealer.

“I’m almost ready,” she said, catching my eyes in the mirror. “Want to grab a quick breakfast?” I knew food was a good idea, but I couldn’t imagine actually consuming it. My stomach was fizzy and sour, and the last thing I wanted to do right then was put something in it.

“I think I’ll wait,” I told her. “Get something after my practicum exam.”
Which starts in twenty-two minutes,
my mind was screaming. I slung my bag over my shoulder and started for the door.

“Just so you know,” Hershey said behind me. “I know why you really helped me.”

I turned back around. “What?”

“It was the Doubt.” Her voice was soft, but it echoed like a scream.

My brain stalled.
How could she possibly know?
My next thought was more practical.
Don’t get defensive.

“The Doubt?” I said with what I hoped was a quizzical smile. The effort hurt my face. “You think I hear the
Doubt
?”

“Well, I know your mom did,” she replied, sounding very sure.

I took a step back. “Excuse me?”

“I know your mom heard the Doubt.”

I stared at her. “Who told you that?”

“No one,” she said quickly. “I just figured it out.”
She’s lying
shot through my head. There’s no way she could’ve known about my mom. So who told her? Who else knew?

She seemed self-conscious now, as if this moment wasn’t unfolding the way she played it out in her head. Then again Hershey wasn’t exactly the type to think this sort of thing through before launching into it. “I mean, I’m not going to
tell
anyone—”

“I can’t talk about this right now,” I told her, turning away. “I have to go. Good luck on your tests.”

I pulled our door open and stepped into the hall, letting the old mahogany door shut behind me. Just before it closed, I glanced back and caught Hershey’s eye. “I don’t hear it,” I said, as convincingly as I could. The door closed before she could reply, but she didn’t need to. I could tell from her face that she didn’t believe me.