Free to Fall (7 page)

“It’s on me,” North said over the hiss of the steamer. “Well, as long as you take it to go.”

“You’re bribing me to leave?”

He flicked a switch and the hissing stopped. “Nope. I’m bribing you to come with me.”

My stomach fluttered just a little. “Come with you where?”

He glanced past me out the cafe’s bay window. A girl with a shaved head and a Paradiso T-shirt was quickly turning the hand crank to close it as lightning flickered menacingly on the other side. “You’ll see,” North said mysteriously, pouring milk into a paper cup with circular precision. With a few flicks of his wrist, he drew a perfect leaf in the foam. My eyes slid up his forearm to the words tattooed there. Only one line was legible at this angle.
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
There was no attribution, nothing to indicate whether it was something he had written or a line he’d taken from somewhere else.

“It’s T. S. Eliot,” North said. My head jerked up.

“I didn’t mean to—”

“It’s tattooed on my forearm,” North said, handing me my drink. “It’s meant to be read. But not right now, because we have to go.” He snapped a lid onto my cup.

“It’s about to start raining,” I pointed out.

“So we should hurry,” he said, giving his apron strings a tug. The girl who’d just been at the window had joined him behind the counter. North handed her his apron.

“You better hustle,” she told him. “It’s already raining on the mountain.”

“Just in time.” His eyes were bright with excitement. “Wait here,” he instructed me. “I’ll be right back.” Without pausing for my reply, he ducked into the kitchen.

“How do you know North?” the girl asked when he was gone.

“I don’t,” I said. “Uh, do you know where he’s going?”

“Do you have the key to the bottom cabinet?” North had reemerged with a backpack on one shoulder and a hoodie over his arm. The girl nodded, then slipped a key off her key ring and tossed it to him. He caught it easily. “Hand me your bag,” he told me.

I shook my head. “I can’t. I have homework to do.”

“We’ll be gone less than an hour,” North said, lifting my bag off my shoulder. “Your stuff will be fine.” I glanced at my Gemini, peeking out from my bag’s side pocket. “Unless, of course, you can’t go without your leash . . .” He looked at me, eyebrows raised, baiting me. I opened my mouth to tell him that I wasn’t going wherever he wanted to take me and I didn’t care if that made me lame. But he cut me off.

“I’m meeting the guys from Cardamon’s Couch to record some music,” he explained in a low voice. “And we need someone who can snap. Another friend of ours was supposed to do it, but she got called into work. We were gonna just do it without, but then you came in, and you’re such a stellar snapper. . . .” Outside, there was a loud crack of thunder. He looked past me, out the window. “Look, no big deal if you don’t want to come,” he said, sliding his arm through the other strap of his backpack. “I get that you barely know me. But I’ve got to get going, so . . .” He wasn’t going to try to convince me.

I looked over my shoulder at the darkening sky, wavering. He was right, I barely knew him. And I had homework to do. But that song I’d heard was
really
good. And I was curious. About the band. About him.

I met his gaze. “How much does this snapping gig pay?”

He grinned. “Free matcha for life.”

I handed him my bag, then looked at the girl with the shaved head. “I know your loyalty is probably to him, but if I’m not back in ninety minutes, call the police.”

7

A CEILING OF HEAVY STORM CLOUDS
had settled over the valley. With each crack of thunder, I expected them to burst open, but the rain held off.

“Where are we going?” I called to North as we crossed into the woods, having to shout a little over the rustling trees. My stomach twisted in nervous little knots. I wasn’t good at spontaneity. Or surprises.

“The cemetery,” he replied, stopping to help me down the hill.

“The
cemetery
?”

“I’ll explain when we get inside,” he said, lifting my cup from my hands. I went down the hill sideways, careful not to slip, and waited for him at the chain-link fence Hershey and I had climbed over the day before. North stooped down next to me and reached under a raised part at the bottom of the fence, setting my cup on the other side. The way the grass was matted, I knew he’d done this before.

“Inside?” I asked, looking around. “Inside where?”

He pointed at the small square building at the center of the cemetery. It was built into the side of a hill, so its roof was covered with grass and its entrance was only partially in view. There was an apple tree directly in front of it, like the one on the pin stuck to my shoe, planted in a square plot of grass the same size as the building, surrounded on all sides by the cemetery’s stone sidewalk. “The rain’s gonna start any second, so unless you want to get soaked . . .” He clasped his fingers together, making a little platform, and nodded at my foot. I put a hand on his shoulder and stepped up.

It started coming down just as North dropped inside the fence. “C’mon,” he said, grabbing my free hand. We sprinted across the grass toward the entrance, weaving around headstones. The air smelled like wet stone. I kept my eyes on the ground as we darted past the statue of the angry angel in the center of the cemetery, avoiding his menacing gaze.

We were both laughing as North unlocked the structure’s gated door and we stepped inside the narrow overhang. With his guitar on his back, North had to stand away from the wall behind him, which left less than a foot between his chest and mine. My limbs were electric with his nearness.

“Now what?” I asked, keeping my voice light, as if I were used to being in tiny semi-enclosed spaces with boys I barely knew. I brushed my hair out of my eyes, but a strand fell back down. North reached for it, twisting it gently before tucking it behind my ear. My bottom lip quivered a little when his fingers brushed my cheek. I bit down on it, hard, reminding myself he was a complete stranger.

“Now we go inside,” he said. He leaned into the granite wall beside us, and it retracted then slid smoothly aside.

I did a double take. “How did you . . . ?”

“It’s a lever and pulley system,” North explained, gesturing for me to follow him inside. “The stone’s actually sliding down, not over.” The inner chamber was dark even with the door open, so I moved carefully, not wanting to walk into anything. To my surprise, the air inside wasn’t heavy or dank like I expected it to be, but smelled fresh, like the room had just been cleaned. I heard a soft thud and the sound of a zipper. A few seconds later, the room lit up.

North’s backpack lay open on top of the marble coffin in the center of the room, next to an LED lantern. The walls and floor were marble too, and the ceiling was covered in gold leaf. The room was much bigger than I expected it to be, nearly as large as my dorm room, and empty save for the coffin and the low ledge that lined the walls. A bench for mourners, I supposed.

“This is a mausoleum,” I pointed out.

“No wonder they let you into the academy,” North teased. He started lifting things out of his backpack. A thin silver laptop. A tiny black microphone, no bigger than a button. Two metal coffee canisters. A thick rusty chain. A plastic Baggie of coins. Outside, rain pounded on dry earth.

I tried again. “You record music in someone’s internment space?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Internment space. Nice use of a vocab word, Rory.” It was the first time he’d said my name. I liked the way it sounded on his lips. The
r
’s rolled just a little, not like he was trying to roll them. It was just the way he talked.

Just then there was commotion outside, and the stone door slid open. Three soaking wet guys tumbled in out of the rain. They were laughing and cursing at the same time.

“Rory, meet Nick, Adam, and Brent,” North said, pointing them out. “Aka, Cardamon’s Couch. Guys, meet our snapper.”

“Hey,” they said in unison, dropping their instrument cases onto the marble.

“Holy crap, it’s pouring,” Brent said, shaking the rain out of his hair. He looked younger than the other two, younger than me even, and his red curls were the exact same shade as Nick’s.

“I told you guys to leave when you heard thunder,” North said.

“Yeah, but genius here said it had to be a thunder
clap
, not a rumble,” Nick replied, punching Adam in the shoulder.

“I didn’t want to schlep all the way out here if it wasn’t going to actually rain,” Adam said defensively, shrugging out of his wet jacket. He tossed it onto the coffin. It landed with a wet slap. I shuddered. “Don’t worry, no one’s buried there,” he assured me.

“How do you know?” I asked him.

“North opened it.”

I gaped at North. “You opened it?”

North shrugged. “I figured if it wasn’t sealed, there couldn’t be a body inside. The lid is really light,” he said, putting his hands under the rim and lifting it a little. “No way it’s actually marble.”

“So why would they put a coffin in here if they weren’t going to put a body in it?”

“Good question,” Nick said, unzipping his mandolin case. “Better one: Why put a building with perfect acoustics in a graveyard?”

“Ah. So that’s why you come here to play.”

“It’s better than a recording studio,” Adam replied, tugging open the large rectangular case at his feet. “And it’s free.”

“But why the need for rain?” I asked.

“It masks the sound,” North explained. “Plus, it’s the only time we can be sure no one will be out here. It’s a private cemetery, so technically we’re trespassing. Fortunately, only a crazy person would come to a graveyard in a thunderstorm.” He grinned.

I knew I should be worried about getting caught, arrested even, and what it would mean for my future at Theden, but I told myself the odds of that actually happening were slim. Thunder and lightning were crashing just seconds apart, which meant the storm was right over us, and the rain was coming down so hard, it sounded like we were standing under a waterfall. North was right; no one in their right mind would venture out here now. I could start worrying about consequences when we left.

Nick had started to strum his mandolin. The instrument had to be at least a hundred years old, but it was in perfect condition, not a single scratch in its veneer. I was watching his fingers dancing effortlessly over the strings when the others joined in. Adam on a bongo drum, Brent on an upright bass. Even just riffing like that, they were awesome.

“Okay,” North said, setting his laptop and the mic down on the floor in the center of the little circle we’d formed. “Which one do you want to do first?” he asked Nick.

“The chain in the small can,” Nick replied. “With a snap on the five beat.”

North looked up at me. “Just count it out in your head,” he said. “One, two, three, four,
snap
. Over and over.” I nodded, suddenly nervous I’d screw it up.

The guys tinkered with their instruments as North got the chain and the canister from the top of the coffin and knelt on the floor by his laptop.

“‘No Vacancy,’” Nick said when everyone was ready, and the others nodded. “One, two, three—” And they all started to play. I was so taken with the instant fury of their fingers and hands that I almost forgot to snap, but North caught my eye just in time. He, meanwhile, was dropping the chain in the canister and picking it up again. I closed my eyes so I could focus on my snapping and immediately got lost in the music. The snaps came instinctively then. I didn’t even have to count them out.

They played three songs, and there were snaps in two of them. North used the coins in the cans, and the chain on the marble, each combination becoming its own instrument, integral to the whole. Something inside me stirred and moved as I listened to the last song, the one without any snaps, watching North’s face from behind my lowered lashes. This music was better than anything on my playlist. It baffled me that these guys could be so off the radar.

“That’s a wrap,” North said when they were finished. My heart sank a little. I didn’t want it to end.

The guys said their good-byes and cleared out as quickly as they’d come, leaving North and me alone again.

“So, you’re their sound engineer?” I asked as North slid his laptop back into the front pocket of his backpack.

“Basically. They used to record at a studio in Boston, but it was expensive, and the end result wasn’t any better than what we were getting here. So I bought some sound software and some mics and started doing their stuff myself.”

“But you seem so antitechnology.”

He laughed. “Antitechnology? Hardly. Anti-handing-over-my-autonomy-to-a-two-by-four-inch-rectangle? Yes.”

“So you don’t use one?”

“A handheld?” He hesitated for a sec then shook his head. “I can’t use a Gemini without using its interface.”

“And you’re anti-Gemini because . . . ?”

“Because I know how it works,” he said, then switched off the lantern. The rain had stopped, but the sun was nowhere to be found. I felt my muscles twitch as the anxiety I’d been putting off rushed back in. I practically leaped to my feet.

“I should go,” I said quickly, moving toward the entrance. “I didn’t realize how late it was.”

“You still don’t know how late it is,” North pointed out.

“Yes, thank you,” I said irritably, sliding just a little on the slick grass as I stepped outside. North caught me by the elbow, and my whole body felt it.

“So I have to make a quick stop,” he said as we set off back toward the fence. He was keeping both his voice and his head down now, moving quickly and quietly. His caution only intensified my rising panic.
What was I thinking, coming out here like this?
I so easily could’ve gotten caught. Not to mention the mountain of homework I’d just blown off. On the first day of school, no less. The dean’s welcome speech came barreling back.
Wisdom is not for the faint of heart,
he said.
Not all of you will complete our program. Not all of you are meant to.

“You game?” I heard North say.

“What?”

“I asked if you wanted to come with me to pick up my hard drive. The shop’s just down the street from Paradiso. It’s cool, they have tons of old—”

I cut him off. “I have to get back. I need to get my stuff and get back to campus.”

“Ah. The nightingale returns to her cage,” said North.

“Theden is hardly a cage,” I retorted.

“I wasn’t talking about your school.” North made a little rectangle with his thumb and index finger and then jerked toward it, as if yanked by a magnet or a leash.

I rolled my eyes, refusing his help as I climbed back over the fence, holding my empty cup with my teeth. A jagged link scratched a line down my forearm, but I didn’t react. He hopped over easily, landing lightly on the other side. I walked ahead of him as we made our way back downtown, in a hurry to check my phone. As long as no one had been looking for me, I was probably okay.

“Well, thanks for coming with me,” North said when we reached Paradiso’s door. “I’d walk you back to campus, but—”

“I’ll be fine,” I said quickly.

There was an awkward second or two where we just stood there, looking at each other in the near-dark, North with his backpack, his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, me clutching my empty cup with both hands. My brain was yelling at me to get back to campus, but my feet were rooted in place. Then North smiled and started to say something, but I cut him off.

“I probably won’t be able to hang out again for a while,” I told him. “Things are gonna get busy with school, and I need to focus. Theden is really intense.” I needed to say it, to remind myself, but as soon as the words were out, I realized how bitchy I sounded. “Sorry,” I said quickly. “It’s just that—”

“I wasn’t aware that I’d asked to hang out with you again,” he said with a smirk. I felt myself flush. “But thanks for letting me know.” He turned and headed off down the sidewalk, whistling as he walked.

Hershey was perched on my desk in our bedroom, waiting for me.

“Where were you?” she demanded.

“Library.” It was the obvious choice for an alibi, since there was no risk that Hershey had been there. I’d decided on my way back not to tell her where I’d been. She had her secrets. Why shouldn’t I have some of my own? I dropped my bag on the floor by my desk and my eye caught the Café Paradiso logo on a half-crumpled napkin inside. I nudged the bag under my desk with my foot. “Why?” I asked, keeping my face neutral. “Were you looking for me?”

“Only for the past two hours,” Hershey replied, still studying me with narrowed eyes. “You weren’t showing up on Forum.”

“My phone was on private,” I said with a shrug, which was true. North had toggled the switch before locking it in the cabinet.

“Well, it would’ve been nice to send me a text,” Hershey said, her tone telling me that the inquisition was over. “I was worried about you.”

I’d stepped into our closet, so she didn’t see me make a face. I highly doubted that my roommate’s interest in my whereabouts had anything to do with my well-being. More like she was worried she was missing out on something. I stepped out of my mud-splattered shoes and into a clean pair, exchanging my damp cardigan for a jacket.

“Sorry,” I told her when I stepped back out. “Next time, I will.” It was a promise I could keep, because next time
@ the library
wouldn’t be a lie. Unless I wanted to end up a dropout like my mom, I had to get my head in the game. I was already working out how late I’d have to stay up to finish the homework I’d blown off during my little graveyard excursion. “Ready to eat?” I asked Hershey. Dinner started at six and it was already ten after.