Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  “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 pictu
re 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.

  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.