Free to Fall

by Lauren Miller

  “You need to talk to Griffin Payne,” North repeated. “Alone.”

  “Yes.” I zipped up my coat. “In person.”

  “You do realize this is Griffin Payne you’re talking about. You’d have a better chance of meeting the president.”

  “I’ve met him already. At a Theden event. He’s nice.” I walked past North toward the automatic exit. Outside, the clouds hung low in the night sky, giving off an eerie green glow.

  “I’m sure he’s lovely,” North said, following me out. “But that doesn’t mean he’ll take a meeting with a high school girl.”

  I stopped at the curb, letting North catch up. The sidewalk was deserted. When he reached me, he stepped down off the curb so we were eye level. “Rory, what’s this about? You go in to see the doctor and you come out saying you need an in-person meeting with the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world.”

  “He’s my father,” I said quietly. North’s face registered the shock I felt.

  “I don’t understand,” North said. “Since when?”

  “Since he and my mom had sex seventeen years ago, I guess.” My voice was terse. “I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I’m just—still processing it.”

  “But how’d you find out? I mean, you grew up with a dad, right? I’ve heard you talk about him.”

  I nodded, and took a shaky breath. “I found my mom’s medical file in the Department of Public Heath’s database about a month ago, when I was working on a research paper for my cog psych class. Last night I went back through it. Turns out I was born almost a month past my due date, not three weeks before it like I always thought, which means my mom was pregnant when she left Theden.”

  “The blood type thing,” North said. “You think that means your dad isn’t your dad.”

  “Not think. Know.” My voice trembled. I would not cry. “There was an ultrasound photo in my mom’s file. She was A positive and I’m AB negative. My dad—the man I thought was my dad—is A positive too.”

  North exhaled. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “I didn’t know how,” I admitted. “It’s a kind of heavy thing to lay on someone you barely know.”

  “You more than barely know me, Rory,” North said, taking my hands in his. “And I can handle heavy.”

  I just nodded, not trusting myself to speak. “So what makes you think Griffin Payne is your real father?” North asked.

  “She’s holding his hand. In their class photo. She’s holding Griffin’s hand.”

  “That hardly means—”

  “Look at him,” I said, shoving my phone into North’s face. Griffin’s senior photo was still on my screen. “Then look at me.”

  “There’s a resemblance,” North allowed. “There totally is.” He exhaled, running his hands back and forth along the sides of his Mohawk. “Wow.”

  We were both quiet for a moment. “Well, then I take back what I said earlier,” North said finally. “It’ll be easy to get in to see him. Just tell him who you are.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “If I want to know what really happened seventeen years ago, he can’t see it coming. I don’t want to give him the chance to lie to me.”

  “You assume he’s going to?”

  “I don’t want to take any chances. It has to be in person,” I said firmly. “And it has to be a surprise. I want to be able to see his face.”

  “You think he’s the reason your mom dropped out of school?”

  “She didn’t drop out,” I reminded him. “She was expelled.”

  “Could the pregnancy have had something to do with why?”

  “Maybe. But there was no record of her being pregnant in her medical file. No test results, no mention of a baby in any of her psych reports. If she knew she was pregnant, she didn’t tell her doctor.”

  “Can you show me the file?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have access to it anymore. I have only a photo of the final page.”

  “I’ll see if I can get it,” North said. “You know your mom’s social security number, right?”

  “Yeah, but her file was deleted from the system. You won’t be able to find it.”

  “Au contraire,” replied North. “Deleted files are even easier to get. Before they’re permanently removed from a server, they’re almost always put in these little holding bins for a few weeks. It’s a stopgap for accidental deletions. Because the bins are hidden from users, companies think they don’t need to protect them.”

  “Can we do it now?” I asked him.

  “Sure. It might take me a couple of hours, but you’re welcome to hang out. Stay over, even.” His eyes twinkled. “So I can play doctor.”

  “I can’t stay over,” I said, though his place was the only place I wanted to be. “I should probably just go back to the dorms now,” I said reluctantly. “Weeknight curfew is at ten.” Now that I knew exactly what Tarsus was capable of, I had to be a model student. “Can I come by tomorrow?”

  “Of course,” North said. “I’m working the early shift, so stop by the café first. But give me your mom’s full name and social security number, and I’ll see what I can find tonight.”

  I caught his hand and laced my fingers through his. “Thank you.”

  He brought my hand to his lips and kissed the tips of my fingers. “It’s going to be okay. You know that, right? You’ll figure all this out.”

  “Yeah.” My vision blurred as the tears I’d been holding back spilled over. I blinked, but it was too late. They were dripping down my cheeks. “Damn it,” I muttered. So much for my resolution not to cry. I swatted at my eyes.

  North lifted my chin with his finger, all the confidence I didn’t have bright in his eyes, and then, even though I was probably wildly contagious and smelled like a hospital and hadn’t brushed my teeth in twelve hours, he kissed me and for a moment I forgot everything but what it felt like not to be alone.

  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.”

  22

  “WHAT IF SOMEONE ASKS HOW WE GOT INVITED?”

  “No one’s going to ask,” North said. “It’s a huge ballroom. We’ll blend.” I caught sight of my reflection in the tinted windows of the train and almost didn’t recognize myself. Noelle, the girl at the computer repair shop, had loaned me her homecoming dress, a calf-length black bustier that was in no way high school dance appropriate, and Kate had done my makeup, hiding the constellation of dark freckles across my nose under spray foundation and lining my eyes in charcoal shadow. My hair I’d done myself, preferring to have it loose and wavy around my face in case I needed to hide behind it.

  North was even more incognito. His Mohawk was combed down flat and his tattoos were hidden under the sleeves of a gray herringbone jacket. Between the suit and his tortoise-shell Wayfarers and the Bluetooth earbud clipped to his ear, he looked like a prep school kid on his way to a party. Precisely the part he was playing tonight.

  He was on his handheld now, checking our progress on his map. It was going to be tight; we had to get to Boston, to the party, somehow get Griffin alone, then get back to the train and to campus before the library closed at midnight. I’d left my Gemini there, hidden in the stacks, with location services turned on. North had created a program that would auto-post status updates twice in the six-plus hours we’d be gone, in case anyone was looking for me. It wouldn’t do me much good if anyone actually came to the library to find me, but it’d keep me off the radar as long as no one did. Theden’s rules about leaving campus were lenient, as long as you stayed close by. We weren’t allowed to go outside a five-mile radius of the campus gates without written permission from the Dean. If I got caught tonight, I’d be expelled.

  To calm the cyclone in my stomach, I watched North, memorizing every detail of his face. Even in the train’s harsh fluorescent light, he was handsome. Classically handsome, I saw now. His skin was cinnamon colored and the corners of his eyes were angled down, but his nose was straight and his jaw was strong and the whole of his face came together with beautiful symmetry.

  He turned and caught me looking at him.

  “You look really pretty,” he said, touching the tip of my nose with his finger. “But I miss your freckles.” I tilted my head back and kissed his palm. His finger slid down my neck, tracing the contours of my collarbone toward my right shoulder. He hooked the thin strap of my dress, lifting it a millimeter before skimming over it and down my arm. My skin crackled with heat.

  “You don’t look bad yourself,” I said, my voice airy. I could still feel the path his finger had made, and it wasn’t hard to imagine him tugging my straps down, unzipping the back of my dress. I’d kissed only one boy before North, and now I was picturing myself topless with him. I suspected both Lux and the voice in my head would reel this one in, but I wasn’t consulting either of them right now. I gripped the edge of my plastic chair and reminded myself where thoughts like that had gotten my mom.

  “So there’s a nine-fifteen and a ten-oh-five train back,” North was saying. “If we take the later one, we won’t get into the Theden station until eleven fifty.”

  “That’s not enough time,” I said, although the truth was I had no idea if ten minutes was enough time to get from Theden Central Station back to campus on North’s motorbike. Using Lux for so many years had completely destroyed my ability to assess travel times. Lux tol
d me when to leave, which way to go, and what time it would be when I arrived. How little attention I’d paid to the details, trusting Lux to get me wherever I needed to go. And invariably, it had.

  “It’ll be tight,” North said, “but if we have to, we can make it. Still, we should aim for the nine-fifteen.” He glanced back at his handheld. “We’re the next stop.”

  My heart started drumming in my chest. Oddly, I was more worried about getting into the party than I was about confronting its famous host. I wasn’t expecting the ambush to go well, necessarily, but I knew he’d at least believe I was who I said I was. Even dressed like this, with all the makeup, I bore an uncanny resemblance to my mom.

  “You ready for this?” North asked as the train pulled into Back Bay Station. I nodded. I had to be. And with North by my side, maybe I was. He slipped his hand in mine as we made our way onto the platform and through the building to the taxi stand outside.

  “Copley Square,” North told the cab driver. “The Boston Public Library.” The man grunted and we were off. The station was only half a mile from the library where the party was being held. Walkable if I hadn’t been wearing three-inch heels. So the cab ride didn’t give me much time to collect myself. Two minutes after getting in, it was time to get out.

  We’d pulled up in front of a massive stone building with arched windows that occupied an entire city block. It looked more like a palace than a library, and nothing like Seattle’s glass and metal Central Library back home. It didn’t hurt that it was lit up like a castle, with warm, yellow spotlights illuminating its stone face. Above the lights and the row of arched windows was the word GOLD projected in 3D. There was a red carpet on the front steps and a velvet rope and throngs of photographers hovering on the plaza out front. This was an odd place, as it were, for a tech launch party, considering Gnosis had made public libraries irrelevant when it started offering e-books to borrow for free. None of the old buildings even housed books anymore—not paper ones, anyway. They were basically just big tablet terminals, with rows and rows of desks with screens built in, and public media rooms where you could surf the Web and watch TV.