Free to Fall (5 page)

“We’re talking about sandwiches now?”

North pressed a button on the espresso machine and the steamer shot out a short burst of hot air, blowing a piece of hair in my face. I pushed it away irritably. There was something unnerving about this boy, and I didn’t like feeling unnerved.

I started to say something else, but he’d turned and headed back to the register.

“Flirt much?”

I jumped. I’d completely forgotten Hershey was standing there.

“I was
not
flirting with him,” I retorted, glancing over my shoulder to make sure North hadn’t heard her. He was busy with the next customer.

“Whatever. Can we go now? I want to change before the assembly.” I started to remind her that this little expedition had been her idea, but she was already halfway to the door.

4

BACK AT OUR ROOM,
Hershey changed into an off-white minidress and bronze flats, and pulled her hair into a sleek low ponytail. I looked about twelve years old standing next to her in my navy sundress and espadrilles. I fought the creeping, sinking disappointment that kept wrapping itself around my ribcage. Of all the roommates I could’ve been matched with, I’d ended up with her.

We made it to the auditorium a few minutes before the assembly was supposed to start. While Hershey went to get our name tags, I stood near the entrance, taking it all in. The pictures I’d seen hadn’t done the room justice. The ceiling was painted to look like a summer sky and rose into a steeply pitched dome. The floor was polished marble and was inset with the Theden logo.

A lanky blond guy in seersucker pants and a navy blazer stepped up beside me. His hair was parted and combed flat, and he was wearing penny loafers. Like, with actual pennies in them. “Hey,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Liam.” Even though his preppy getup would’ve relegated him to the social fringes back home, I could tell that he was popular here. Maybe it was his posture or the confidence in his smile. Or the fact that people kept calling out his name and slapping his back as they passed.

“I’m Rory,” I said, caught off guard by the attention and the hand-shaking. No one my age had ever shaken my hand before. Then again I’d never stood in a room that looked like this one either. Liam’s palm was rough and callused against mine, but his fingernails were neatly clipped and buffed to a shine, like he’d gotten a manicure. The rest of his appearance followed this rough versus polished pattern. He was dressed like he belonged on a sailboat, but there was a scar at his hairline and the bluish-yellow remnants of a bruise beneath his right eye. Sports wounds, I guessed, since Liam had both a water polo pin and a rugby pin stuck to his blazer.

“So what do you think of Theden so far?” he asked. “It’s a little surreal, right?”

“A little?”

Liam smiled. “It’s easier to get used to than you’d think,” he said. “I grew up on the south side of Boston. Less than a hundred miles from here, but it feels like a world away.”

The south side of Boston? I’d been expecting him to say Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard or some other place where rich kids were hatched and groomed. “So you weren’t a legacy?” I asked.

“Hell, no. Whatever the opposite of being a legacy is, I was that. You?”

“My mom went here,” I told him, feeling like an impostor. It was true, but it didn’t mean what he thought it did. My only connection to this place was a woman I never knew who, for reasons I’d probably never understand, didn’t even want me to know she’d gone here.

Hershey came up behind me and slipped her arm through mine. “Who’s your friend?” she asked, sizing Liam up.

“I’m Liam,” he said. His eyes slid down her legs as he extended his hand.

“Hershey,” she replied, not bothering to shake it. She turned to me. “We should go in,” she said. “I don’t want to sit in the back.”

“You can sit with me if you want,” Liam said. “I’ve got seats down front.”

“Great.” Hershey flashed a plastic smile. “Lead the way.”

“So what’s his story?” she whispered as we made our way toward the auditorium. “Is he as boring as he looks?”

“He’s nice,” I hissed.

“We can go around the side,” Liam said as we stepped inside the auditorium. The rotunda was impressive, but this was breathtaking. The heptagonal room was lit by crystal chandeliers, and its marble walls were framed on all sides by rows and rows of gold pipes. I’d read that there were more than fourteen thousand of them, making the Theden Organ one of the largest in the world, and the only one of its size that was still operational.

I tilted my head back, taking it all in, as we made our way down the far left aisle to the second row, which was blocked off with orange tape and a sign that said
RESERVED FOR STUDENT COUNCIL MEMBERS
.
Liam lifted the tape and gestured for us to sit.

“You’re sure it’s okay for us to sit here?” I asked.

“A perk of being class president,” he said, crumpling the sign in his hands.

The row in front of us was occupied by faculty. When we sat down, the woman on the end turned her head. She had flawless black skin and one of those stylish Afros that only the excessively attractive can pull off. She was striking, with sharp cheekbones and deep-set green eyes that locked on mine and didn’t budge. I smiled. She didn’t smile back.

“Just in time,” I heard Liam say. I looked up and saw Dean Atwater approaching the podium. He didn’t wait for the room to get quiet before he began to speak.

“You are here because you have two things your peers back home do not,” he declared, his words reverberating off the pipe-lined walls. “Qualities known by Ancient Greeks as
ethos
and
egkrateia
.” He overenunciated the Greek for emphasis. “Character and strength of will. Here you will put those qualities to work in the pursuit of something more noble.
Sophia.
Wisdom.” He gripped the podium now, leaning forward a little. “But wisdom is not for the faint of heart. Not all of you will complete our program. Not all of you are meant to.”

I looked at my hands, the anxiety I’d felt on the plane rushing back. My mother didn’t have what it took. Maybe I didn’t either. I was the daughter of a high school dropout and a general contractor. What made me think I could even keep up?

“I know what you’re thinking,” Dean Atwater said then, as if he’d read my mind. But he was gazing past me, into the center of the crowd. “You’re second-guessing your fitness for this program. You’re questioning our decision to let you in. Could the admissions committee have made a mistake?” The crowd twittered with nervous laughter. Dean Atwater smiled, his face kind. “Let me assure you, students”—he looked directly at me—“your presence here is no accident.”

It was meant to be comforting, but I squirmed in my seat.

The dean’s gaze shifted again. “Now, for some housekeeping matters. Each of you has been assigned to one of twelve small sections. Section members share a faculty advisor and will meet together daily for a reasoning skills intensive, which you’ll learn more about tomorrow. Your section assignments will appear along with your course schedule under the ‘academics’ tab in the Theden app.” There was much rustling as people pulled their handhelds from purses and pockets. “I said
will
appear,” Dean Atwater added with a knowing smile. “When you’re dismissed for dinner. We’ve got one more announcement first. Please welcome your student-body president, Liam Stone.”

The room erupted in whistles and applause as Liam joined Dean Atwater at the podium. “On behalf of the student council,” Liam’s voice boomed into the mic. “I’m happy to announce that a date has been chosen for this year’s Masquerade Ball. Mark your calendars for September 7.” The room erupted into loud cheers. “For you first-years—the Masquerade Ball is a black-tie fundraiser for all alumni and current students. As is tradition, a shop in town will provide the tuxes and dresses, and we’ll all be given masks to wear. Though, as we second-years can attest, the word
mask
is a bit of a misnomer. They’re more like gigantic papier-mâché heads, most of them more than three hundred years old and worth more than your parents can afford.” He grinned. “In other words, make it an idiocy-free evening, guys.”

Dean Atwater chuckled as he took back the mic. He looked over at Liam. “Anything else, Liam?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, then,” Dean Atwater said, clapping his hands together. “Let’s eat!”

Sleep came easily that night, partly from physical exhaustion, and partly because I’d eaten so much lobster and steak that all the blood in my body had rushed from my head to my stomach, draining me of whatever mental energy I had left. I drifted off with the silver pendant between my thumb and index finger, wondering if they’d served surf ’n’ turf at the welcome dinner nineteen years ago and whether my mom had felt as out of place then as I had tonight, but I awoke later with a start, my hand still pressed to my collarbone. My chest was heaving a little beneath it. I’d been having a nightmare—running somewhere, or from someone—but the details slipped away from me as soon as my eyes adjusted to the dark. I listened for Hershey’s breathing, worried that I’d cried out and woken her. But the room was quiet. I slid my hand under my pillow, feeling for my Gemini, and blinked as my screen lit up: 3:03
A.M.
Still rattled from the dream I couldn’t remember, I tiptoed to the bathroom for some water, using my handheld as a flashlight. As I passed my roommate’s bed, I realized that the tiptoeing was unnecessary. Hershey wasn’t in it.

I quickly sent her a text:
where r u??

Half a second later, her handheld lit up in the dark. She’d left it on her nightstand. I picked up her Gemini and erased my text.

I lay awake for a while after that, wondering where Hershey had gone. It was stupid, but I felt a pang of disappointment that she hadn’t invited me to go with her. Not that I would’ve gone, but still. When an hour passed and she still wasn’t back, I started to worry.
You’re not your roommate’s keeper,
I told myself, forcing myself to go back to sleep.

It wasn’t even light yet when I woke up again, jolted awake by the screaming chorus of a This Is August Jones song. Hershey’s alarm. She fumbled for her Gemini, knocking it off the nightstand in the process. “Sorry,” she mumbled, then pulled her pillow over her head and promptly fell back asleep. Her alarm was still going off. Any relief I felt about the fact that she wasn’t dead in the woods somewhere was overshadowed by the immense irritation of having my eardrums accosted by excruciatingly crappy pop music at 5:45 in the morning.

“Hershey!” I barked.

“Fine,” she grumbled. She slid her hand along the floor, feeling for her Gemini. It took her another thirty seconds to actually turn it off. By the time she did, we were both wide-awake. I rolled onto my side. I’d seen Hershey wash her face before we went to bed, but she had mascara smudges around her eyes now.

“Five forty-five? Seriously?”

Hershey rubbed her eyes. “I may have forgotten that my phone readjusted itself for the time difference.”

I burst out laughing.

“I was tired when I set it,” she said irritably. I expected her to elaborate, to boast about her late-night escapades or at least hint that she’d snuck out, but she turned away from me, toward the opposite wall.

“How’d you sleep?” I asked, giving her another opportunity. She didn’t take it.

“Great,” she replied. Her Gemini lit up again as she launched Forum.

I watched her back for a moment, wondering what other secrets my roommate was keeping, and why.

5

A SMALL CROWD WAS GATHERED
at the doorway to my first class. There was a sign next to it that read
ELECTRONIC
DEVICES MUST BE LEFT OUTSIDE. NO EXCEPTIONS
, with a cubby station beneath it. I figured no one wanted to abandon their phones until they absolutely had to, but when I got closer, I noticed that none of my classmates were looking at their screens. They were all staring into our classroom, which was still out of my view. I moved toward the door and peered inside.

The room was the most hi-tech I’d ever seen. Every wall was a screen, and instead of desks, there were twelve egg-shaped units that reminded me of those sleeping compartments they had on luxury airlines, except that those are made of gray plastic and these were made of something shimmery and translucent and almost wet-looking. “Even without a bell, you all can still be late,” our teacher said, then stepped into view. It was the woman I’d seen at the assembly yesterday. When I saw
Dr. E. Tarsus
on my schedule, I’d pictured a man, an older white one, with gray hair and thick glasses. This woman was the total inverse of that. Standing still, she had the countenance of an eagle, her shoulders broad and her posture perfect. But when she moved—as she did now, toward the front wall, with purpose—she reminded me of a jungle cat, the sharp, angular edges of her shoulders and hips visible beneath her clothes.

She taught Plato Practicum, the official name for the practical reasoning intensive Dean Atwater mentioned at the assembly and the only class on my schedule that met every single day. She was also my advisor, so I wanted to make a good impression.

As we filed into her classroom, milling around and looking generally uncertain (
do we stand next to the pods? inside them?
), Dr. Tarsus stepped up to the front wall and wrote with her index finger, her words appearing like chalk on the wall’s surface. Instantly the wall transformed into an old-fashioned chalkboard, and she was writing in chalk. I knew it wasn’t actually a chalkboard, just a rectangle of interactive wallpaper resembling one, but the texture was so reminiscent of the real thing that for a split second I wondered if somehow it was.
The beginning is the most important part of the work,
she wrote in impeccable script.
Plato,
The Republic,
book two
.

“Pick one,” she said, turning to face us now. She gestured to the egg-shaped compartments. I went for one in the middle.

“You should see a small square in the center of your screen,” Dr. Tarsus said as I sat down in my pod’s metal chair. I felt it adjust beneath and behind me, sliding forward a few inches and conforming to the curve of my spine. “Press your thumb firmly into the box,” Dr. Tarsus instructed. “Your terminal will activate.” The screen she was referring to was oblong and rounded outward like the nose of an airplane. When I touched my thumb to the little box, the door to the compartment slid shut, sealing me inside. Within seconds, the surface I’d touched and the walls around me had become completely transparent, like glass. I could see my classmates in the row in front of me, the walls of their enclosures as invisible as mine. Dr. Tarsus was perched atop a stool at the front of the room.

She stood and began to make her way around the room as she spoke. “As Dean Atwater explained yesterday, this program is unique in its focus. You’re here to gain knowledge, yes. To learn the who and the what and the where and the why of literature, history, mathematics, psychology, and science. But you’re also here to pursue something that is far more valuable than knowledge, and much harder to attain.” She paused for effect. “
Phronesis
,” she said then. “Prudence. Wisdom in action. The ability to live well.”

Something in me grabbed ahold of this idea. Wisdom in action.
I want that
. The conviction that I’d made the very best choice, without having to ask an app on my handheld to be sure. When left on my own, I waffled and wavered, second-guessing my decisions before I even made them. It was the reason I’d always sucked at sports. And gardening. And art. It was the reason I used Lux for nearly every choice I made, from the mundane to the major. I craved the assurance that I was on the right track, headed somewhere that mattered.

I knew what Beck would say. That prudent genius was an oxymoron. That the greatest athletes and the most talented artists and the most brilliant thinkers went with their gut. But wasn’t that exactly what Dr. Tarsus was offering? A gut I could trust.

Don’t exchange the truth for a lie.

My whole body stiffened, bracing against the voice. Hearing it once was one thing. A fluke. But here it was again, less than twenty-four hours later, cryptic and eerie and even louder than it had been the day before. Dread pooled in the pit of my stomach as I swallowed. Hard.

Chill,
I told myself firmly. The Doubt wasn’t anything to panic over unless you couldn’t turn it off, like that French girl in the Middle Ages who let herself be burned at the stake. So I’d heard it a couple of times. It didn’t have to be a big deal. If I ignored it, the way I’d been taught, it’d eventually go away, the way it had when I was a kid.

Dr. Tarsus was still talking. I started repeating her words in my head to drown out the Doubt’s, which were replaying like an echo in my mind. “The ancient Greek philosophers, and Aristotle in particular, understood that
phronesis
could not be attained in a vacuum,” she was saying. “Or a classroom for that matter. They believed that
phronesis
had to be hard-won through personal experience.” She pulled a tiny remote from her skirt pocket and typed on its screen. The walls of our pods instantly turned opaque. I realized now that the pods were soundproof and that her voice had been coming through tiny speakers above me. “The simulations we do in this practicum will provide that experience,” she said, and my screen lit up. Grateful for the distraction, I focused intently on the image on my screen. It was a ground-level shot of Nob Hill in San Francisco. I’d never been there, but I recognized the steep hill and cable-car track from movies and TV. The image shifted, and I realized that it wasn’t a photograph but video footage shot from the point of view of a pedestrian waiting with several others at a trolley stop. The camera must’ve been on a pair of glasses, or mounted between the guy’s eyes, because I was seeing whatever he saw as he looked around, glanced at his handheld, even bent to tie his shoe—a men’s Converse One Star.

“Our simulations will differ in format, but the way in which we interact as a class will generally remain the same,” Dr. Tarsus went on. “The booths you’re in are equipped with audio technology designed to facilitate our discussions. You can hear me, obviously. But I can only hear one of you at a time. The booths are wired to record your audible responses and broadcast them over the speakers in the order they were received, and I’ll respond—or not—as I see fit. There is no need to wait until you’ve been called on, and no risk that you’ll interrupt one another. Speak when you have something to say. If the discussion stalls, I will begin addressing my questions to specific students, in which case the responses of other students will be recorded and delayed until the person I’ve called on has responded.” She paused, and I imagined her glancing around the room. Were the walls opaque on her side, or could she see us? I kept a pleasant smile on my face just in case. “Any questions?” she asked. I shook my head, eyes riveted to my screen. A family with three kids and a baby in a stroller had gotten a wheel caught on the trolley track. “Excellent,” Dr. Tarsus said. “Let’s begin.”

Immediately the audio from the video switched on. I could now hear the chatter of the people on the street, car noises, a jackhammer pounding on asphalt nearby. And a baby crying. The baby in the stroller caught on the track. The parents still hadn’t gotten the wheel unstuck, and they seemed to be having trouble getting the baby out. Next to me, an obese man in sweat shorts and a T-shirt fiddled with his waistband. Somewhere in the distance, a cable car rang its bell. Dr. Tarsus had called this a simulation, so I assumed these details were important and paid attention to all of them. But what were we being tested on?

The cable car sounded its bell, much louder this time. Much closer. Instinctively, my head turned in the direction of the sound, and when it did, my view shifted. I blinked. Was I controlling the camera? I turned my head the opposite way, and the camera moved with me. I felt the headrest against the back of my skull and realized that it must have motion sensors. I’d just started to move my feet—wondering if I could get the guy with the camera to walk—when I heard the bell a third time, so loud this time my head whipped to the right. The cable car had crested the hill and was now barreling down it. Toward the baby in the stroller.

Just then the screen froze and Dr. Tarsus’s voice came through the speakers. “Here are the facts. The wheel of the stroller you see is caught in the track in such a way that it cannot be removed without dismantling the entire stroller, which, with the proper tools, would take four and a half minutes. The cable car careening toward it has just experienced brake failure. Unless stopped, the cable car will hit the stroller in forty-two seconds, traveling at sixty miles per hour. The baby inside the stroller is buckled into a seat belt that has jammed.” Her voice was dispassionate, almost bored, as if she were describing the weather. “If the trolley hits the stroller,” she continued, “the angle of impact will cause the trolley to jump its track, killing at least five passengers on board, including two children, and two pedestrians. The baby and its parents, who will refuse to leave the stroller’s side, will also be killed, along with their three other children, who will be crushed when the trolley flips over. The only way to prevent this outcome is to force a crash before the trolley reaches forty miles an hour. The trolley is currently traveling at thirty miles an hour.” I felt my eyes go wide with horror. I knew that what we were seeing wasn’t actually
real
, but still. The scenario reminded me of the morality quizzes Beck was always taking online. Except in those, I couldn’t hear the baby whose life was at stake or see its parents’ desperate faces.

“The man next to you weighs four hundred and eighty-four pounds,” Dr. Tarsus continued. “He is both blind and deaf. You, a third-year medical student, are his caretaker, and he will go wherever you lead him. If he were to walk across the track in the next ten seconds, the trolley would hit him going thirty-two miles an hour and would come to a stop just before reaching the stroller. In light of the choices available to you, what is the most prudent thing to do?” A few seconds later my screen unfroze and I was back in the action again. I turned my body to the right and was now facing the fat man next to me, who was clearly waiting for my cue. The trolley blared its horn again. I glanced back at the parents pulling frantically at their baby’s stroller. Could I convince them to move away from the track? One look at their desperate, panicked faces, and I had my answer. It was pointless to try.

I scanned the rest of the scene for another option. Across the track, there was a hot dog cart, with a vendor in a striped hat behind it. The cart was on wheels. Did it weigh as much as the fat man? I had no idea, but I doubted it. I whipped my head back around toward the stroller. Could I help them get it unstuck? I moved my feet like I was running in place and instantly the camera was moving. I was sprinting toward them. Seconds later I was at their side.

The wheel was pinned in the groove between the steel rails. Instead of pulling up on it, I tried pushing it. The wheel turned, and the stroller moved a few inches.

“Push the stroller that way!” I cried, forgetting for a second that the people I was yelling at were computer generated. Could they even hear me? But they seemed to. They immediately stood and started pushing the stroller down the track. I dashed back to the hot dog cart. If it weighed less than the fat man, then it wouldn’t slow the trolley down as quickly, but it would at least do something, and if the parents could get the stroller far enough down the track, maybe it’d stop before it reached them. I had to try. I couldn’t lead a deaf and blind man into the path of an oncoming train.

“Help me push this cart!” I yelled at the vendor.

“No way!” he shouted back. I grabbed the cart’s handle and yanked it. It wouldn’t budge.

Crap. According to the timer at the bottom of my screen, twenty-one seconds had already passed. The trolley was zooming toward us. I had to do something. Fast.

I whirled around, looking for something I could put in the trolley’s way, but there was nothing. Just the fat man and the stroller.

And me.

As the timer raced toward forty, I ran to the center of the track and squeezed my eyes shut, bracing for the impact. Of course, I didn’t feel any. Just the sound of a buzzer as the simulation ended. I opened one eye. On my screen were the words
DEATH TOLL: 2
. My “body” lay crumpled and bloody beneath the trolley. The baby’s father was also dead, pinned under the trolley’s grill. When my body wasn’t enough to stop it, he’d tried to help. His wife and baby and two other kids were all still alive. As was the fat man, who stood by the tracks, oblivious to it all.

The screen blinked black, and then a list appeared on the screen. The class roster, twelve of us, ranked by death toll. There were seven people who’d done better than I had, with a death toll of only one. The fat man. Their grades set the curve, pushing mine to the middle. The others hadn’t intervened at all, and the trolley had killed the family with the baby, just as Tarsus had said that it would. My hands unclenched and my shoulders relaxed. Being in the middle of the curve had its benefits. I wouldn’t get singled out. The pod walls became transparent again and I could see Tarsus at the front of the room.

“As with all the simulations we’ll do in this class,” came Tarsus’s voice through my speakers, “the goal of this exercise was what economists and social scientists call ‘net positive impact.’ Those of you who chose to sacrifice the fat man achieved this result. Of the players in the scenario, he had the lowest utility value. Blind, deaf, and overweight, he contributed very little to the well-being of society. The prudent course of action, then, was to use this man to stop the train. Of the options available to you, that was the only one that yielded a net positive impact.”