The Way We Fall (3 page)

Rachel wasn’t in school again. No word about her dad.

Mackenzie didn’t seem to think her being absent was a big deal, but I couldn’t imagine Rachel skipping school two days in a row unless her dad was pretty much dying—and
someone
would have been talking about it if his condition was that bad. This is the same girl who argued that she didn’t need to go home after puking her guts out during last year’s English exam, after all.

Rachel’s never said anything, but I suspect there isn’t enough money for her to go to college unless she gets a good scholarship. Her dad just has the fishing, which isn’t going well for anyone these days, and her mom doesn’t work at all. It’s got to be tough.

So after school I called her to see how she was doing.

“Kaelyn!” she said when she picked up. “I’m so happy you called. I missed you!”

I hadn’t been expecting such an enthusiastic response. “How’s it going?” I asked.

“Oh, I’ve got this stupid cold and Mom said I have to stay home and rest,” she said, and sneezed. “God, it’s so boring. You want to come over? She probably wouldn’t like that, but she’s out grocery shopping, and what she doesn’t know can’t hurt, right?”

“Sure,” I said. Maybe she was acting weird, but I’d wanted to be better friends with her. Seemed like a good time to try.

When I rang the doorbell, Rachel opened the door and flung her arms around me. She only let go to cough into her elbow and then scratch her collarbone. Her nose was red. Just like her dad when I’d been over before—sneezing and coughing and scratching.

I started feeling nervous then. But Rachel seemed so excited to see me, and a real friend wouldn’t just take off. All she had was a cold. Her dad had gotten it really badly, but it wasn’t like they’d put her in the hospital too.

So when she tugged my wrist, I followed her into the family room.

On the TV, a VJ was interviewing some hip-hop singer. Rachel pulled me onto the couch and slung her arm over my shoulder.

“Talk,” she said. “I want to know everything I’ve missed. I’ve been stuck in this boring house too long.”

There wasn’t much to talk about. I didn’t think she’d want to hear that everyone at school was gossiping about her dad. I told her they’d announced swim team would be starting soon, since I’ve decided I’ll try out and maybe she’d want to come too, and then I remembered the story Mackenzie told at lunch—one of her usual “this famous person my parents know” deals, but really funny this time. As I started getting into it, Rachel grimaced.

“She’s such a snot, isn’t she?” she said.

I stopped and stared at her.

“I mean Mackenzie,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “As if she’s so special because she was born in L.A. She’s always got her nose up in the air. God, I want to rip it off her face sometimes, don’t you?”

Sometimes I do. But Rachel? She’s always looked like she was hanging off of Mackenzie’s every word.

When I didn’t answer right away, Rachel kept going: “And she’s so bossy too—it drives me up the wall! You know, I was kind of pissed for a while because she’s my best friend, and you were, like, trying to steal her for yourself. But you’re really so much nicer than she is. I’m so glad I’ve got you now! We can stick together, right?”

The weight of her arm across my shoulder had gotten uncomfortably heavy. “Yeah,” I said. “Sure.” Except the last thing I wanted to do right then was stick around. It wasn’t just the sneezing and the coughing—she was
talking
like her dad did last week too. Like she was spewing out every unpleasant and embarrassing thought in her head.

I shifted away, and she started scratching at her collarbone again, hard enough that the neck of her shirt slid to the side. She must have been working at that spot for hours. The skin was pink—not a flushed pink from pressure, but a dark, raw pink, like the blood was about to break through. Looking at it made my stomach turn.

Rachel only stopped scratching when she had to sneeze. She dropped her arm for a second, and I leaped up. But a music video came on at the same time. Rachel squealed.

“I love this song!” she said, jumping off the couch and grabbing my hands. “It’s so amazing!”

I bobbed along as she danced, wondering how I was going to get out of there. She raised her hands in the air and shimmied. “What d’you think?” she shouted even though the music wasn’t that loud. “I’ve been practicing in my room. Sometimes a striptease too! You know, for when I get a boyfriend. I’m going to rock his world.”

She spun around, laughing. The squeak of the front door opening right then was the most wonderful sound I’d ever heard.

“Rachel?” her mom called. “Sweetie, I told you to—”

She stopped short when she saw us. Rachel kept dancing, thrashing her hair from side to side. I’m not sure what upset her mom more: the fact that I was there, or the fact that her daughter was acting like a maniac. But she was definitely upset.

“Kaelyn,” she said, with a little tremor in her voice, “I don’t think this is the best time for Rachel to have guests.”

“I’m really sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “I didn’t know she was going to get so…worked up.”

Rachel skipped after me to the door. “Mom’s such a spoilsport,” she said in a loud whisper. “She thinks the other parents on the island let their kids run wild. But wild is freakin’ fun!”

She was scratching that spot again as she waved good-bye. I looked back when I was halfway down the block, and she was still standing there, waving and scratching.

I’m not just nervous now. I’m scared. I can’t make myself believe Rachel was drunk, or any of the other excuses I could have used for her dad. She was just
not
herself.

What the hell is happening?

Leo,

It’s one in the morning, and I can’t sleep. I wish I could call you. No matter what happened or how upset I was, you always found something to say that made me feel better. When we were still friends.

But I haven’t got your number in New York, and even if I did, I doubt you’d appreciate me breaking two years of silence by waking you up in the middle of the night. It’s my own fault for not talking to you sooner. So I’m crouched here on my bed with my reading lamp on, writing in this journal, because I can’t think of anything else to do.

I couldn’t stop worrying about Rachel after I got home this afternoon. Trying to figure out what weird sickness would make people act so strangely. But bacteria and viruses are Dad’s area, not mine.

So when he and I were doing the dishes, I started telling him about what happened. The whole story ended up spilling out, about Rachel’s dad last week too. I didn’t look at him, just at the dish I was drying, because I thought maybe I was agonizing over nothing. But getting it out of my head was such a relief. I was starting to feel like maybe everything was okay when I raised my eyes and saw Dad’s expression. His face had gone pale, and his hands were lying still in the dishwater.

“Her father touched you?” he said, sounding like he was trying very hard not to raise his voice.

“Just on the shoulder,” I said. “Nothing inappropriate.”

“And Rachel, today,” he went on. “She was hugging you—have you been wearing the same clothes all day?”

My cheeks warmed because I’d felt like an idiot even while I was doing this.

“No,” I said. “I changed when I got home, and took a shower. I couldn’t help thinking—if what she’s got is contagious—I don’t want to catch it.”

Dad’s stance relaxed, which made me tense all over again.

“You think it is?” I asked. “Contagious?”

“It’s always smart to be careful, Kae,” he said. “You should run whatever clothes are in your hamper through the laundry tonight. And Rachel was at school last week, wasn’t she? After you saw her father?”

I nodded, and he said, “You should stay home, then. Until the weekend at least.”

“What?” I said. Part of the reason I’d been worried about getting sick was missing class. Maybe I don’t need a scholarship, but I still have to get good grades to be accepted into any of the top university science programs. And staying home would mess with my new-Kaelyn project too. “Swim team tryouts are this week,” I said. “Mrs. Reese said she’s only going to let people join if they show they’re committed right away.”

“I’ll ask someone at the hospital to write you a doctor’s note,” he said. “We have to be safe, Kae.”

“Safe from what? We don’t even know what’s happening!” I said.

I heard Mom come into the kitchen behind me. She touched my back and said, “Gordon, you should just tell her.”

“Tell me what?” I said, twisting to look at her and then turning back to Dad. His eyes were on her instead of me.

Mom doesn’t like arguing—she says she finds it more effective to “gently but firmly nudge.” But if something’s really important to her, she’s not afraid to put her foot down. Dad wanted Drew to lose his internet and phone privileges after the making-out incident, but Mom said he was being ridiculous, and that was the end of it.

“She’s only sixteen,” Dad said, as if that made me a toddler.

“Yes,” Mom said. “And like any normal sixteen-year-old, she’s only going to listen if you give her a reason to.”

Dad took his hands out of the sink and dried them, then ran his fingers through his hair.

“What is it?” I said. If he’d told me what he knew before, maybe I wouldn’t have gone to Rachel’s in the first place. Did he really think keeping secrets would protect me?

“Rachel’s father is very sick,” he said. “We’re not sure what’s wrong with him.”

“‘We’?” I repeated. “Did you go see him?”

He smiled tightly. “I’m the only microbiologist on the island,” he said. “The hospital staff realized they couldn’t identify the condition they were attempting to treat, so it made sense for them to involve me. We were hoping the cause might be something environmental. Two other fishery workers were admitted to the hospital last week, and another this morning, with similar symptoms: coughing, sneezing, persistent itching, and a fever, followed by a severe decrease in social inhibitions. And finally, panic brought on by mental confusion.”

“They’re hallucinating,” I said, remembering Mackenzie’s theory. “Because of the fever?”

“We’re not sure,” he said.

So basically some freaky disease is completely messing with people’s brains, and no one has any idea what it is or where it came from. What’s the point of having doctors if they can’t figure out things like this?

Mom slid her arm around me and rubbed my shoulder. “Will that happen to Rachel too?” I managed to ask.

She had all the other symptoms when I saw her. Will she be going crazy in her backyard tomorrow? How are they going to help her?

“I don’t know,” Dad said. “I’ll have to talk to her mother tomorrow morning about bringing her into the hospital so we can keep her under observation. But what concerns me the most is that, from what you’ve told me, we appear to be dealing with an infectious agent. It seems most likely Rachel picked up the condition from her father.”

I remembered what Dad had said earlier, and my heart started beating faster. “You think she might have given it to me,” I said. “That’s why you don’t want me to go to school.”

“There’s a small chance,” he said. “Very small, because you were careful and the contagion doesn’t appear to be spreading easily. Rachel’s the only case I know of where the condition was clearly passed from one individual to another. But we can’t be absolutely sure. And she may have infected other kids at school. I’m going to ask Drew to stay home as well.”

“But she hasn’t been at school since she got sick,” I said.

“You can’t be sure of that,” he said. “We don’t know how long the incubation period might be. She could have been carrying the bacteria or virus last week before the symptoms started showing.”

I considered everything as calmly as I could. If anyone had caught this mystery disease from Rachel on Friday, the last time she was at school, they’d have come down with it by now, wouldn’t they? I haven’t seen anyone in class coughing or sneezing. And Dad thought I was probably safe. Rachel was
living
with her dad, after all. That’s a lot more close contact than I’d had with her.

At the same time, I was imagining sitting at home for the next three days—on my own. I’ve been doing okay, but I still get nervous about speaking up in class, and to be honest, I’m a little terrified of showing up at swim tryouts on Thursday. Giving in to Dad would be an easy way out. Which was exactly why I shouldn’t.

“What if I’d like to keep going to school?” I asked. “I mean, there’s cautious and then there’s paranoid, right? Only five people are sick. For all we know, they could get better tomorrow.”

Dad exchanged a look with Mom over my shoulder. His mouth tensed, but he nodded.

“All right,” he said. “But if you notice anyone in your classes with any of the symptoms I’ve mentioned—or if you feel at all unwell…”

I held up my hands. “I’ll stay at home and I won’t argue,” I said. “I promise.”

But even though I know if there was really an emergency, Dad would never have agreed, once I got up to my room, I couldn’t make myself turn off the light. I keep wondering, what if those people don’t get better? What if I did catch it, whatever it is?

I hope you’re sleeping well out there in New York, Leo. Then at least one of us is.