“Why?”
Hershey looked thoughtful. “I figured I was missing out, I guess. Everyone would talk about being ‘led’ and feeling ‘guided.’ It seemed so . . . easy. To not have to weigh the options and decide for yourself. To be given the answers without having to take the test.”
I almost laughed at the absurdity of it. Easy? Yeah, right. Listening to the Doubt meant completely setting yourself aside. Even as a kid, I’d understood that. The voice would whisper not to worry when reason said I should. It’d tell me to slow down when I needed to hurry, to be kind when I was angry, to listen when I so desperately wanted to be heard. “Guided” was the euphemism for being chastised and corrected and coaxed.
“I mean, obviously the answers are wrong,” Hershey said then. “They have to be, right? It’s not the Doubt unless it’s irrational, so—”
I interrupted her. “It’s not irrational. It’s arational.” That had been the most surprising discovery in my APD research—other than finding out that my mom had it. The “irrational inkling” was another nickname for it, but the empirical evidence suggested that the voice was much less predictable than that.
“Arational?”
“Not rational or irrational,” I explained. “Sort of outside the realm of reason, I guess.”
She considered this. “Is it weird when it speaks to you?” she asked then.
“It’s hard to remember,” I lied. “It’s been so long.”
“Rory.” Her voice was gentle but chiding. “I know you still hear it. Talk to me about it. I’m not going to tell anyone.”
I looked over at her and hesitated, wavering. I hadn’t planned on ever telling anyone about the voice, not my dad, not even Beck. And here I was about to spill it to Hershey, a girl with secrets of her own she insisted on keeping, a girl who hardly inspired a great deal of trust. There was no way that was a good idea. I should’ve asked her how she could possibly know what I’d barely admitted to myself, but I was too caught up in my response to wonder about the question.
Hershey kept pressing. “It told you to help me study, didn’t it?”
I started to shake my head to deny it, but Hershey barreled on. “It’s the only explanation. Why else would you do it? It’s not like I had some compelling sob story to win you over. I blew off school. I deserved to fail.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said, more for my own benefit than hers.
“Rory, come on,” she said, swinging around in front of me to look me in the eye.
“The voice did tell me to help you,” I said finally. “But that’s not why I did it. I helped you because you’re my friend.” This was the truth. It struck me in that moment how disturbing that should be—that my mind and the Doubt’s had been completely in sync.
Hershey burst into tears. Instinctively, I reached for her hand. It sat limply in mine as she cried.
“Hersh, it’s really not a big deal,” I said softly. “You needed help, I helped. It’s not like it hurt me at all. I did fine on my tests.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, shaking her head.
“So tell me. What’s going on?”
She shook her head again. “I can’t,” she whispered. “You’d hate me.”
For a second I forgot she didn’t know anything about me and North. That had to be what she couldn’t bring herself to tell me—that she was hooking up with the guy I liked. So I made it easy for her.
“Hershey, I already know.”
Her eyes jerked up. “What?”
“Not the details, but I know something happened. I came by his apartment that night. I saw your dress on his floor.”
Confusion flashed in her eyes. “Huh?”
“You and North,” I said. “The night of the Masquerade Ball.”
Finally it registered. “So that’s why you thought we were hooking up!”
“If you weren’t, why was your dress on his floor?”
“Because I puked on it,” she replied. “I went to Paradiso thinking coffee would sober me up. Ugh, I could throw up again just thinking about it.” She grimaced. “Anyway, North loaned me some clothes and gave me a bag for the dress. That was it. Really.” I believed her, but it didn’t completely make sense. If it was so innocent, why didn’t North just tell me that when I showed up at his door? Instead he’d seemed so cagey, so concerned that Hershey would find out I was there. I can explain, he’d said. So why hadn’t he? The wad of napkin felt like lead in my pocket. “So does he know you like him?” she asked.
“I don’t like him,” I said quickly.
“Mm-hm. Whatever. But he’d be lucky to have you.” She slipped her arm through mine and laid her head on my shoulder. “I’m sorry I’ve been such a sucky friend,” she said after a minute.
“You haven’t been that bad,” I said, squeezing her arm. I waited for her to laugh or make a joke, but she didn’t. She was quiet after that.
We stayed like that the whole way back to campus, my hand on her arm, her head on my shoulder. I’ve never had this, I thought. Having a boy BFF has its perks—less drama, less gossip, more action movies—but I’d missed out on the sisterhood of girlfriends. The comfort of sameness. I’d envied other girls, their ease with one another, the way they occupied the same physical space, touching one another’s hair and faces, clinging to arms and waists. With a boy, there had to be margin. Distance. You couldn’t hold hands or sit on laps or walk arm in arm like this. Unless, of course, you were more than friends, but Beck and I never were. With a pang I realized that I hadn’t spoken to my best friend in weeks. We’d texted a few times, but he hadn’t returned any of my calls. It wasn’t entirely unlike him—he hated the phone—but still, it stung. We caught up with two girls from my pod in the courtyard. Dana and Maureen. They were carrying bags of movie theater popcorn and jumbo-size boxes of candy.
“What’d you guys see?” I asked as we fell in stride with them.
“Sugar Sword Four,” Dana replied, making a face. “So bad.”
“Serves us right for not asking Lux before spending twenty-three dollars on the fourth installment of a franchise about a girl who fights crime with candy,” Maureen chimed in. “Then again, the only other choice at the theater downtown was a war movie. After our practicum midterm, I couldn’t watch another explosion.” She shuddered a little.
I felt the smile fade from my lips. Going out with Hershey had made me forget my practicum midterm, but the mention of it brought the horrible images rushing back. I’d gotten so caught up in celebrating my grades that I’d forgotten to search for the real incident online. Was Liam right? Was the scenario based on something that had actually happened? My stomach squeezed at the thought.
I waited until we were back in our room to start looking. “Want to watch Forensic Force?” Hershey asked from her bed. I was lying across mine, typing the words “dock explosion faulty firework island” into GoSearch, and I didn’t look up.
“Sure.”
“What are you doing?” Hershey asked. In my peripheral vision, I could see her craning her neck to see my screen.
“Trying to find the news story Tarsus used for our practicum exam today.”
“The people on the dock?”
I glanced at her and nodded.
Hershey looked at me like I’d said I wanted to rip my nails off with rusty pliers. “Why?”
“I just . . . want to know what really happened, I guess.” I was barely acknowledging this to myself and definitely wouldn’t admit it to Hershey, but the truth was, I was looking for absolution. In some weird and twisted way, if more people died in the real version than did in my simulation, I could let myself off the hook. If I’d done better for those people onscreen than they’d fared in life, maybe I’d stop feeling guilty about the ones I didn’t save.