“Well, I think it’s a bad idea,” Hershey declared, aiming her handheld at the wallscreen. “Shitty things happen in the world. There’s no use dwelling on them.” She scrolled down to the most recent episode of Forensic Force and pressed play.
“I’m not dwelling,” I muttered as I scanned the first page of search results. When I didn’t see anything that looked remotely like our exam, the tension I’d been carrying around started to give way. Until I tapped over to the next page and was staring at an image identical to the scene I’d seen in class. The same green mountains in the distance, the same floating bridge leading to the same white sand beach, the same wooden crates of fireworks and crowded dock. It was a “before” photo, obviously, pre-explosion, when the platform was still intact. But it had to be from the same day. I double-tapped the photo and read the caption beneath it: INDEPENDENCE DAY CELEBRATION IN FIJI, OCTOBER 10, 2030.
Less than a week ago. The photo wasn’t attached to an article, so I searched again, with the date this time. The top hit was a story from the day after, with the headline “Dock Accident Cuts Fiji Freedom Fest Short.” I tapped my screen to open the page. I had to read the first paragraph three times before I understood what happened.
In a fortuitous accident, a floating platform holding a crowd of natives and tourists in Fiji collapsed on Sunday, dropping celebrants into the South Pacific Ocean just moments before the event’s arsenal of fireworks exploded. With more than eight hundred in attendance for the island’s annual Fiji Freedom Fest, it is believed that the weight on the dock moments before the collapse was nearly three times its posted limit.
“Thank God they broke the rules,” John Smith, an American tourist on his honeymoon, remarked afterward. “If the dock hadn’t collapsed, we all would’ve been standing on it when the fireworks blew.”
Instead the wooden crates that held the more than two tons of aerial-display fireworks caught fire just as they sunk below the surface of the water, killing hundreds of tropical fish but no humans.
I swallowed hard. In real life the dock had broken apart just moments before the fireworks caught fire. But I’d evacuated at least half of the weight by then, preventing the collapse and thus ensuring the explosion. The relief I should’ve felt that no real people had died was sucked away by a stilling reverence for the voice that had known how to save them.
The Doubt had been right.
If I hadn’t done anything—if I’d only waited—every single person on that dock would’ve survived. But how could the voice have known that? The Doubt didn’t belong to some external, omniscient force. It was an auditory hallucination my brain produced. But if that’s all it was, then how could it have told me something I didn’t know? Because there was no way I could’ve known that platform would collapse when it did.
I sat there, staring at my screen until it went dark, emotions rushing through me like river water. What was I supposed to do now?
I reached for the pendant around my neck, pinching it between finger and thumb. Is this what my mother had gone through, this same internal debate? In the end, she’d chosen to trust the voice, and look how it had ended for her. With a permanent diagnosis and a ticket back to Seattle.
“Find it?” I heard Hershey ask.
“The dock collapsed before the explosion,” I told her, tossing my tablet onto her bed. She scanned the story then tossed it back.
“That’s good news, right?”
When I didn’t answer, Hershey looked at me. “What?” I hesitated. So long that she asked again. “Rory. What?”
“I heard the Doubt during the exam,” I said finally, regretting it as soon as the words were out. But I needed to tell someone, and Beck wasn’t there. He also hadn’t returned yet another one of my voice messages, which my brain didn’t have space to analyze at that moment. Hershey didn’t react. She just picked up the remote to pause the TV.
“Okay,” she said. “And?”
“And it told me to wait.”
“To wait?”
“We were supposed to save as many people as possible,” I explained in a hushed, hurried voice, even though we were alone in our room. “And I didn’t know what to do. There were all these little kids . . . I just kind of froze. And then I panicked, because obviously the test was timed, and we didn’t know when the dock would explode, just that it would.”
“Ugh, your exam sounds so cool. Ours was so lame. But keep going.”
“The point is I thought I had to hurry. Everyone did. How else were we supposed to get those people off the dock before it exploded? But the voice, it told me not to do anything. It said to wait. Which made no sense. Except—”
“The dock would’ve collapsed before the explosion,” Hershey said. “You would’ve saved them all.” She exhaled, her breath whistling through her teeth. “And there’s no way your brain could’ve figured that out somehow?”
“No.”
Hershey looked thoughtful. “So the Doubt, it—”
“It knew something I didn’t,” I said. “Which is impossible. Scientifically, empirically impossible.”
“Yeah. You’re right. So it must’ve just been a fluke, then.” She was baiting me, because she could tell I didn’t believe that.
I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the ceiling. “Do you think it’s possible that the Doubt isn’t as bad as people think?”
Hershey was quiet. I glanced over at her again. She was on her back too, staring at the ceiling. “But there’s science,” she said finally, but without her usual conviction. “Studies that prove that the Doubt isn’t rational.” She turned her head and met my gaze. “Right?”
There were studies. I’d read most of them. But as I’d pointed out in my research paper, none were particularly complete. The most famous one compared life outcomes between people like my mom and people like Hershey—people who professed to trust the Doubt and people who claimed never to have heard it—and concluded that the second group fared much better in terms of happiness, stability, and prosperity. It was a splashy headline, but it hardly said anything about the Doubt itself. “I guess I’m just not convinced,” I said finally. “But even that freaks me out, because that’s probably how it started for my mom, too, and look what happened to her.”
“What did happen to her?” Hershey asked.
“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “I know she started hearing the Doubt, and she saw a psychiatrist about it. It got pretty bad, I guess—her grades were suffering and stuff—and her doctor wanted to commit her. So they expelled her.”
“Wow,” Hershey said. “That’s heavy.”
I rolled onto my side, toward her. “Please don’t say anything to anyone. About my mom, or what I heard today.”
“I won’t,” she said. “I promise.” But she didn’t meet my gaze.
16
HERSHEY SPENT THE WEEKEND doing homework, venturing into the library for the first time all semester. I found her asleep on top of her tablet in the otherwise empty main reading room late Saturday afternoon, drooling on her calculus problem set. I curled up in one of the armchairs by the reading room’s crackling fire and let her sleep while I waded through my lit reading.
I kept zoning out, thinking about North.
I wanted to believe Hershey’s story about what happened, but it didn’t completely make sense. If it was so innocent, why didn’t North just tell me what was going on when I showed up at his door?