Free While I'm Falling by Laura Moriarty

alone together since high school, and I wondered if, with no audience, she might momentarily drop the act. She did not. When she noticed me watching her, she fished a tube of lipstick out of her skirt pocket, turned around, and looked at her reflection in the flat-screen television.
    “He’s really particular about his things,” she said. “He’ll notice right away if anything is different.” She sounded angry, maybe at me. I could see her face in the gray screen, but I couldn’t read her expression.
    Still, all around me was quiet. I could hear a dishwasher, gently humming, but that was all. Sunlight streamed in through the enormous windows, settling on the overstuffed couch, the hardwood floors, the lush and leafy plants perched on pedestals. I leaned forward and looked through the bathroom doorway, catching sight of the edge of the Jacuzzi—“a garden tub,” my mother would have called it. I hadn’t taken a long, hot bath in over a year. And so even though I was unsure if Haylie had just made a threat or a complaint, I continued to be friendly and compliant.
    I would think about it later, how I dove headfirst into that weekend. I only took in the information that I wanted, and I ignored everything else. My mother would later tell me, in her nice way, not to be so hard on myself; I wasn’t the first person to ignore a risk. This is how we welcome both adventure and grief, as anyone who has done so will tell you.
    That evening, Marley Gould, wearing piglet slippers and a long, ruffled nightgown, was camped out on the big orange couch that faced the elevators in the seventh-floor lobby. I was on a quick study break, headed downstairs to get a soda; but when I saw the back of Marley’s long braid, I slowed. I felt bad for Marley. She was from a town in western Kansas that had a slightly smaller population than our dorm. She seemed much younger than the other freshmen on my floor. Her roommate was in a sorority and never around. I knew she read out in the lobby because she was lonely.
    “Hi, Marley. How’s it going?”
    She looked up with such a happy, hopeful expression that when the elevator doors opened behind me, I didn’t move.
    “Okay! Just doing some reading!” She showed me the cover of her book: a princess, in full princess garb, was holding a sword to a dragon’s throat. She glanced at my walkie-talkie. “You’re on duty?”
    I nodded. Two black girls—I didn’t know their names—emerged from the women’s wing, laughing hard into their hands. One of them smiled at me and then at Marley, but they kept moving, running into the waiting elevator just before the doors closed.
    “It’s finally getting colder out, huh?” Marley pulled her braid in front of her shoulder, and then just under her nose, as if she were sniffing the tip. “And the buses were running late all day. Did you notice? I have to get better shoes. I have these great boots back home, but I didn’t bring them up yet, because it was so warm at Thanksgiving, and now it’s cold. So my dad said he would send them, but…”
    Trying to smile, I watched her lips move. I fought the urge to look at my watch. I had physiology lab the next morning, and before I went to it, I had to be able to diagram the central nervous system and digestive tract of a dog shark. And Tim was coming over at eleven. You can be kind, my mother had often said to both me and Elise. Nothing else you girls accomplish really matters if you don’t know how to look out for other people. When I was in grade school, she had methods of tracking my social ethics. She was always the room mother, coming to school with cupcakes or inviting herself along on field trips on which she would strongly encourage me on the bus to sit next to the kid no one else wanted to sit with. Just say hello and be friendly, she would say. It only takes a minute.
    Marley was looking at me now, waiting. She had asked me a question.
    “What?” I shook my head. “Sorry.”
    “I said, ‘Do