Descend the Stairs (Part 6)

Apparently, a handshake is not the proper way to greet a princess you’ve just met for the first time.

I didn’t know that, though. I was in third grade. And anyways, it didn’t seem to matter much. Not when she was enthusiastically pumping my arm up and down with both hands.

Maybe some member of the galactic nobility, watching through the cameras we’d already forgotten about, fainted at our breach of decorum. As for us, alone together in that glass gazebo on the lawn of the mansion that would become her home on the planet, we only cared that we’d each made a new friend.

* * *

We pulled it off somehow, Elliso and I. Pure fraternal instinct drove us. As the diversion, I suffered worst for it. But when the five of us were reunited in the street, Deji unscathed and Pera none the wiser, Elliso and I shared a look of noble satisfaction. The life of our pure-souled friend had been spared thanks to our actions.

Forget the town with the famous bell; we felt like we’d just built a city of brotherly love with our own damn hands.

“What happened to your face?” Deji asked me.

“Let’s just say,” Pera answered, clutching the paper bag I now knew contained certain ladies’ items to her chest. “That he was unwise and incautious in his eagerness to see the results of our shopping.”

“I really didn’t know,” I repeated.

“I am aware.”

Next to Pera, Nelle cracked up, futilely trying to stifle her giggles with a hand weighed down by the bags hanging from her arm.

Thankfully, the groundwork for my role as decoy while Elliso pulled Deji out of the shop had been set long ago, if unwittingly. This wasn’t our first shopping trip as a group, and I’d always made an effort to pay attention to what the others bought. More than once, I’d seen how pleased Nelle was to share about her purchases and tastes. It was reinforcement for a habit that even Pera sometimes seemed to at least tolerate.

In other words, my interest in their most recent prizes hadn’t been out of character. I just usually didn’t throw myself into their bags with such reckless curiosity.

It had to be done, though. Pera might have forgiven Deji for chatting with a random shopkeeper, but one with hair almost the same color as hers? Not a chance.

“What’s so funny?” I grouched at Nelle almost a full half hour later, although without real annoyance. I already knew the answer anyways. Every time she’d glanced at me since we’d left Rebellious 2nd, she’d immediately looked away from the fading red on my cheek as if doing so would hide her laughter.

We’d split from the others, Elliso deciding he’d had enough of the outdoors and Pera satisfied with her shopping. Deji, of course, had followed Pera, leaving Nelle and I to wander together.

“Nothing,” she said, her voice lilting up at the end.

“It did actually hurt, you know.”

“I’m sure you learned an important lesson about Pera’s delicate maiden spirit.”

“Delicate…?”

Although Nelle hadn’t been on the receiving end of Pera’s palm, I was sure the way the slap echoed through the streets had been sufficient to make clear that delicate was not an appropriate word choice.

“I think you got off light, all things considered. Especially if she’d realized what you two were up to.”

It wasn’t quite a chill that ran up my spine, but it was close.

“You knew?” I asked, wondering just how close Elliso and I had come to disaster.

“You might not believe this, but my observation skills are top notch. Don’t worry, though.” She winked, trying to mime zipping her lips shut with the same arm that held her bags and not exactly succeeding. “I won’t say a word.”

“Don’t hold it over me, okay? In fact, may I hold some of your bags, ma’am?”

“Oooh, pretty bold after everything you’ve been through.”

“I’m trusting you not to give me a bag worth slapping me over.”

“I give you permission to look at my candles all you want.”

Nelle slid a few bags of her arm and handed them over. I saw the red indentations on her skin where their handles had pressed in.

I won’t say buying her silence was the only reason for my offer.

I bundled the bags together in my free hand, letting them hang at my side.

“Candles?” I said, peering into the heaviest bag. Sure enough, it held more than a few stout, paper-wrapped cylinders. “What for?”

“Let me see…” Nelle tapped a finger on her chin. “Well, lots of people burn them because they smell nice.”

“I know that,” I said, narrowing my eyes to let her know she wasn’t funny. “But most people only burn one at a time. Don’t tell me you’re abandoning the sciences for witchcraft with all thes–hey!”

I stepped away, dodging a playful kick aimed at my calf. I glared at Nelle, who only responded with a smug smile.

“Don’t forget who’s carrying your purchases. I can’t be held responsible if something happens to your candles as a result of your unwarranted attacks.”

“Hmmm,” she hummed, an expression of complete unconcern on her face. “I’ll consider your argument.”

Our exchange continued as we made our way through the streets, ducking into shops whenever one of us saw something of interest. The sun shone down from the cloudless afternoon sky, and even in the comfortable temperature of late spring I felt it warming the top of my head, drawn in by my dark hair.

Nelle seemed unaffected, although I noticed a drop of sweat slide down her temple where just the smallest tuft of the blue hair she’d crammed into her cap peeked out.

“Should we call it?” I asked as we came to the end of one of the backstreets, just out of the way of the flowing crowds of the main road. “You’re looking a little warm.”

“It’s these pants. I don’t get why people wear them.”

“Is that a yes?”

Nelle shook her head, pointing. I followed her finger to a coffee shop across the street.

“You want coffee?”

“Look at the sign. They have frozen mochas. Fro-zen.”

“Any excuse to stay out will do I guess.”

Not that I could begrudge her something sweet after what I’d eaten earlier.

I looked back up the street, gazing over the heads of the crowd toward the building where we’d eaten earlier to look for a crosswalk.

“It’s faster this way,” Nelle said. I felt the sleeve of my jacket pulled away from my arm. “But…”

Not far away in the opposite direction, a pedestrian bridge crossed the busy road, people streaming up and down its stairs.

“But what?”

“We don’t have to. I don’t mind going the long way.”

I thought back to my conversation with Elliso, to my own thoughts.

Just because I’m afraid of heights…

“No,” I said. “We’re not letting me get in the way of your mocha.”

I consolidated her bags and mine into one hand, then stepped forward, grabbing Nelle’s wrist gently and pulling her after me so we didn’t get separated as we wove into the mass of people.

“I can just go get it myself!” she protested, but I had already had a foot on the first step. If I looked straight down, it was almost as if I wasn’t even going up.

At least, that was the lie I told myself as I took the next one. I made it all the way up to the landing where the walkway crossing the road connected with the stairs before, unable to keep moving without checking where I was going, I looked up.

I knew the traffic was barely moving, but it seemed like cars whizzed by below while the people in front of me slowed to the pace of sludge. Old, familiar, exasperating panic rose.

Then I felt a hand on my back, and through the touch, a memory.

“Let’s just say it involved a helicopter.”

“That sounds worse than an elevator.”

“No, because you would have been unconscious.”

“Are you turning into Pera?”

“Hey! Unlike Pera, I don’t imagine horrible things happening to the person I li–”

That was it. Back on a landing just like this one was the vaguely important thing I’d felt I missed on the way down from the restaurant: A word, even if cut off, that was unmistakable in its intention.

The person I like.

“You’re going to hurt her,” Elliso had said.

If she was already at the point where such words were on the tip of her tongue, where she was having to cut herself off… was she already at the end of her rope?

Cut herself off… with me?

“Maybe you already have,” he’d said.

I looked over my shoulder at Nelle, the bridge, the stairs, the cars, the people all gone. Even the panic that had been rising crumbled.

It was then that someone coming down the stairs knocked into her shoulder.

What happened in those next moments was like the reverse of that day in the classroom, when I’d fallen in slow motion as Deji’s ball flew from my hand. I hadn’t even known I could move so quickly.

My foot was on her step, and my arm was behind her back.

It wouldn’t have been that bad a fall. She might even have caught the stair rail and not fallen at all.

But my heart was thundering in my chest as if she leaned over the edge of a cliff.
“You… okay?” I breathed. 

Even under the shade of her hat, her eyes glittered. Sunlight glinted off her lips, her mouth slightly parted in surprise.

“Fine…” she breathed back.

Being afraid of heights is just another way of saying afraid of falling. As I stared at Nelle, her forehead damp with sweat and her clothes comically boyish, I thought that maybe falling in love might be the kind of fall that wouldn’t be so bad.