Embrace the Fall (Part 1)

You’d think that after spending months, maybe years, trying not to fall in love with someone, letting yourself finally fall in love with them would be easy—that the feelings would appear to sweep you off your feet as soon as you were ready for them.

Apparently, it didn’t work like that. No torrent of new emotions exploded out of me. No sudden transformation colored my world in rose tones. Nothing changed at all. 

I was starting to wonder if I even knew what falling in love meant.

This was the kind of unnecessarily complicated emotional situation I found myself in as I looked into the Experimentation and Analysis Club room.

To be clear, my romantic headache had no connection to the EAC. I just happened to be thinking of it at the time.

It was Nelle’s club, after all.

Inside the room, a smattering of students wearing the short-sleeved button-downs of the school’s summer uniform worked. A few pairs poured over spreadsheets on razor-thin monitors, while another cluster appeared to be marking up some kind of architectural diagram. Given the wide-ranging, rarely related subjects of the EAC’s experiments, guessing at what any of them might be doing was basically impossible.

While I didn’t possess the same kind of skepticism Elliso did towards a club that was basically just another science lab, I had to admit that all this over the lunch break seemed a bit intense.

Then again, with a science nerd like Nelle at the helm, it was hardly surprising the rest of the club shared their founder’s limitless energy for testing ideas too grand—or too random—for class labs.

Against the far wall of the room, backlit by a pair of huge windows, Nelle studied her own computer screen. I was about to call out to her when she shot to standing.

“It got approved!”

The other club members almost all startled. One unfortunate soul who’d been making a careful mark on the diagram drew a ragged red line across half the page. But no one seemed upset. Instead, they left their projects, crowding around Nelle’s desk as excitement built.

“No joke?”

“I can’t believe they actually said yes!”

“When’d they schedule it?”

I withdrew my head from the doorway, not wanting to intrude on whatever nerdy treat the club had received. With only a few minutes until the pre-class warning bell, they’d be out soon enough.

I crossed the hall, putting my arms on the frame of an open window, and stared across the sun-dressed schoolyard. Opposite me, I could see the window to the nurse’s office. In the air, the buzz of conversation hummed as people ate their lunch, messed around in the halls, and generally enjoyed the break from classes. The energy that always precipitated summer break rustled under it all, like a breeze tickling leaves but not quite moving them—change on the air but not yet arrived.

“Whatcha looking at?”

I turned to see Nelle on my left, EAC members dispersing out the door behind her. I hadn’t realized the minutes had already elapsed, the warning bell ringing as she finished speaking.

“Nothing, really. Just thinking about how soon summer break is.”

“What about it?”

“Just that it’s coming. What was that all about?”

“What do you mean?”

I pushed up from the window, and we began to make our way toward the classrooms.

“The thing that got approved. You seemed pretty excited.”

Next to me, Nelle tapped her fingertips together, hands half-covered by the sleeves of her cardigan. Even as everyone else transferred to summer clothes, she preferred her customary sweater.

“How’d you know about that?” she asked.

“I was coming to get you. You messed up one guy’s drawing, you know.”

“Did I?”

She didn’t seem all that concerned.

“Uwah. No sympathy for him?”

“I wasn’t trying to mess him up. But that project’s just a stopgap anyways. This is the real deal. The real deal!”

The fingertip taps morphed into little claps to emphasize the point, their sound muffled by the fabric covering her palms.

“Months ago, we put in a request to do a survey at a wind farm. Like a cost-benefit analysis of generators at different scales. We designed our own miniature version with the engineering club. But we wanted to have an enterprise-grade data set to compare it to in an equivalent environment.”

“Don’t you already know the bigger ones are going to be better? I mean, why else would they build them that big if they weren’t the most efficient?”

“You’d think that,” Nelle said, sneaking a proud smile at me. “But we won’t know until we try.”

“You think yours is better.”

“Only the data will tell.”

“But you think you know what it’ll say.”

“We only have hypotheses, Annin. That’s the scientific process.”

If she didn’t want to say it out loud, I didn’t mind. But it was pretty obvious what those hypotheses were.

“The only annoying thing is that they only approved the on-site visit for two students,” Nelle said.

We turned the corner toward the stairs that led to the second-floor classrooms. As was my custom, I put my eyes on my shoes, clutching the rail a bit harder than necessary, as we went up. After hundreds of times up and down, my body had mostly decided that I wasn’t going to die from this particular ascent. Mostly.

“When’s the visit?” I said as we rounded the landing and took the second set. Keeping Nelle talking so her familiar voice could distract me was a tried and true strategy against what remained of the fear.

“A few days into summer break. We have to check the installation of our generator and verify the data collection. I’ll probably ask Pera to come.”

“What if I went with you?”

Halfway up the stairs, the suggestion flew out of my mouth before I even realized it. Distracted by the steps, I didn’t notice that she was no longer at my side until I reached the floor above.

“Nelle?”

I turned slowly, reaching out for the railing.

Nelle stood a few stairs below, looking up at me with an expression that, even after all our years together, I didn’t recognize. I braced myself for the world to rock as my height and the stairs conspired to make my body believe I was Too Far Up, but as long as I held her unreadable green eyes, everything stayed solid.

“Never mind,” I said, my brain finally digesting my own words and choking on my presumptuousness. Of course she was looking confused—if that was what that expression meant. “I’m not even a club member. I wouldn’t want to take the opportunity from Pera or whoever else. Plus, I don’t know anything about the experiment, so I’d be completely useless.”

This was the rational thing to say. Maybe even the right thing to say. But, for some reason, I had a feeling of irritation with myself, as if I wished I weren’t saying it.

“That’s okay,” Nelle said.

“What’s okay?”

“I don’t care if you’re useless.”

Nelle started climbing the stairs again, but she didn’t look away.

I didn’t either.

The one-minute warning bell rang as she joined me at the top of the stairs. We should have made a break for the classroom, but…

“Did you know the EAC has an honorary membership program?” Nelle said.

“You do? A whole program?”

“Yeah.”

“Since when?”

“The club charter says that, as president, I can make discretionary alterations to club member requirements, provided they don’t disqualify existing members.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Do you want to be an honorary member?”

I didn’t know what it meant to be an honorary member of a club. Actually, I didn’t know if what she’d said about the club charter was even real. It sounded a bit suspect.

“I don’t know if I sho–”

“I didn’t ask if you should. I asked if you wanted to.”

“I’m starting to doubt your intentions here, Miss Club President.”

“It’s discretionary. Do you know what that means? It means, I can do it if I want to.”

Every time she blinked, I thought I saw rolling fields of tall grass in her eyes, the blue of her bangs the wide sky above.

“So what do you want to do?”

What do you want to do?

“I guess it would be cool to see a wind farm,” I said.

Nelle lowered herself from her toes, letting go. 

Letting go? 

When had she grabbed my shirt and pulled me toward her?

“You have to say it directly, you know. Otherwise, I can’t say it’s official.”

Down the hallway, our literature teacher’s head appeared out the door to our classroom. It swiveled in the opposite direction, then back toward us. Distantly, I heard shouting that sounded like both of our names.

“Okay,” I said. “Then I’d like to be an honorary member of the Experimentation and Analysis Club.”

She smiled.

“Consider your application accepted.”