Embrace the Fall (Part 4)

It’s basically a cliché for kids with a security detail to sneak away from the adults charged with protecting them, but when you’re in middle school and you can’t go shopping without a crowd of men and women in suits, you don’t care about cliché. You just sneak out of the store’s changing rooms in the nondescript clothes you stuffed into the bottom of your backpacks and enjoy freedom you haven’t had in years.

That was the first time Nelle and I disguised ourselves out in public.

We eventually got caught, obviously, and told off. I felt bad, because there were some good people who looked after us. But, in the end, it got spun into a happy story for the public about what good friends the princess and her ambassador had become, a charming tale of youthful spirit. Just the sort of thing that builds an appetite for peace.

* * *

If there was any proof that I hadn’t yet fallen in love, surely Nelle’s ankle was it. If you’re in love with someone, you don’t let them get hurt for something as pathetic as trying to hide your fear of heights.

Even just as a friend, I felt I’d been pretty terrible to let this happen.

“You know she’s still alive, right?”

Elliso plopped down next to me on the bench across the hall from the med bay where one of the GPSS’ on-call physicians was wrapping Nelle’s ankle before releasing her back to us.

“The doc said it was just a light sprain. Stop looking like she got a terminal diagnosis.”

“The wind farm…” I mumbled, unconvincing even to my own ears.

“…is four days away, and the doc said she’d be fine in three. What’s up with you, Annin?”

One of the worst things about the sunk cost fallacy, or, rather, the entire problem with it, is that it leads you to make decisions actively opposed to your own self-interest.

Case study: me. Here I was, lost in a collapsing galaxy of my own thoughts, with one of my closest friends offering a wide-open escape pod.

And yet, what I said was, “I just think I should have, I don’t know. Seen it coming.”

The look Elliso gave me said very plainly what he thought of that. His face said, You cannot be this stupid.

“You cannot be this stupid, Annin,” his mouth said.

Even from the depths of my gloom, I thought one or the other would have been enough. Both the look and saying it out loud felt a little harsh.

“Actually, what are you even talking about?” he continued. “What does, ‘I should have seen it coming’ mean? You reading the future in the stars now?”

“Now you’re just being disrespectful.”

“Are you saying you don’t deserve it for being an idiot?”

“First you accuse me of doing astrology, and now you’re calling me dumb? I thought we were friends.”

“Friends don’t let friends blame themselves when they should be claiming force majeure,” he said.

“Just because we learned about basic contract law in geopolitics class doesn’t mean you can shoehorn it into conversations just to show off,” I retorted. “Also, a sprained ankle doesn’t count as an act of God.”

“What’s the point of going to an intergalactic exchange school if I don’t get to put what I learn into practice?”

“To develop common sense?”

“Ah, but I’m not the one blaming myself for an accident. So which one of us is lacking common sense, Annin?”

The problem with having clever friends, well… you see. I had to admit, though, that a little banter went a long way to pulling me out of the gravitational pull of my guilt.

I eyed Elliso suspiciously.

“Was all that just to cheer me up?”

He smiled broadly, dimple showing.

“That’s the first smart thing you’ve said since I sat down.”

If I was a pettier person, I would have held that comment against him.

“So now will you tell me what’s going on? Sure, it sucks Nelle got hurt. But, like, she’s going to be fine in a few days. Why have you been looking so miserable?” He paused, searching my face. “Or, more like, why are you making up weird excuses for it?”

I returned my gaze to the door of the room containing the one person who would understand. The one person who knew my secret.

But…

Maybe it was time for one more person to know. And maybe if I started here, I could tell one more person after that, and then another. So something like this wouldn’t happen again.

If my secret was hurting Nelle, maybe it wasn’t a secret worth keeping.

I took a deep breath. Things would only change from the way they’d always been if I changed first.

“Can I tell you a secret that’s going to make you think I really am stupid?”

“Uh, sure?”

“I’m afraid of heights.”

Part of me didn’t want to look, but I had to see his reaction.

Of course, Elliso looked completely normal.

A normal reaction to a normal revelation.

“Yeah?” he said.

“That’s… not really the bad part.”

He let out a short laugh.

“No kidding. I was expecting a confession that you, I don’t know, had decided Nelle hated you or something. Nothing wrong with a phobia you can’t help.”

“Why would you expect that?”

“When it comes to you, Annin, I never know.”

Fair enough. It wasn’t exactly like I was a beacon of certainty about the whole thing.

“So, what’s the bad part?” he asked.

Before I spoke, some tiny voice deep inside tried to protest. To say that, if I let this out, the thing that had kept Nelle by my side all this time would vanish. Over it, a louder one, the one that had grown deafening over years of listening to it, shouted that all my years of hiding were about to go to waste.

But that’s the thing about friends who aren’t just clever, but kind. They remind you that their voices are the ones that really matter.

So I shoved the other voices away.

“I’ve been hiding it since fourth grade. Nelle’s the only person who knows, and she’s been helping me hide it. Like the day I went to the nurse’s. She made me sniff the superadhesive so I’d throw up and wouldn’t have to go to the roof. Or the elevator experiment. And today, she was going to pretend to get hurt so I had an excuse not to climb, but…”

Elliso blew out a breath.

“Dang,” he said. “You sniffed that nasty-smelling stuff?”

I glared at him.

“I’m confessing my secrets and that’s what you say?”

“Would you prefer I say that if someone was trying that hard for me, I might be tempted to quit finding new people to flirt with every few months?”

I flinched. Maybe I should have let him stay on the adhesive thing instead of basically inviting him to have a dig at my main Nelle-related problem.

“I know,” I said. “That just makes it worse that I let her get hurt for my sake.”

Elliso’s trio of tch’s echoed through the hallway as he wagged a finger at me.

“None of that. She did it because she wanted to. If you want to take responsibility for something, how about you get a clue about your feelings for her?”

“I’ve been trying to! Why do you think I’ve been waiting to fall in love with her?”

“Waiting?” Elliso repeated. “What do you mean, you’ve been waiting to fall in love?”

“What do you mean?” I said, unsure why he sounded so incredulous. “Since I stopped trying to avoid falling in love with her, I’ve been waiting for a crush to hit me. You know, seeing her differently, butterflies in the stomach, only being able to think about her. That kind of thing. But it hasn’t happened yet.”

The smack of his hand against his face echoed in the sparse metal hallway.

“Hasn’t happened yet? You’ve got to be kidding,” Elliso groaned. “Tell me you’re joking, Annin.”

“Ha? ” I said, annoyed. “Why would I be joking? It’s not like I can just make my feelings for her change all of a sudden. You can’t force yourself to fall in love with someone. It needs to happen naturally.”

“This is the most incredible thing I’ve ever heard,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Annin, you’re just…”

I felt my annoyance flare into irritation.

“I explained all of this to you literally the day after we went shopping.”

“Yeah, and I thought when you said you were letting yourself fall in love that you meant you were just going to confess.”

“I know you don’t do the whole committed relationships thing,” I said, trying to hold my temper in check. “But even you have to know you need to fall in love first.”

I half-expected Elliso to bite back, but instead he broke into an uproar of laughter, pulling his hand away from his face to slap my shoulder.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said, trying to push him away. “I’m trying to do things the right way!”

He only laughed harder, and I felt myself fuming more the longer he went on.

“Elliso!”

My exclamation finally got through to him, his mirth diminishing as I grouched in silence next to him. When he’d made his last chuckle, he pushed himself to standing and looked down at my with an infuriatingly wry smile.

“What?” I said sourly.

“Sorry, but I can’t spell this one out for you, Annin. You’ve got to figure out how you feel about her yourself.”

The contrast between Elliso’s serious tone and previous humor caught my attention, and my anger cooled. He looked at me for a moment longer, then turned to walk down the hallway.

“Come find us in the restaurant district when the princess gets out.”

As he went, in the void left by the departure of my annoyance rose a sudden desperate feeling. A feeling like he was walking away with the key to my confusion.

“How is it so easy for you?”

The question was out of my mouth before I realized it. I hadn’t even known I wanted to ask it.

“Like with Mav, or any of the others,” I continued. “How do you always know what to do?”

“Easy?” Elliso turned, running a hand through his blond hair. “I’m just honest with myself about what I want—and what I don’t.”

He smiled at me, that same wry expression again.

“I don’t know if that’ll work for you, Annin. But maybe you’d be better off looking for an answer in your own heart instead of waiting for some sudden moment of change.”

He resumed walking, and I heard him chuckle.

“Where’d you get the idea that you need to fall in love with her anyways?”