Page 47 of The Problem with Falling
I didn’t understand his cold, distant personality. I came to apologize. I came to try to shift our connection more toward a friendly one instead of our normally oddly tense experience with one another. Yet now he was attacking my character, which made me feel…sad. And misunderstood.
“It means exactly what you’d think it would mean. You’re fake.”
“No, I’m not!” I barked at him. “There’s nothing fake about me.”
“Everything’s fake about you,” he argued.
“Explain how.”
“For starters, you get along with everyone.”
I arched an eyebrow. “And that makes me fake?”
“Yes. No one likes everyone. It means you’re morphing into whatever it is that you think each person will like. Also known as being fake. And everyone in this godforsaken town seems to like you, too. Which means you’re not being real.”
“You don’t like me!” she said, pointing a stern finger my way. “And if I’m honest, you’re making it very hard for me to like you, too.”
“Well, I’ll be.” He snickered, but it wasn’t from amusement. It was a mocking type of laughter. “The first real moment of your life, I assume.”
“Screw you, Theo!”
“There you go, slugger. Let the real you seep out.”
“Why do you want me to be this awful person so bad? Why do you want me to be something I’m not?”
He stepped toward me, his big, broad body making me feel tiny as I tried my hardest to keep my chest puffed out to make myself look as big as I could next to his gigantic self.
“I don’t want you to be an awful person, Willow,” he hissed, stepping closer. His voice dropped an octave, and he locked his piercing eyes with my stare. “I just want you to stop pretending that you’re as happy as you are. Because you aren’t.”
“Then what am I?”
“Sad,” he confidently said.
“Sad?” I huffed. “I’m not sad.”
“Yes, Willow. You are.”
“How dare you assume—”
“It’s in your eyes,” he interrupted. This time, his tone wasn’t as harsh, though. It was gentler. Quieter. A whisper of truths that grazed against my ears.
I slightly shook my head. “What’s in my eyes?”
“Every ounce of sadness you’ve ever lived. It seeps out of you, Weeping Willow,” he remarked sarcastically. Or maybe he wasn’t being sarcastic. Maybe he saw the truth behind my life of pretending.
That left me uneasy.
I didn’t want to be perceived in such a way. I didn’t want others to know that parts of me were so heartbreakingly broken.I didn’t want them to see the nightmares that kept me up some nights.
I wanted to be happy.
I wanted others tothinkI was happy.
I had to lie to myself and the world because if I didn’t…if I didn’t stop spinning and pretending and living in a false reality, then my feet would touch solid ground, and I’d shatter into a million pieces.
Theo was right.
I was fake.
