The Fall (Camren)

Fear of Falling

Lauren’s walk back to the tour bus was purposefully sluggish. The last thing she wanted was to go back and listen to the girls talking about Camila and Austin’s flirty texts and dates and how cute their goddamn babies would be but it was getting late and she was slightly terrified of the shop owner who bore an uncanny resemblance to the shop owner in Deliverance.

The door to the bus was open when she eventually arrived. Danny, the driver, was sat at the wheel with a map spread over his lap and a Satnav in his hand. She could hear her band mates laughing in the back and music playing loudly. The thought of walking in there and acting like she was okay was draining just to think about.

When he noticed the dark haired girl at the door, Danny looked up from his map and smiled at her. He was a slightly pudgy older guy with tattoos up his arms but he had kind eyes and a fatherly essence that made Lauren feel safe and feel like she could trust him.

‘Can I go up on the roof?’ Lauren asked. She had asked Danny the same thing last week when she first noticed the dropdown ladders at the rear of the vehicle that lead to the roof. He had said no when she had asked, claiming that it was too dangerous. But today, probably due to the crestfallen look and dried tears on her face, Danny reached forward and pressed the ladder release button the console.

She smiled a little in thanks and then turned to make her way to the back of the bus.

‘Lauren, wait,’ Danny stopped her. ‘Take this,’ He handed her a folded dark blue fleece blanket. ‘It’s getting pretty cold out there.’

‘Thank you.’ She said, taking the blanket and heading towards the ladders.

The bus seemed much higher when she was stood on top of it. She peeked over the edge, a sense of vertigo suddenly upon her; she stepped back immediately and sat down carefully on the cold roof. When she was younger she used to tell people she had a fear of heights but she found out in high school that it was actually a fear of falling.

The heights themselves didn’t actually bother her; it was the sensation of falling or the possibility of falling that she was scared of. Lauren remembered writing about it for a school science project, how animals and infants reacted similarly in height experiments. They would avoid the possibility of falling, almost like they are born with this innate fear, an inbuilt form of self-preservation.

The irony wasn’t lost on her, her own fear of falling for Camila, of being hurt by Camila, caused her own self-defence mechanism to kick in – run.

She wanted to be the kind of person who didn’t run away or hide from her problems, she wished she could’ve run up to Camila and grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her, screamed at her, ‘I love you! Why would you want him, when I would give you the world!?’

But she knew that this wasn’t how this would play out. She was a coward on a ledge and telling the truth felt a whole lot like jumping.

Lauren looked out into the distance, the sun had almost completely set, she watched it duck behind the horizon then flicker and fade into oblivion.

The darkness set in and it got significantly colder. She wrapped the fleece blanket around herself and watched her own breaths coming out in swirls of white mist.

A little while later she heard the sound of the bus doors opening and footsteps on the gravel. Lauren instinctively burrowed deeper into the blanket. When the sound of someone ascending the ladders echoed she figured that Danny had come to check on her, but her breath caught in her throat when Camila’s head popped up over the edge.

‘What are you doing?’ Lauren asked.

‘What are you doing?’ Camila countered her torso now visible over the roof. ‘You disappear, it’s dark, the bus has broken down and the cast of Wrong Turn is apparently running the gas station. It’s the premise of every horror movie, I was worried about you.’