“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t need to. Your foot did.”
“Well, I—”
“Come on, you pain-in-the-butt. That’s enough of this,” he said, pulling her back against the canvas so that the top parts of their bodies were lying across the hammock sideways. His feet stayed planted onthe ground, though she could only brush hers against the tips of the grass.
“This is nice,” she said, her body an ironing board.
“Are you comfortable?”
“Relative to what?” Ellie asked the canopy of tree branches above.
Cris let out an exasperated breath and rolled toward Ellie. “Can I?” he asked. She nodded, blinking, and he shifted his arm under her so that her head rested on his bicep. It did feel more comfortable. Plus, the hammock wasn’t moving. Finally, it felt good to lie still. Of course, being Ellie, the longer she lay still, the more her thoughts came to party with a brass band and parade floats like it was Canal Street in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Her head was a never-ending stream of worries and fears, decked out in feather headdresses and honking horns. Couldn’t they take the day off, just this once?
“What are we doing, Cris?”
“We’re lying in a hammock, Ellie. It’s called relaxing.”
“This is not relaxing. This is us not preparing for the interview, which is one of the most important things we will ever do.” Ellie held her forehead in her hand. “We shouldn’t have drunk so much. We should have left and come back later.”
“Will you stop, please? You’re torturing yourself.” Cris pulled her hand off her forehead and placed it on her belly. “Would you have missed out on that lunch? The beautiful food and wine and new friends? I know this is important to you, but why are you killing yourself over this show? You’re already so successful. It’s me who should be freaking out!”
“That’s funny. I feel like it’s the complete opposite. I’m not successful—not in the way you think,” she said. She couldn’t look at him, but suddenly became very focused on the eucalyptus leaves wavingin the breeze overhead. She sighed. “I kind of can’t get over something I screwed up and I don’t know what to think about it anymore.”
“Is this still about what happened on the last show?”
“No. I mean, yes, that’sonescrewup. But there’s another.”
“You’re trying to decide whether or not you should tell me, I’m guessing.”
“It’s not about telling you or not telling you. All of the facts are out there. I just never lined them up all together in one place for you,” she said, drawing lines with her fingers in the air. Cris reached up and laced his fingers between hers, like he already knew how they fit. He rested their clasped hands on his thigh.
“How about you don’t worry about lining things up for once? Talk.”
“Okay,” she said, taking a breath. “I never hid it from anyone, but I never did my clinical internship when I got my PhD.” She paused, possibly waiting for a crack of lightning to slam down and split the tree in two, but all she heard was rustling leaves and a particularly chatty finch. “I never matched. I had just gotten an offer to sell the show to Magniv, and I couldn’t say no. At that moment it seemed like it wasn’t a big deal to skip the clinical training, as weird as that sounds. I thought that I was just choosing a different path, but I didn’t realize how it would plant this seed of insecurity in me. I didn’t notice it at first because I didn’t think of myself as a clinician on the show. We were having fun, and the psychology part was more like a nice bonus on my résumé, you know? I wasn’t trying to be taken seriously. The whole shtick of the show is that I am a snarky sports-hater paired up with athletes to burn them to the ground. Which I was more than willing to do, given my experience, but then it started to get personal. People were telling me things, real things about themselves, and I began to feel responsible for them. It was impossible to just write them off asself-centered jerks. The whole act started to feel gross and disingenuous. Given my family history, I wasn’t prepared to feel that level of empathy. So, I got insecure about the purpose of the show and my role in it—was I good enough to help these people? Of course, it didn’t come out like that when I opened my mouth and stuck my foot directly in it during a live recording.” She exhaled. “And then there’s one more thing.” If she wanted Cris to understand her, she was going to have to tell him everything. Whatever happened after that was not under her control. It was time to take a risk.
“El, you can take all the time you need, but I am listening.”
“About a year ago, I was feeling really tired. It was this exhaustion that didn’t really feel physical, but it still became overwhelming. There were all of these things about my life that I thought were insignificant—how I’m pretty rigid about certain things, I can’t deal with a lot of sensory stuff, and I kind of have a hard time regulating my reactions to some situations. I don’t know, there are a lot of things. I went to a new psychiatrist because I started to suspect that it wasn’t only anxiety, you know?”
“Are you sick? Is there something wrong?” Cris turned to face her, his eyes growing wide.
“No.” She turned to look back at him and smiled. “I’m not sick. I’m autistic.”
“Oh, thank God,” he said, the color returning to his face. He pulled their hands to his chest. “I thought you were going to say something terrible.”
Ellie laughed. It wasn’t the reaction she expected. It was so much better. She looked down at their fingers knotted between them—something that would have been unthinkable two days ago. “It’s not terrible, no. But it has been pretty life-changing to discover that I amnot just weird, socially awkward, cold, arrogant—let’s see… what else have people said about me along the way?”
“Why would anyone say those things about you? I don’t see any of that.”
“Well, you knew me when we were kids, Cris. And you didn’t see any of that because you just knew me asme. My parents didn’t notice, either. There’s so little understanding of autism in girls, let alone grown women. I started to research and when I read the signs and symptoms list, I knew. The list was me.”
“And you feel good.”
“I do.”
“Thank you for telling me about this. I mean it,” he said. She believed him. “Can I ask a question?”
