Lie to Me Again | ONC 2024

3 - Prisoner's Dilemma

Golden maple trees shed their leaves to blanket the school grounds in an autumn haze, their slimmer boughs swaying in the gentle breeze. The night's rain had left the grounds scented with rich petrichor. 

Yuki kicked through the piles of leaves before she reached a picnic table and tossed her backpack onto it with a thud.

Ethan looked up sharply from his book, brown eyebrows drawing together. Despite being a robotics nerd who probably had a Lego Millennium Falcon built at home, he didn't wear glasses. Yuki had to imagine them onto his face, to give him the proper studious air. "Not interested. Whatever you're going to say next, I don't want to hear it."

Instead of answering, Yuki slapped two fortune slips, both hers and Ethan's, down on the page of his book.  Herd Mentality marked the top of the page while the rest depicted a lone blue blob person standing against an army of red.

Picking up her fortune, Ethan clicked his tongue. "I'm your Lie. You're out of luck, Yuki. You don't even have lucky numbers." He compared the two papers, though hers was significantly smaller than his. 

"I can help you get Sophia," Yuki said, watching Ethan slowly tear up both the fortunes piece by piece before sticking them in an empty chip bag.

Ethan pulled up the hood of his green cable-knit sweater. "I'm not going to wear anyone's ring and play Era's game. Give up. You're not going to convince me." He closed his book with a sense of finality, displaying the cover: Introduction to Psychology.

Ethan might not want to play Era's game but Yuki would get him to play hers. She slid onto the smooth bench opposite him and leaned forward to whisper, "What if you don't need to wear a ring? What if I just need to borrow yours?"

With his moment of pause, Yuki knew she'd snared him. "How do you have my fortune?"

"Picked it out of the trash. Listen" —Yuki flipped her ponytail out of her face before the hair could blow into her mouth and adjusted the blue ribbon tying it— "if no one wins their Lie, then who would Era give the presidency to?"

Ethan punched at his cheek with the eraser end of his pencil, dark eyes lowered and glimmering in thought. "You or Rhett. Most likely you."

A few students walked by, roaming Zenith's private campus for the rest of their free hour for lunch. They were headed in the direction of the dragon building where she'd have Poli sci next. She waited until they were past, eyeing them instead of meeting Ethan's gaze. "Say I don't want to be a puppet dancing to Era's fiddle either. We play along, subvert the game, and win by default." We make the unexpected move. No one will ever see it coming. Not even the fortune cookie president.

All night Yuki had lain awake in bed, thinking and staring at the only decoration on her bedroom wall. After the massive debts her parents incurred were discovered and the bank seized their assets, it was the most priceless thing left to her.

A large glass case held a thousand paper cranes, half gold, half silver. For her parents' wedding, her father had folded them all and arranged them in a joining of their family crests. The Kobayashi crane and the Hime wisteria, two interlocking circles to symbolize their eternal union.

Her father loved her mother enough to become mukoyōshi for her, abandoning his family name to take hers and preserve the dying Hime line.

And now it was dead, no matter what Era said.

"If we manage to win this," Yuki said, following the script she'd run through all night, "then I'll make you vice president and we won't have fortunes ever again." She'd found the clear line from A to B while staring at the cranes. Now she intended to follow it.