Page 1056 - Enders_Game_Full_Book

"Everything's bigger than life right now and I don't have any experience with this. In case you forgot, I haven't been alive very long. I don't know things. There are a lot of things I don't know. I don't know why I care so much about you, for instance. You're the one trying to get me replaced as landlord of this body. You're the one who tunes me out or takes me over but I don't want that, Miro. I really need a friend right now."
"So do I," said Miro.
"But I don't know how to do it," said Val.
"I, on the other hand, know perfectly well how to do it," said Miro. "But the only other time it happened, I fell in love with her and then she turned out to be my half-sister because her father was secretly my mother's lover, and the man I had thought was my father turned out to be sterile because he was dying of some internally rotting disease. So you can see how I might be hesitant."
"Valentine was your friend. She is still."
"Yes," said Miro. "Yes, I was forgetting. I've had two friends."
"And Ender," said Val.
"Three," said Miro. "And my sister Ela makes four. And Human was my friend, so it's five." "See? I think that makes you qualified to show me how to have a friend."
"To make a friend," said Miro, echoing his mother's intonations, "you have to be one." "Miro," said Val. "I'm scared."
"Of what?"
"Of this world we're looking for, what we'll find there. Of what's going to happen to me if Ender dies. Or if Jane takes over as my-- what, my inner light, my puppeteer. Of what it will feel like if you don't like me anymore."
"What if I promise to like you no matter what?"
"You can't make a promise like that."
"Okay, if I wake up to find you strangling me or smothering me, then I'll stop liking you." "What about drowning?"
"No, I can't open my eyes under water, so I'd never know it was you."