Page 34 of Happiness for Beginners

Beckett nodded. “How old are you, Windy?”

“Twenty-one.”

That was all Beckett wanted, it turned out. I had overthought it again. He didn’t need our life stories, or our hopes and dreams. Just name, age, and a one-sentence summary. In a way, that was easier—and much harder. Windy looked like she expected more questions, but Beckett was on to the next volunteer: a tall guy with a backward baseball cap. “I’m Mason,” he said. “I’m a junior at the University of North Carolina, I’m taking this course for college credit, and I’m hoping for a near-death experience.”

“How many of you are here for credit?” Beckett asked then. Just about every hand went up. Another reason for so many college kids: It’s much harder for grown-ups to get credit for anything.

“I’m Kaylee,” a girl piped up next, as the hands went back down. “I’m a sophomore at Auburn, and I’m a Pi Phi, and I’m hoping to come back a total hardbody.”

They’d set the tone, then. One by one, the kids jumped in, using that same template. Name, year, university, Greek affiliation, and a ten-words-or-less goal for the trip. They were all sophomores and juniors. They all went to big Southern universities. The boys were all hoping for a narrow escape from death, while the girls all, universally, hoped that three brutal weeks in the wilderness would send them home skinnier. Everybody was here for a stupid reason.

Everybody, that is, except me, and I guess that girl Windy, too. And possibly Jake. Though it occurred to me I didn’t really have any idea why he was here.

I hung back. My life did not fit into that template, and I dreaded having to announce it publicly to the group. I figured I’d wait to see what Jake said, and maybe crib a little from him. But Jake wasn’t volunteering, either. He seemed to be waiting for me.

When every single person had taken a turn but the two of us, Beckett looked back and forth and said, “Well? Who’s next?”

Jake pointed at me. “She is.”

Everybody turned in my direction—the guys in theirLIFE IS GOODT-shirts and leather, and sharks’ teeth necklaces, the girls with their unnaturally tan faces and lip gloss. I surveyed the group. They were not, to say the least, what I’d been expecting. It’s possible I’d been in denial, given everything Duncan had insisted about the type of people who’d sign up for a course like this, but I’d expected crunchy-granola hippies. And nature freaks. Shoppers at Whole Foods. Readers ofOutsidemagazine. Hemp enthusiasts. Athletes. Perhaps a poet or two. Instead, I was surrounded by the kids you see at spring break on reality TV. Terrifying prototypical teenagers, self-centered and heartless in the way you only are before life has shoved you down and sat on your head for a while.

My turn.Who was I? Why was I here?

Time ticked. They stared.

At last, I forced out some words—any words. “I’m Helen,” I said. “I don’t go to college. Anymore, I mean. I graduated already—years ago. I went to Vassar, though, back when I was your age, but I wasn’t in a sorority or anything because we didn’t have them there.” I’d lost these kids already. I was from another planet. “I’m thirty-two,” I went on, digging myself deeper, “and my life sort of fell apart last year.”

They were blinking at me as if they literally had no idea what it might mean for someone’s life to fall apart. But that couldn’t be right. Everyone, no matter how carefully they do their eyeliner, knows something about disappointment, or loss. That said, the older you get, themoreyou know about those things. Maybe it wasn’t that they didn’t know anything—maybe it was just that they didn’t knowenough. Something about those blank looks pushed me forward and made me want to force them to get it, even though, of course, that just goes against the physics of human life: People can’t understand things before they can understand them.

“I got divorced, actually,” I heard myself say. “We’d been trying to start a family, but that went off the rails.”

My gaze flickered past Jake, who shook his head imperceptibly as if to say,Abort! Abort!

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t find a stopping place. They were all so quiet. I’d stunned them, and not in a good way, and my mouth refused to shut down until it had stumbled upon some kind of redemption.

“I remember in high school,” I went on, turning my own volume down to match the quiet in the room, “I had this crazy crush on a boy who was completely out of my league. He was handsome like a Greek god, and I was just a plain old slightly awkward mortal. I had no business liking him, but he’d helped me up one time when I’d tripped on the stairs, and I couldn’t let it go. One day in study hall, as I stole glances at him, I decided that I was going to kiss him at graduation. It was three years away, but I made this solemn vow to myself. And I wasn’t going to do it because I thought it would make him suddenly fall in love with me. I was going to do it for me. As a gift to myself. Because I refused to swoon so achingly over him for so long without ever getting even one thing out of it. I pictured it over and over. I planned out different forms of attack. And guess what?” My gaze had fallen to the floor and I didn’t look up or wait for an answer. “Graduation came, and I never did it. I didn’t chicken out, exactly. I just realized that day that the reality of it would spoil the fantasy. And Ipreferredthe fantasy. And guess what else? I ran into him about a year ago at the gas station, and I didn’t even say hello.” I looked up, at last. “You can’t understand this yet, but that’s most of life: breaking your own promises to yourself.”

With that, I hit bottom. My attempt at redemption—to say something wise and useful for them—ended with the kind of silence you give the crazy cat lady after she tells you about the time Mr. Mittens ate a cockroach. I guess if the only person you ever process things with is your mean little rat-tailed dog, it’s all bound to come out sideways sometimes.

That was all I needed, apparently: a crushingly awkward silence and a sudden 3-D glimpse of myself through the group’s eyes. I had to lose all hope, and it released me, somehow. “So that’s why I’m here, I guess,” I said at last. “To get stronger and toughen up. To care less. To rise up from the ashes of my existence like a really badass phoenix and give life the finger, at last.”

After an overly long beat, Beckett turned to Jake. “Okay,” he said, stretching out the “ay” sound in athat-was-totally-bananastone. “And what about you?”

We all turned toward Jake. That’s when I got a look at him for the first time, in context, and noticed that he really didn’t look like the rest of the guys. They were all wearing baseball caps, and cargo shorts, and Patagonia shirts. Despite individual variations of size and coloring and hair length, they were all somehowalike—the boy versions of all the girls in the room. But not Jake—in his red vintage Hawaiian shirt, and frayed khakis and flip-flops. He wore a tattered canvas fisherman’s hat with a home-tied fishing fly pinned to it that should have made him look like a total goofball. But it didn’t somehow. Perhaps it was the implied power of all his muscles. Or the hipster glasses that gave him a Cary Grant–like star presence. Or maybe the goofiness of that Gilligan hat proved beyond a doubt that he truly didn’t care what anybody thought of him. But the whole room, including me, was thinking the same thing at the same time:This guy is going to be the boss.

Jake gave the entire group a big, flirty grin. “Why am I here?” Then he pointed at me with his thumb, and spoke these words: “What she said.”

The whole room burst out in a loud, tension-relieving laugh. Even I laughed for a minute. Until I realized none of us were laughingwithme.

“Actually,” Jake said then, as everybody fell quiet. “Seriously.” He looked around. “I agree with the redhead.” He squinted at me a little. “Or the strawberry-blond-head.” The remaining laughing died down, and a few kids glanced over in my direction. “What’s-her-name’s not wrong. Lifeisgoing to kick the hell out of all of us. Everybody here. Me included. And I think I’m here to learn to survive it. And take it like a man. Or maybe learn to kick back a little.” He turned his eyes toward me. “Like her.” With that, maybe even just that one look, he saved me. “Oh, and my name’s Jake, by the way,” he added. “And I didn’t go to Vassar. But I did just graduate from Harvard.”

A second silence hit the room—but this was one of awe. In that moment, Jake became our official alpha dog. Theirs, because he was cool, and confident, and hip, and friendly, and had just graduated—which essentially made him a senior. And mine, too. Because even after I’d been as mean to him as I could all day, he still went to the trouble of rescuing me.

Beckett, though, didn’t want Jake to be our alpha dog. He stood as fast as he could to snatch back his position as leader, and, when Jake sat back down, Beckett demanded in a voice that sounded suddenly deeper, “Does anybody know where we are?”

The kids all kind of looked around. Did anybodynotknow where we were?

“More importantly,” Beckett went on, now that he had our attention, “does anybody know where we’re going?”

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