Page 9 of Happiness for Beginners

“We did not!” I said. We’d eaten beef jerky. And Oreos.

“The point is,” Jake went on, “this is totally over your head.”

“They took my application. They let me in.”

“That’s because they don’t care if you die.”

In truth, several people had died—or at least been maimed—on trips with this group. Duncan had Googled it hoping to convince me to do Outward Bound, instead—or something more sane and reasonable. But I didn’t want sane and reasonable. I wanted crazy and unreasonable. I wanted to amaze everybody, including myself. My own personal campaign of shock and awe.

“They’re under new management now,” I said.

“I think theylikeit when people die,” Jake said. “These guys have cornered the market on hard-core nut-job wannabes, and a clear-and-present threat of death just improves their appeal. To crazy people.”

Was that me? Maybe.

I had signed about fifty waivers, declaring BCSC blameless for every possible life-threatening, or life-ending, situation I might encounter out there, including bear attacks, avalanches, hypothermia, and “fatal diarrhea.”

Nothing about this course should have appealed to me. BCSC was notorious for taking the steepest slopes, following the rockiest paths, and exploring the most remote locations. Google “BCSC,” and there’s article after article of broken collarbones, rockslides, bear attacks, missing hikers, and hypothermia. That’s how they’d become the patron saints of crazies, thrill-seekers, and people with nothing left to lose. Which, needless to say, wasn’t me. I was a first-grade teacher, for Pete’s sake!

I couldn’t believe the tone in Jake’s voice. “Why are you asking me about this? This has nothing to do with you.”

“Well,” he said, “it kind of does. Since I’m here.”

“I didn’t ask you to be here!”

He closed his mouth and looked away.

“I’m going to get a Certificate,” I said.

“You think you’re going to be one of the top three on this trip?” he said, in a tone like,Come on.

“Yes.”

“Well, I don’t. I think you’ll be lucky to survive.”

“That’s because you’re looking at the old me. This,” I patted myself on the head, “is the former me. The me I’mabout to becomeis someone else entirely. You wouldn’t dare patronize her. She’d claw out your eyeballs and feed them to her dog.”

“I can’t wait to meet her.”

“She’s going to ruin your life, man.”

“I don’t doubt it,” he said.

And despite the unabashed mockery in his voice, a quieter, raspier sound had crept in, too. One that made me wonder if he maybe, really, actually thought she would.

Chapter 3

We fell quiet as we made our way out of the city. Jake read his whale book and let me concentrate on navigating the roads and roundabouts of Boston, which are so convoluted my ex-husband Mike used to joke they were laid out by ferrets.

Ex-husband.It had taken me so long to get used to the word “husband,” but “ex-husband” was taking even longer. At the thought of him, my chest got that familiar squeeze—as if all the sorrows of the past year were still in there, still collapsing inward like my own personal intergalactic black hole.

Mike. He was the reason for this crazy trip, though I wasn’t fleeing him, exactly, so much as the person I’d become in the wake of our marriage. I’d met so many women this year who swore their divorces were the best things that ever happened to them. It was time—past time—to become one of those women. I needed to do something wild and brave and stupefying, though how I had settled on a survival course, I still wasn’t sure.

In hindsight, it seemed far too literal.

But it was the cure I’d chosen, and I was going to try like hell to do it right.

I mentally reviewed my list of goals for the coming weeks. I’d actually taken the time to write them down on some old stationery. In my neatest print, I’d written “In the Wilderness I Plan to:” and then, below, made a bullet list with little optimistic boxes to check off:

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