Page 10 of Happiness for Beginners

Find a deeper spiritual connection to nature

Push myself beyond my physical and emotional limitations

Rise up from my own ashes like a phoenix

Toughen the hell up

Become awesome

Kick the wilderness’s ass

Earn a damned Certificate

I really, really wanted a Certificate.

I really, really wanted to be the kind of person who could dare to want a Certificate without seeming utterly ridiculous.

I really, really wanted a slip of paper that proved, at last, that I was okay.

I just wanted to be good at this. And competent. And tough. And, ultimately, just:anybody but me. I was tired of being a disaster. I was tired of being a trampled-on flower. I wanted to be awesome. That wasn’t too much, was it?

My first act of business after registering had been to write down my goals, and I’d rifled through several storage boxes in the basement before I’d found the perfect paper to write them on: notecards from college with H E L E N • C A R P E N T E R embossed at the top. So far, having my old name back had been the best thing about getting divorced. Because guess what Mike’s last name was? “Dull.” Okay, so the original old-world pronunciation had been “Dool.” But even the family had given up trying to correct people.

It was amazing that I’d been willing to take a name like that. It would have been so easy to keep Carpenter. But Mike had wanted us to have the same last name, arguing that we wouldn’t feel like a family otherwise. And I had wanted to feel like a family with him, truly. Isn’t that a reasonable choice when you’re starting a life with somebody? Try to please him and hope like heck he’ll try to please you back?

Duncan had teased me about the name constantly. I’d rolled my eyes, but there was no denying that it was a downgrade. Helen Dull was a terrible name. I tried to see it as a personal challenge—to prove the name wrong in every way. In the end, I failed: Helen Dull had been a much diminished version of Helen Carpenter. Though that was hardly the name’s fault. It takes a lot more than just a name to bring you down that low.

So both the list and the paper it was written on felt profound to me, even though I’d made a last-minute decision to cut my name off the top of the page for the sake of anonymity. I didn’t seem to have any clothes with pockets, and so I kept the list folded up in my bra, relishing both the roughness of it against my softest skin and the vague naughtiness of using my underwear like a pocket. And that, friends, is how I set off for the wilderness: with a tribute to the person I once was, and a simple checklist for the death-defying superhero I planned to become, folded up and stuffed into my C-cup.

Right then, if I’d been alone as planned, I’d have reached in to pull out the list—if only for the pleasure of resting my eyes on it. But I wasn’t alone. And somewhere near Framingham, the person keeping me from being alone finished his book, snapped it closed, and decided to strike up some more conversation.

“I liked that smile you gave me back there, by the way,” he said, out of nowhere.

It startled me to hear his voice. “What smile?”

He waved in the direction of the city behind us. “Back in town. You gave me a smile.”

“Did I?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I know,” he said. “That made it even better.”

“Okay.”

“Think I’ll get another one?” he asked. “Because that thing was like sunshine.”

He had to be up to something.

“I’m just saying. You should smile more.”

“I smile all the time,” I said, not smiling. “I smile constantly. From the moment I wake up until the moment I go to bed. Sometimes I get cheek cramps from smiling so much.”

He knew I was joking, but he wasn’t sure how much. “I can count on one hand the times I’ve seen you smile,” he said, “including the night of your wedding.”

“You only ever see me around Duncan,” I said. “Who vexes me.”

“I’ll say,” he agreed. “You’re the meanest big sister I know.”

“I’m not mean,” I said. “In real life, I’m nice.”

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