Page 23 of Happiness for Beginners

I expected him to say something cocky, like “You still owe me a kiss,” but he didn’t.

He leaned toward me the tiniest bit, like there was something he wanted to say, but he didn’t say it. I felt like I was teetering on the edge of being kissed—that if I’d wanted him to, he would have. But now that I’d had time to think about it, I wasn’t sure if it was a great idea. And without some kind of encouragement from me, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. I was still the grown-up here. Especially in GiGi’s house, where we’d spent so much time in our roles as untouchable and untouched, he couldn’t make a move.

So I made one for him.

I stuck out my hand to shake. “Goodnight,” I said.

He looked from my hand to my face. “Really?”

I shrugged.

He took my hand, then, but rather than shake it, he just held it for a second, turning it sideways to study it, almost. I held my breath.

When he let go, I had to cover. “Can you set Duncan’s alarm for five?” I said. “Mine’s broken.”

“Five in the morning?”

“Big day tomorrow,” I said.

He didn’t fight me. “Okay,” he said. “Five it is.”

Next, he turned and went to put himself to bed in my brother’s bedroom, which looked the same as it always had. The beer girl posters were still on the walls, the bottle cap collection still took up most of Duncan’s desk, and the terrarium with the dead plants still sat by the window. This was where Jake had spent most of high school. It was where the two of them had tried to build a guillotine out of popsicle sticks, made plaster casts of their feet, and written their own video game about cannibals called BeastFeast. They’d tried to build a rainforest in Duncan’s closet, and carried out endless experiments with dry ice. Oh, and let’s not forget the whole summer they spent in there trying to build a working replica of R2D2 out of a trash can, a dismantled lawnmower, and an old PC.

As I watched Jake step through the doorway, I remembered who he was. The old Jake returned to my mind and blotted out the person I’d almost let kiss me. He clicked the door closed, and I turned away with a feeling of narrowly missed disaster. That’s when I latched my bedroom door behind me. Keep it simple. I would sleep in my room, and Jake would sleep in Duncan’s. Exactly where he belonged.

Chapter 5

We hadn’t been back on the road five minutes when Jake said, “We should probably talk about last night.”

“Oh,” I said, leaning on the steering wheel with both hands. “Do we have to?”

“Let’s just get it out in the open.”

“Let’s not.”

“I just need to tell you that I won’t hold you to it.”

That caught my attention. “You won’t?”

“I won’t. The bet’s off.”

“Great,” I said, feeling oddly disappointed. “Good.”

“Great,” he said. “That’s settled.”

And there it was. Settled.

After that, here’s what we talked about: doughnuts,Pulp Fiction,best birthday parties we ever had, hidden talents, UFOs, time travel, whether politics attracts assholes from the start or turns normal people into assholes later, countries we wanted to visit, how whales breathe when they’re sleeping in the ocean, childhood fears, how to make enchiladas, cats versus dogs, and global warming.

Here’s what we didn’t talk about: the wine we drank, the crush Jake confessed to, and the kissing we’d almost done.

At first, I thought we weren’t talking about it because it was such a big deal. But as the day wore on, and Jake told me all about his Scottish father’s great romance with his Texan mother, all about his favorite books (Lord of the RingsandLonesome Dove), and all about his thesis on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s shockingly naughty love letters to his wife Sophia (she had to cut whole passages out with scissors), I wondered if it had only been a big deal to me. He certainly didn’t seem to be thinking about it. Maybe he was, deep down—but just faking it on the outside. Or maybe kissing wasn’t the same thing in his generation that it was in mine.

Not that we’d even kissed!

But he’d wanted to. Or, at least I’d thought he wanted to. Could be it was me who wanted to. And right there was the problem, because I’d gone on this trip to become a better version of myself—and regressed. The stream-of-consciousness poem of my life—which I’d hoped to fashion into something like a nature haiku crossed with a Chuck Norris movie—had been reduced to “Does he like me? Omigod!” in the space of twenty-four hours. And that wasn’t the point of this trip. When Duncan first told me about this survival course, I’d been planning a trip to Paris. I’d given upParisfor the wisdom of the wilderness. But I wasn’t in Paris or the wilderness now. I was in middle school.

The farther we drove, the more I knew I was going to have to build up a tolerance to him. Starting immediately. I wasn’t just going to drop the bet, I was going to block it out entirely. I was here for a higher purpose than shenanigans like that. I’d gone through way too much hell this past year to settle for some half-assed resurrection.

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