Page 32 of Happiness for Beginners

As he yanked up the parking brake, I turned toward him.

“Hey—” I said. My first word in four hours.

“Yeah?”

“Do me a favor, okay?”

He met my eyes. “Of course.”

“We don’t know each other.”

“We don’t?”

“We did not drive here together.”

“We didn’t?”

“And you have never stuck your tongue in my mouth.”

He took that in. “That’s harsh.”

“I’m trying to do something important here,” I said. “This is not a joke to me.”

“It’s not a joke to me, either.”

“I came on this trip for a reason, and it wasn’t to mess around with my little brother’s goofy friend.”

He tilted his head like that smarted a bit. “Okay.”

“Whatever that was yesterday, it doesn’t matter.” I was frustrated that four straight hours of pretending not to give a damn hadn’t worked better. I wanted so badly not to feel humiliated. And rejected. And pathetic. I’d had enough of those feelings to last a lifetime. I was supposed to be turning myself into a badass superhero—not a sniveling teenybopper. I just had to shut it all down. By whatever means necessary.

“I never really liked you,” I said. Then I looked at him, dead serious, and added, “And I wish yesterday had never happened.”

He looked away. “I wish it had never happened, too.”

Here was something surprising. Even though I had just spoken those exact words with no feeling at all, the sound of them boomeranging back at me really stung. I made my voice falsely bright. “Great. I agree. So let’s do that.”

He frowned. “Do what?”

“Pretend it never happened.”

He tried to read my expression. “That’s what you really want?”

“What I really want is for you to not be here. And to never have been here.”

He shrugged.

“Right. So I’ll take the next best thing. Strangers.”

“But we’re not strangers.”

So true. “Nobody knows that but us.”

“You want to pretend to be strangers?”

I nodded. “I want to pretend so hard that we almost believe it.”

He took a deep breath and then looked into my eyes, as if trying to decide something about me. “I’ll pretend for you, Helen,” he said at last. “But there’s no way I’m going to believe it.”

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