Page 33 of Happiness for Beginners

His intensity flustered me a little. “Okay,” I said. “That works.” Then I wasn’t sure what to do next. I stuck my hand out. “I guess this is good-bye, then.”

He looked at my hand a second before he took it. We shook.

“Good-bye,” he said, without looking up. He let himself out of the car. And then, just like that, we were strangers.

***

Jake turned out to be good at pretending. At check-in, he stood an anonymous distance behind me. When I climbed the stairs to take my stuff to my room, he did not watch me go. I didn’t see him again until the orientation meeting that afternoon, where I sat near the back, and he took a seat right up front like he didn’t even know I was there.

Good,I thought.Perfect.

But nothing felt good or perfect. As I watched the room fill up, I felt more and more out of place. It was all college kids, which, as I thought about it, made sense. Who else has this kind of time off in the summer? Or ever? As one tall, lanky, coltish twenty-year-old after another appeared in the doorway, the sameness of them smacked me in the face. They wore the same kind of T-shirts—all with Greek letters commemorating some party or another—and the same kind of nylon shorts, and sneakers in some shade of neon. They wore the same kind of lip gloss and applied their eyeliner the same way. They were all the same shade of tan. Their shoulder-length hair was all blow-dried straight in the same shape. All only slight variations on the same twenty-year-old theme.

It was ridiculous, of course, to think they were all the same. As the weeks wore on, I’d come to see them all as distinctly different, no matter how hard they tried to match. But that didn’t do me any good at the time.

There seemed to be only two kinds of people gathering for the trip: all of them, and me. Pale me. Freckled me. Wavy hair a cross between red and brown twisted in a knot at the back me. I had on black yoga pants, of all things, and plain black flip-flops, and a cute little batik-print halter top from Old Navy. I had liked that shirt very much when I bought it, and when I packed it, and even when I put it on that morning. Now it felt like the thing that was going to keep me from fitting in. That is, until a mental list of all the other things that were going to keep me from fitting in started to write itself in my head: my age, my divorce, the fact that each of my toenails was painted a different rainbow color. I was nothing like these kids. I was doomed.

Where were the grown-ups? The guys having midlife crises? The stockbrokers with lumberjack fantasies? The carpool moms with something to prove to their personal trainers? I had expected another adult or two, at least. But they weren’t on this trip. This trip was one big frat party. We might as well have had a keg.

I want to state for the record that, at thirty-two, I was hardly “old.” Thirty-two isn’t “old.” It’s just adult. A pretty nice age, actually. I’d never disliked being thirty-two.

Until now.

Surrounded by nothing but college kids, I decided I wasn’t a huge fan of college kids. They were far too confident for my taste—far too proud of themselves. They were the Self-Esteem Generation, and they were allawesome. Where was the doubt? The angst? The self-hatred?

I couldn’t literally be the oldest person on this trip. I kept waiting for the instructor to come in. Surely he—or she—would be an adult, right? Some grizzled old leathery mountain guy with a flannel shirt, and a trick knee, and a scar from a bear fight under his beard? I would have loved an instructor like that: a wise and comforting Grizzly Adams type.

But that’s not what I got. At threeP.M. on the dot, a high schooler appeared in the doorway and eyed the room without coming in. Nobody noticed him but me. I watched him there for several minutes before deciding to pipe up and direct him to the Junior School meeting across the hall—just as he introduced himself as our instructor.

I gaped. He couldn’t be a day over sixteen. Not with that little wispy goatee and overgrown frame that didn’t even have its muscles yet. He was stringy, pale, and a little pimply, with oily hair and a home-knitted stocking cap the color of beets. I would have pegged him for a video game programmer, easy, or a movie theater concession stand worker, or even a misfit paperboy. But not—not—the person who was going to lead me through the greatest journey of my life.

His voice was as stringy as his facial hair. “Listen up, people,” he said. “It’s time to get schooled.”

I couldn’t help it. I raised my hand.

“It’s not time for questions,” he said.

“Are you the instructor?” I asked.

He pointed to a patch on his backpack strap. “Is this an instructor’s patch?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Is it?”

“It is,” he said, “and I am.”

“How old are you?” I asked. It just popped out.

He stood up straighter. “Old enough,” he said.

But he wasn’t. He really wasn’t. I felt a tingle of alarm.

He turned to the room. “I’m Beckett,” he said. “And for the next three weeks, I am your only link to survival.”

He crossed his arms and squinted as that sank in, then said, “I’m about to introduce myself—and our program, and the wilderness—to you. But I want you guys to go first.” He sat down in an empty chair and leaned forward, instructing us all to volunteer our names, ages, and what, exactly, had brought us here.

It felt like a big question, that last one. What exactly had brought me here? I was still wrestling with that question. I didn’t know how to answer it for myself, much less a clump of overconfident kids.

He waited for volunteers. Finally, a J. Crew model in a tank top raised her hand—showing a total absence of upper-arm fat. This one, I noticed, was a little different from her peers. She had long blond hair and wore no makeup. Of course, she was so striking she didn’t need makeup, but even just that little variation was enough to get my attention. “I’m Windy,” she said. “And I’m here because my older brother did the same trip five years ago, and he said it changed his life. Not that my life needs changing!”

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