Page 41 of Happiness for Beginners

I chewed the rest of my dinner in slow motion. I can’t say that Mike’s proposition didn’t rattle me. If it had come a year ago, or even six months, I might have had a softer heart toward him. But it was too late now.Chuck Norris can slam a revolving door.

I had an empty Coke can and two cheeks full of my last bite of Whoopie Pie and was just about to pack up and head back to the lodge, when the group—my group—came ambling up the sidewalk toward the hotel, tipsy.

They were all best friends already, in the way Mexican beer and salsa can make you friends. Windy, the one who kept flirting with Jake, called out to me on the approach. “We’re going up to the roof to play Truth or Dare!” she said. “Want to come?”

Before I could think better of it, I slipped into Pickle mode with a sarcastic, “Seriously?”

The tone was way too mean, but she wasn’t listening, anyway, because just then, one of the guys grabbed her from behind in a tickle, just like in a wine cooler commercial.

I hated them all already.

I tried to assess Jake without looking directly at him. Was he drunk, too? Was he going up to the roof, too? I stood up at the idea, and when I did, the wrappers from my shameful and tragic dinner fell to the ground. Busted. Dammit. But before I’d even bent down, there was Jake, at my feet, gathering them up. He stood, and stepped closer without meeting my eyes, and just when I thought he was going to hand me the whole pile of trash, he gently, almost tenderly, pulled one last thing—the Coke can—from my grasp and walked the bundle back to the trash bin at the corner.

I watched him, and I wasn’t the only one. The whole group was waiting for him to come back, as if there was nowhere to go without him. As he turned back toward everyone, somebody shouted, “Move it, J-Dog!” and Jake ramped his walk up to a trot.

J-Dog?He was already “J-Dog.”

Suddenly, I wanted a nickname. I wanted to be the kind of person that people gave nicknames to. How would my life be different if they all suddenly started calling me H-Dog? Okay, H-Dog didn’t work—butsomething? I tried to remember if I’d ever had a good nickname. Duncan had about fifty for me, but they didn’t count because I hated them all:Helena, Helenita, Holla, Sis, Sistah, Sister Sledge, Sister Mister, Big Mama, Crazy Lady, La Loca, La Locita, Lena, Lane, Fast Lane. He also thought I looked like an armadillo when I got mad, which gave rise to a whole cornucopia of irritating names, includingDilloand the dreadedDildo. But nicknames I liked? I couldn’t come up with one. Mike had sometimes called meMrs. Dullafter we got married, with no self-deprecating awareness at all, which kind of made my skin crawl, even though I never said that to him. After a while, he settled on Ellie, which never really fit me, somehow, but was a slight improvement. And Grandma GiGi called meDarling,but she called everybodyDarling.

Oh, well. It was fine. I liked the name Helen.

I watched J-Dog jog back to the group. Somehow, he even made disposing of trash cool. Beckett would not have approved of that Whoopie Pie: the nuclear chemicals it was made with, the plastic it was wrapped in, the trucking industry that had brought it here from the factory in Kansas, or wherever. He could so easily have used me as an example to everyone—a consciousness-raising cautionary tale of bad food and littering. As it was, though, Jake had those wrappers hidden at the bottom of the trash before Beckett even noticed I was there.

I wasn’t going up to the roof. I wasn’t going to sit around up there watching a bunch of goofy kids play a goofy game. But just after Jake turned around, for no reason I could explain, I had this funny little spark of hope that he might tell them all to go on without him and stay here, instead, with me.

Which he didn’t. Of course.

Jake was going up to the roof to drink beers at sunset and be his easy-going, optimistic self in the way you only can when you’re twenty-two. And of course I was going to stay here alone. There was no other way it could play out.

Except for this: As Jake caught back up to everyone, he veered for the spot between the group and me, and I wondered just for a second if he might reach out, somehow, or find a way to brush against me as he went by. I allowed myself to hope for it just the tiniest bit—for the welcome human contact, for the acknowledgment that I was even here, for somebody out in this wild, empty land to have the slightest idea who I was.

But I shouldn’t have let myself hope like that. Jake walked right on by without even a glance my way. Just exactly like a total stranger. The one I had ordered him to be.

Chapter 8

I was still half asleep when we boarded the bus the next morning—an old school bus that had been repainted green with the BCSC logo.

I chose a seat near the front and purposely sat right next to the aisle so nobody could sit beside me. Or, at least, so I could tell myself that’s why nobody sat beside me. But then a skinny guy named Hugh wedged himself past me and sat down without even making eye contact. I stared at him until he asked, already seated, “Is this seat taken?”

“No.”

“It is now.”

I looked past him, out the window, even though it was still too dark to see.

“You were hilarious yesterday, by the way,” he said.

“I was hilarious?”

He nodded. “The sad kind of hilarious.”

I frowned. “Thank you.”

“You’re my new favorite person here.”

“I am?” Something about his voice made it sound like everything he said actually meant the opposite.

He leaned in. “I had no idea this course would be such a frat party.”

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