Page 53 of Happiness for Beginners

Beckett squinted at me like I was trying to pull a fast one. “Helen?”

Then Hugh shouted, from off to the side, “With an H!”

I nodded to confirm.

“Okay,” Beckett went on. “Do not be aHelen. If you feel a hot spot—like I explained in detail on the bus yesterday—deal with it. Right away.”

Looking back, I often think this was the moment that crystallized me into Beckett’s What Not to Do Girl, though it might have started earlier. From that point on, I became Beckett’s go-to example for doing things wrong, and over the following week alone, he’d point out my hiking stride, the placement of the pack on my hips, the amount of water I drank during rest stops, my knot-tying, my cooking, my attitude, my sense of humor, and my understanding of the basic physics of the natural world as being wrong, wrong, wrong. I had nightmares that started with the phrase, “Okay, people, gather round,” and ended with, “Don’t be a Helen.” He had my name right at last, but he was using it all wrong.

At one point, after a particularly humiliating teachable moment, I approached Beckett and said, “You know, I do a lot better when people point out the things I’m doingright.”

“Do something right,” he said then, “and I will.”

***

The best thing about that first week on the trail was Windy. After our Pickle conversation that first night, she started seeking me out. She even took to falling back to hike with me, which was truly remarkable because she could have left every single person in our hiking group for dead. She was that good.

The first time I looked up from the trail to see her hiking right in front of me, I couldn’t imagine what she was doing there.

“Why are you back here?” I asked. “You should be up front.”

“With Mason and his minions?” she said. “No, thanks.”

I was kind of predisposed not to like Windy because she was so very perfect, and there’s always something so exhausting about perfect people. She was long and lean without an ounce of cellulite anywhere—that ideal adolescent-boy-with-boobs look that girls are always striving for. She never seemed overwhelmed or anxious. She took everything in stride—as I supposed I might have if I were that pretty, that fit, and that pleasant. She had Marcia Brady–style long hair: classic, flax-colored, and so long she could literally tie it in a knot. My own hair just got frizzier and more dreadlocked as the days passed. But Windy stayed chic with her nape-of-the-neck, hand-tied chignon, seeming only to get more and more lovely as the rest of us devolved into filth.

She was the only person on this trip who’d been nice to me consistently, and I felt grateful enough when she hung back to hike with me that the little hitch of shyness I often felt around new people kicked in. We walked in silence for a good while as I got more and more nervous that she was going to get bored and return to the front. Then I called up the advice that Grandma GiGi always gave me for meeting new people: Ask them about themselves.

“Ask them what?” I once asked.

GiGi had shrugged. “Where they’re from, what they do for fun, hobbies, favorite books, favorite actors, pets. Anything. Everything.”

“Isn’t that kind of nosy?” I’d asked.

She shook her head. “People are always their own favorite topics,” she said. “It’s the only thing they’re experts on.”

It was great advice and it always worked. When I remembered to use it. More often than not, though, I forgot. Being nervous made my brain go blank. But this time, like magic, I remembered.

“Hey,” I called up to her. “Tell me about being a pet psychologist.”

“Anaspiringpet psychologist.”

“Do you need a degree for that?” I asked.

“If you want to be really good at it, you do.”

“Do you want to be really good at it?”

“Of course,” she said. “I want to be really good at everything.”

As I walked behind her, watching her calf muscles flex and release, I decided they were just exactly the perfect human shape for calves—and for legs in general, really. I felt an impulse to tell her how much I admired them. After all, if someone were admiring me, I’d want to know. But I couldn’t figure out how to bring it up. What would I say? “Great gams, by the way”? It might have pleased her, but it might just as easily have creeped her out.

“Tell me about your summer reading,” I called up from behind.

“It’s for this class I’m taking on the positive psychology movement.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s the study of happiness.”

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