Page 76 of Happiness for Beginners

“I’d promise to come see you in the hospital when we get back,” I said, “but I don’t think you’ll still be there.”

“Nah,” he said. “I’ll be at Miami Beach by then.”

“Take good care of yourself,” I said, giving his hand a squeeze.

“I will if you will,” he said, squeezing back.

I let go as they loaded him up, and waved until they were out of sight.

“Hell of an exit,” Jake said to me, when I turned around.

But all I could think about was how the mouth making those words had just been all over Windy. I looked down at the ground. I couldn’t talk to that mouth.

***

The hike back to the others felt much longer than a half mile.

My full-out exhaustion was only made worse by the fact that Windy didn’t seem tired at all. She and Jake hiked up ahead while I fell farther behind. How could she not be tired? My hands were throbbing. My neck and shoulders felt like glass. I’d somehow gotten sunburned. My boots felt like iron blocks riveted to my feet.

But there was Windy, up ahead, walking with a ponytail that bobbed behind her like she was prancing. She bounced. She skipped. She trotted up to say things to Jake, things I could not hear. But I could hear the giggles. And I could hear the smacking noise her hand made on his shoulder when she swatted him for his shocking retorts. I felt a thousand years old.

Jake kept stopping to let me catch up. “You don’t have to wait for me,” I said, every time I saw them. “Just go ahead.”

“We’re not leaving you behind,” Windy said, meaning to be kind, but wielding that little pronoun “we” like a knife.

“I really don’t care,” I said, wishing more than anything for exactly that: to be left behind.

“But we do,” Windy said, and tried to give me a hug.

I ducked away. “Let’s not stop. I don’t want to rest. If I stop, I won’t start again.”

“You look pretty awful,” Jake said.

Fuck you,I wanted to say. But I just kept shuffling along, instead.

So this was it. Whatever Jake’s bad news was—if there was, in fact, any—it was enough to keep him from getting involved with me, but not enough to keep him from Windy.

Instead of ignoring me, as any other thoughtlessly in love couple would have done, they purposely hiked slower so we could all be together. Like assholes. There I was, left to walk right alongside them and contemplate the hot mess that had become of my life. It occurred to me that that should have been one of my good things—that I had at least traded one kind of heartbreak for another on this trip. At the very least, it wasn’t the same old sorrow that had dogged me all year. I tried to order myself to count that as a blessing. But I wasn’t taking orders very well right then.

Jake and Windy. Could I blame him, really? If I were choosing between Windy—so nice, so cheery, so hopeful, a dog lover and a literalstudent of happiness—and my grumpy, disillusioned, jaded, thirty-two-year-old butt, there was really no contest. That wasn’t Jake’s fault. In fact, if it was anyone’s it was mine.

This was the problem: I saw so many good, kind, worthy things in him—though, granted, it had taken me six years to figure it out—and I found him solovable,that I wanted him to find me lovable, too. But that wasn’t Jake’s job. It wasn’t even fair to ask of him. This was something I had to prove to myself.

Yeah, right. That would work. I’d get right on that.

Up ahead, Windy and Jake were engaged in conversation. He asked her how she got interested in positive psychology.

“It was after my mom had breast cancer, after she got better,” she said. “My little sister started smoking and drinking and getting in trouble. I was really trying to find a way to help her… but in the process I helped myself.”

“Did you need help?” Jake asked.

“I wasn’t breaking the rules,” Windy said. “I was, like, following them too well. I was trying to be perfect at everything. You know, to have the best grades, and letter in every sport, and star in all the plays.”

“Did you manage to do that?”

“I did,” Windy said. “But I was miserable. I started having a little trouble with anorexia, after that. And I just had this moment when I thought to myself:This is it. This is going to be my life if I don’t change it.”

Oh, God. That girl just wouldn’t let me hate her.

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