Page 8 of Happiness for Beginners

I could feel his gaze traveling along my face.

I sat up even straighter. I kept my eyes on the road. I imagined the angle of Julie Andrews’s chin and lifted mine to the very spot.

“Okay,” he said at last, unconvinced but willing to drop it. “If you say so.”

“I do say so,” I said.

“’Cause I was wondering if you might want to kill yourself.”

I coughed. “Kill myself?”

“What were you thinking, anyway? Signing up for a BCSC course?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Probably the same thing you were.”

“You weren’t thinking what I was,” he said, as if the idea were ridiculous.

I let it slide. “I want a challenge. I want to do something really hard. I want to push myself beyond my limitations.”

“Or maybe you just want to kill yourself.”

I looked over. “I do not want to kill myself.”

“People die on these trips all the time.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Of all the outdoor adventure courses you could have chosen, you picked the most terrifying, the most reckless, the most lethal of them all. What’sthatabout?”

“Duncan suggested it,” I said.

“Duncan suggestedacourse. Notthiscourse.”

“He showed me the catalog.”

“You never do anything Duncan suggests.” Jake shook his head. “Why start now?”

It was true. But the fact that Duncan had suggested it was incidental. What got me hooked on the idea was aPeoplemagazine human interest story I stumbled on a few restless nights later about a guy who had lost a leg in Afghanistan and brought himself back to life by completing this very course. With one leg! He did it—and did it well enough to earn one of their prized “Certificates,” which were only given out to the top three participants. The article had echoed in my head for days afterwards: “I was lost,” the guy had said, “but I found myself out there.”

Was I lost? Not technically. But I had lost something that I couldn’t even articulate—and I’d gone far too long without finding it. Was it waiting for me in the Wyoming wilderness? Probably not. But I had to start somewhere.

Clearly, Duncan also thought I never did anything he suggested. When I’d told him I’d signed up, he’d coughed in disbelief and tried to talk me out of it, insisting a course like this was no place for someone like me. In his view, it was both pretty extreme and kind of phony. It attracted the worst of the worst. Real hard-core hikers, Duncan had argued, knew what they were doing and organized their own trips. BCSC was for hard-core wannabes. They didn’t want to study the terrain or buy the proper gear or actually take the time to know what they were doing—they just wanted to sign up and do it. Which made them not just daredevils, but lazy daredevils.

I glanced at Jake. “You signed up for it, too.”

“I’ve gone camping every year with my dad since I was three. I have tons of experience. Plus, I’m coordinated.”

“You’re saying I’m not coordinated?”

He tilted his head. Yes. That’s what he was saying. And he wasn’t wrong, either.

“I’ve been camping,” I said at last.

“When?” he demanded.

“I drove to Colorado with my high school boyfriend.”

“That’s not camping. That’s a slumber party. I bet you ate fluffer-nutters on white bread.”

---