Get Happy

by Mary Amato

  I’m sure I said something brilliant, like “Cool.”

  “This is basically where I live,” he said, and showed me his various basses and recording equipment.

  I pulled out my uke and my songwriting journal.

  Hayes set up a microphone and we started recording.

  Let me tell you, recording is hard. As soon as you hit that red RECORD button, you automatically tense up.

  Whenever Hayes would signal me to start, I’d make a mistake. I was getting embarrassed and frustrated and sure that Hayes was regretting his offer. Finally, he leaned back and said, “Just sing it once all the way through to remind yourself how it goes. I won’t record.”

  I closed my eyes and sang and played without making any noticeable mistakes, and as soon as I got to the end, I stood up and screamed: “Son of a biscuit! Why couldn’t I do that when we were recording?”

  Hayes grinned. “I was recording!”

  Genius.

  Right after that, our phones both signaled an incoming text at the same time.

  Fin.

  Parents too cheap to stop for lunch. Inhaling pizza-flavored goldfish to stay alive. Arrrgh.

  Attached was a picture of him and his youngest brother, Sammy, taken with a fish-eye app. Their noses were gigantic, and goldfish crackers were sticking out of their nostrils.

  We laughed so hard we cried.

  HAYES CALLED ME the next day.

  “Just say yes or no,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “What did I say yes to?”

  “To coming with me to do something on my list.”

  “Oooh! Where to?”

  We met at the Davis El station. My mom hated the El, said it was unsafe. The only other times I had been on it was with Fin and his dad. Two years in a row, his dad took us to see a musical downtown for Fin’s birthday.

  If you’ve never taken a train anywhere, subway or regular, put it on your list. You stand on the platform, waiting, and then you see it approaching from the distance. When the train arrives and you climb into it, you can’t help feeling like you’re going somewhere, not to a destination but to a destiny.

  Hayes gave me the window seat. I liked looking out at everything passing by. In some places, the train went close to an apartment building or a house, and you could see inside people’s windows. In other places, it was running alongside the rooftops, and you could see exhaust fans and graffiti tags and fire escape ladders. The train stopped lots of times, and each time, I looked at Hayes to see if we were getting off. Finally, I settled back to enjoy the scenery, except, at that point in our ride, the neighborhood was sad: boarded-up buildings, trash all over the platforms, and a guy passed out next to a doorway, with a newspaper covering his face.

  As people got on and off, Hayes kept checking them out. “We just need to find the right — ”

  “Drug dealer to buy from?” I whispered.

  He laughed.

  “The right liquor store to rob?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “The right prostitute — ” I stopped and punched him lightly. “Tell me that is not on your list.”

  He laughed.

  At the next stop, a little kid got on, sat by himself in one of the yellow plastic seats, opened up a book, and started reading. About eight years old riding the El alone in this neighborhood.

  Hayes smiled. “I found my first man,” he whispered. “We’re getting off at the next stop. Be ready.”

  When I tried to get him to explain what he was going to do, he kept shushing me; his legs were jiggling and he was cracking his knuckles as if his adrenaline was pumping.

  As the train pulled up to the next station, Hayes stood up and, without hesitating, stuck a crisp ten-dollar bill between the pages of the boy’s book. The kid looked up, shocked, but Hayes kept walking out the door. I followed and turned back to see the kid’s face as the train pulled away. Wild joy. Hayes had the same expression.

  “You just gave a kid ten bucks? That was on your list? A random act of kindness?”

  He laughed. “It’s trite, isn’t it? But it felt really good.” He started jumping around on the platform like a boxer loosening himself up. “Really good.”

  “I wish a stranger would’ve handed me ten bucks when I was a kid.”

  “That is my point,” he said. “That kid will grow up with a good attitude, thinking something good could happen any day.”

  I punched him again.

  “What’s that for?” he asked.

  “For going all Mother Teresa on me.”

  He laughed, pulled out his wallet, and showed me two more crisp tens. “You get to pick the next one.”

  “Really?”

  I took the ten, excited. A new train rumbled in and opened its doors for us.

  THE LAST DAY of the break, Friday, we did another thing from Hayes’s list. It was after we had spent a few days recording. I called my mom and made up a story about how Joy had messed up the schedule and I was on for two gigs: one at five and one at seven. Hayes had all the supplies ready, and as we walked to the corner of Davis and Sherman, he described this article he’d read about a guy who went on a sort of happy campaign in Washington, DC. “He and his friends stood on a busy street corner at rush hour and held up signs to make passing motorists smile,” he said.

  “Just the phrase passing motorist makes me smile,” I said. “Did it work?”

  Hayes stopped in front of a burger joint. “We’ll find out.” He tore open a package of poster board and took out two markers.

  “So …,” I said. “What do we put on the signs?”

  “Anything that’ll make somebody honk or smile or laugh or wave. We want to try to get as many people as we can to respond in the next hour.” He balanced the stack of poster boards on a fire hydrant. A steady stream of cars rushed by. “What would make somebody happy just reading it?”

  My mind went blank.

  “A phrase,” he said. “Like Cheer up, only more original.”

  “How about Try robust enthusiasm?”

  He laughed and wrote in large letters:

  Try robust enthusiasm today!

  We took turns writing down our ideas.

  Honk if you love chocolate.

  Hey, beautiful … yeah, you!

  Grab life by the ears.

  Honk if you love someone.

  Passing motorists rock!

  Seize the second.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  We each took a sign, leaned the rest against the hydrant, stood on the curb, and held up our messages.

  A car went by and the driver did a funny double take.

  We both laughed. “Well,” I said. “It’ll work for us if nothing else.”

  “She smiled!” He pointed and waved at the next car and then the next. “Him, too.”

  The honks started coming.

  A guy in a suit walked by and gave us a huge smile and a thumbs-up.

  Hayes looked at me. “It’s going to be hard to keep count.”

  A truck approached. “Trucks count for double,” I said, waving my sign and reaching up to pull on my imaginary horn.

  The guy honked, and Hayes started jumping and hooting in a hilarious way. Two women walking on the other side of the street stopped to laugh. The whole thing was incredibly cheesy, but you wouldn’t believe how fun it was. For the next hour, we made what seemed like all of Evanston happy. Motorists. Cabbies. Truck drivers. Moms pushing strollers. Joggers. An old guy with a cane. Every honk, smile, or wave was like a shot of positive energy coming back at us.

  As we were packing up our signs, the owner of the burger joint actually came out and invited us to come in for free burgers and fries. When we were done, who should walk by but little Lindsey, the adorable six-year-old I rescued from the mean girl in that basement, and her mom. The mom was talking on her cell phone, with little Lindsey walking two steps behind her, wearing leotards and — get this — the fake gold pearls from her party around her
neck. Lindsey’s eyes lit up when she realized who I was and she pulled on her mom’s sweater. “It’s her,” she whispered.

  Her mom gave me one of those distracted nodding smiles.

  “Hi, Lindsey,” I said. “You look beautiful with your necklace. Are you just coming from a ballet lesson?”

  She nodded, wide-eyed and smiling, so thrilled that I remembered her name, and pulled at her mom’s shirt again. Her mom recognized me and lowered the phone for a second. “Oh, look who it is! Linz already requested you for next year’s birthday party.” I could tell she wondered what Hayes and I were doing with those signs, but she went back to her cell conversation, her smile dropping. “You need to pick her up tomorrow at nine, Kevin. That’s what we agreed on.” She pulled Lindsey along, but Lindsey kept looking back at me, her little legs pudgy and pink, her eyes full of admiration.

  “One of your fans?” Hayes asked.

  I nodded.

  Joy Banks and Cassie Lott could eat that with a side of fries.

  We got our food and walked down Church Street toward Northwestern, talking and eating.

  The day had been overcast, but now it was clearing and the sun was setting. We crossed Sheridan Road and took a trail through some trees, and the ground became sandy, and suddenly, there it was in all its glory … the lake. No matter how often I see it, I am always amazed by how big it is. When I was little, I called it Michigan Ocean. That evening, in the fading light, the water was a beautiful greenish gray, the waves small and gentle, the water folding right at the shore, as though each wave were happy to come home.

  We took off our shoes and walked in the cold, damp sand as far as we could one way, talking and stopping to skip rocks, then we turned around and walked back and sat on the sand facing the lake, the only people left on the beach, the sky now dark.

  “So do you know Ray’s?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s over on Prairie Avenue. It’s this old house where they have live music. They have open mics one Saturday each month.”

  “That sounds cool,” I said, already getting nervous.

  “So …” He smiled at me.

  “Is this on your list?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Say yes. We can do a duet.”

  “When?”

  “Next Saturday, April fifteenth.”

  The date came with a shadow attached to it, which flickered across my mind. It was the date of Keanu Choy’s lecture, but I decided it was a perfect day to play music with Hayes.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.” He fist-bumped me, and I added, “If you get a reward for doing everything on that list of yours, I want a piece of it.”

  He laughed.

  I looked out at the lake. The half-moon lit a path on the water, leaving the rest black and mysterious.

  “What made you start your list in the first place?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I was depressed. My brother left for college, and my parents split up. School was stressful. I hated being there, but I hated coming home because my mom had taken all this stuff with her and it didn’t feel like home anymore.” He picked up a rock and tossed it.

  “Where is she?”

  “In Waukegan.”

  “Did she just leave out of the blue?”

  “No. They were fighting. She said they tried.” He smiled and shrugged again.

  “Did you get a choice about whether to go with her or stay with your dad?”

  He nodded. “I didn’t want to move. School was bad enough here. It would have been worse to move.”

  “So at some point, you got the idea to make the list?”

  “I got tired of being depressed and — there’s that whole New Year’s resolution thing that people do — so I decided to make a list and gave myself a deadline. I figured if I started doing something, I’d feel better.”

  “It’s working, right?”

  Hayes smiled. “Yeah.”

  “I’m glad.” I dug my toes into the cold sand. We sat quiet for a few moments, listening to the lapping of the water against the shore. Way out in the distance, a speck of light from a boat danced in the dark, and to the right, Chicago lights glowed. “So what’s left on the list?”

  He turned and smiled, and even though his features were dark, I felt a rush of heat move from his eyes straight into my own. “I don’t know if I’m ready to confess,” he said. “After the open mic, I’ll only have one thing left to do, but it’s kind of scary.…”

  “Scary? I didn’t think you were scared of anything.”

  “Me? Not scared? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m scared.”

  “You are not. You walk up to people and shake their hands, you audition for jobs, you put on cowboy suits and face small children, you sing in the street, you do good deeds. You’re the most together person I know.”

  “I was terrified to shake your hand, terrified at that audition, terrified when we were all in that van driving to the first party, terrified to sing with you and Fin on the street.”

  “You were not.”

  “I was.” He looked out at the lake. “You’re the one who’s not afraid of anything.”

  I laughed. “Me? I am filled to the brim with fear.”

  “Minerva Watson? You’re kidding? You and Fin do what you want. You’re known for that.”

  “And I am secretly an internal wreck,” I said. “If you could see the real me, you’d be horrified.”

  “Let me see …” He leaned in, with this joking expression, as if he were trying to see the real me in the dark through the portals of my eyes. I made a funny expression and leaned in closer, too, as if I were trying to peer through the darkness to a deeper Hayes. Then his face softened and the moonlight flickered in his eyes. I stopped breathing. My body was sitting on the sand, but my soul or my spirit or whatever you want to call it was traveling through the light of his eyes and really seeing him.

  Then I panicked and started doing the Get Happy song and dance. He laughed and let the moment go.

  My phone buzzed, and it was my mom, worried because it was getting late. While I was calming her down, Hayes got out his phone and whispered that he was calling his dad to ask him to drive me home.

  “I’m getting a ride home, Mom,” I said. “I’ll see you in, like, half an hour.”

  Hayes made his call and agreed on a pick-up spot with his dad. We said good-bye to the lake and walked back to Sheridan Road and hung out there, talking and waiting.

  Right as the car pulled up, Hayes stopped me, and said, “Wait,” And then he made me hold out my hand.

  “Your plakette, my lady,” he said, and dropped a warm smooth stone into my palm.

  He held open the car door for me, and when I got in, his dad turned around and — big smile — shook my hand.

  In the car, he gave his dad a hard time about what he was listening to on the radio and they teased each other about it in a cute way. I sat in the back and held myself very still, watching the moon follow us home.

  Once, when I was six or seven, we took a trip to my aunt Joan’s ranch and — I remember this moment vividly — she brought a candy dish down from a high shelf and held it in front of me and said, “Take as many as you want, Minerva.” The dish was full of perfectly smooth round candies in pastel colors, and I scooped up a handful and walked around, holding myself very still so that I wouldn’t lose a single one.

  JUST SAYING

  I want to make a list

  Of all the things I don’t want to miss—

  This journey full of sudden turns and twists.

  You got one of your own.

  Your resolutions down in a row.

  Come on and show me what you wrote, I want to know.

  Someday the writing’s gonna fade away.

  We gotta move before it goes.

  Something good, something new,

  Something out of the blue,

  Something untried and true,

  Something big to see you through,

  Something
long overdue.

  It could happen to me and you.

  Let’s get on the next train,

  Ride the busy rhythm on through the day,

  Watch for signs and let our own rules decide the way.

  Fate could take you and me,

  Throw us out on some random street.

  Strangers we meet could change our destiny.

  There are cracks in the sidewalk,

  I think they’re meant to be.

  Something good, something new,

  Something out of the blue,

  Something untried and true,

  Something big to see you through,

  Something long overdue.

  It could happen to me and you.

  I’m at the very beginning.

  I may be losing or may be winning.

  While I’m on the solid ground, my head is spinning.

  But in a quiet room

  I’ll find the time to heal the wound,

  Grab a line and hold it tight to pull me through.

  We got to keep this world we’re on

  From sinking down too soon.

  Something good, something new,

  Something out of the blue,

  Something untried and true,

  Something big to see you through,

  Something long overdue.

  It could happen to me and you.

  19

  WHAT’S HIDDEN DOESN’T STAY HIDDEN

  BACK TO SCHOOL. Fin was a hyper, nervous pogo stick of energy because he was auditioning for the play Our Town and he desperately wanted the part of George Gibbs, one of the leads. While he was busy after school, I got together with Hayes to rehearse for the open mic. And here’s the thing: I didn’t tell Fin about any of it. It’s not as if it were a terrible secret, but I knew that a little part of him would feel left out, and I didn’t want to throw anything at him — even something as small as me and Hayes singing together — during the whole audition process. He was called back for the second round of auditions on Thursday. On Friday the director asked just four people to come back for an absolute final read-through. Fin’s fingernails were bitten to near oblivion.