Perfect Happiness

by Kristyn Kusek Lewis

  Sometimes, late at night, she thinks back on that final sentence from the introduction, the words returning to her like angry pinpricks, and she wonders what her life would be like had she never written them. Because the truth is, most nights now, when she pulls her covers up to her chin and turns off her light, she doesn’t feel as happy as she ought to be. Or as she once was, before all of this madness with the book began. If she’s downright honest about it, becoming a happiness guru has made her as unhappy as she’s ever been.

  She picks up her phone and types a hashtag into the search field, one that she coined just after the book came out: #happyhighfive, the practice of identifying five things that you’re grateful for each day. She scrolls through the entries. @Betsy423 has posted a photo of her green smoothie. @CaliJenna is grateful for last night’s Pacific Coast sunset (and rightfully so, Charlotte thinks, examining the postcard-perfect view of the ocean beyond the woman’s infinity pool). She looks down again at her journal and sighs, then she turns her attention back to her phone, tapping the icon on its screen that will take her back to her profile. Her picture of the bunny family has now racked up 8,482 likes.

  Just over an hour later, she and Jason are eating breakfast at the kitchen counter, shuffling sections of the newspaper back and forth, when she takes a bite of her avocado toast, picks up the Saturday real estate insert, and notices the date on the top of the page.

  “It’s April Fools’ Day,” she says, shifting on the stool.

  Deeply involved in the opinion page, he doesn’t answer. He runs a hand over his head, scratches the back of his neck. He buzzed his hair short last year, when his bald spot became too noticeable to ignore any longer.

  “Hey,” she says, waving a hand in front of his face.

  “What?” He looks weary, his mouth turned down at the corners.

  “It’s April Fools’ Day,” she says again, more pointedly this time. Nine hours of sleep and he’s still tired?

  “Oh,” he says, barely glancing up.

  “That’s it?”

  He shrugs and wiggles the side of his fork into his fried egg. “It’s not like it’s Christmas.”

  “No.” She sighs. “It’s not.”

  “What?” He looks up at her, defensive.

  “Nothing. I just wish we’d remembered to pull a prank on Birdie. But it’s no big deal.”

  “Huh?”

  “A prank. Remember? Like we usually do? Was it last year that we froze her bowl of cereal the night before, with the spoon inside?”

  He cracks a smile. “A classic. I can’t believe she fell for it again.”

  “We could still do something.” She turns and looks at the clock on the microwave. “She’ll be home from Hannah’s soon, but we have enough time.”

  He nods his chin toward the sink. “We could tape down the handle of the sink sprayer thing.”

  “She knows that one.” He goes back to reading. “We should have done something,” she mutters to herself, looking around the room. Food coloring, she thinks, opening a cabinet. What could I do with food coloring?

  Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jason shake his head, furrowing his eyebrows as he lifts the newspaper and flips the page, snapping it into the air to straighten it. She once found the habit endearing; it reminded her of her dad, whom Jason had never met. Now the snapping drives her crazy, along with the loud way that he chews, the way he can’t eat an egg without dousing it in sriracha and getting half of it on his freckled face, and the fact that he hangs on to pit-stained ratty T-shirts that are older than their marriage. She glances at the one he’s wearing today, from the Cherry Blossom 10K in 1998.

  She picks up her phone and sees that her friend Stephanie has texted, saying she’ll drop off Birdie on the way to her daughter Hannah’s soccer game. They’d met back when the girls were infants and in the same playgroup, and fortunately for the adults, who’d become fast friends, the girls had remained inseparable long past the point of the two women forcing them together with side-by-side dates in their jogging strollers, group Kindermusik classes, and joint memberships in the same Girl Scout troop. Now, they’re nearly through their freshman year of high school, and despite Birdie having her first boyfriend—a fact that Charlotte, in particular, isn’t thrilled about (wasn’t it too soon?)—the girls still seem to be as close as ever.

  She starts to go to her Pinterest app to look for an April Fools’ idea but opens Instagram instead. Birdie isn’t allowed to use social media yet, though according to her, she is the “last living person in Arlington” without it. (Actually, just last week, she told Charlotte that not letting her get on Snapchat is as old-fashioned as if she made her wear “those pads with belts from the 1950s.”) Charlotte gets it. A lot of Birdie’s friends have had Instagram accounts since fourth or fifth grade, and over the years, Birdie’s tried every argument under the sun: Hannah’s mom lets her have an account (“Every family makes their own decisions,” Charlotte tells her), Charlotte has an account (“Only because I need it for work,” she says), following her cousins’ and aunt’s and uncles’ accounts would help them stay in better touch (“You’re welcome to call them anytime,” she says). The conversations always end the same way: Charlotte starting in with “The research shows—” and Birdie interrupting her, lamenting, “I know, I know! Why do I have to be a psychology professor’s kid?” Charlotte knows that her standing firm makes Birdie a Luddite among her friends, but she doesn’t care. The research does show, and Charlotte’s read enough about teenage girls and social media to stand firm. The skyrocketing anxiety, depression, and suicide rates are more than enough evidence for her. On several occasions, Stephanie has justified Hannah’s Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok accounts by saying that her daughter’s posts provide a window into her life unlike anything their own parents had when they were growing up, and while Charlotte isn’t convinced, she has no problem using Birdie’s friends’ accounts, most of which are public, for her own intel. She makes a point not to actually like or comment on anything they post; that would be over the top, like one of those parents from her own childhood who tried too hard to befriend the kids, singing along to Guns N’ Roses in the car and offering to buy them wine coolers, and because none of Birdie’s friends have ever mentioned the fact that she follows them, it feels anonymous somehow even if it’s not.

  Still, she worried she was crossing a line when she found Birdie’s new boyfriend’s account, @tucklaxlife05, a few months ago. As her students trickled in for her eleven o’clock lecture, she stopped one of her favorites, a redhead from Indiana who wore knee-high striped Pippi Longstocking socks, and asked her if it would be weird for her to follow her daughter’s fifteen-year-old boyfriend on Instagram. Becca gave her the best answer she could have, saying that most kids are more concerned with the number of followers they have than who they actually are, and that he honestly might not even notice, or care. It had surprised Charlotte how many followers Birdie’s friends all had, with numbers in the thousands. She checked Tucker’s account—the kid had fourteen hundred followers—so she went ahead and hit the follow button, never mentioning it to Birdie.

  Today, she types Tucker’s username into the search field, and sees that he hasn’t posted anything in three days, not since the photo of him and his lacrosse teammates standing sweaty at the edge of the field after their win over W&L. But when she taps on his profile picture (a fuzzy pic of his hands gripping a lacrosse stick) to see if he’s posted any stories, a choppy video pops up onto her screen. At first she can’t tell what it is, the video is too dark, and it looks like he was running with his phone in his hand when he took it, but she realizes it’s just wet grass. Then it jerks to several silhouetted figures in the distance. All teenagers, clearly, but they’re so far away and the picture is so dark that it’s impossible to make them out. She looks at the time stamp on the video and sees that it was taken eight hours ago. After midnight, she calculates, trepidation sinking in. How am I supposed to feel about my daughter dating a fifte
en-year-old boy who is out somewhere that late? She glances at Jason, to confirm his eyes are still on the paper, and clicks to move the story to the next frame, and her breath catches in her throat. It’s a foot, a boy’s sneakered foot—dirty slip-on checkered Vans like her brother wore in the late eighties—kicking a beer can. Fuck. And then in the next shot, a boy she doesn’t recognize is shown in shadow, the glowing tip of something in his hand. An e-cigarette, she realizes, and a split second later, she remembers something else her student Becca told her, how most kids have “private” stories, too, that only close friends can see. If this is what Tucker is posting in public, then what is he posting privately?

  She clicks to Hannah’s account. Nothing new since her last post, from around 8:30 last night, when she posted a photo of herself with Birdie and two other friends, the four of them standing outside of La Moo, a local ice cream shop, arms wrapped around each other’s waists, all four of them in oversize T-shirts and those high-waisted mom-jean cutoffs that Charlotte thinks are horribly unflattering even on beautiful teenage girls. See, she thinks, an angry pulse beating behind her ears, Birdie should be dating a boy who posts pictures of ice cream, not—

  “Stop spying on her,” Jason suddenly says. When she looks up, his eyes are still on the newspaper.

  She taps quickly back to Tucker’s video and holds her phone out to him.

  “What?” he says, throwing his hands up like she’s showing him something she just found on the floor.

  “Look.” She nudges the phone toward him. “Look at what Tucker posted last night.”

  He takes the phone and shakes his head, confused. “What are you—”

  “Here.” She takes the phone back and taps the screen to replay it, pointing at the evidence. “Do you see that?”

  “Are you sure that’s Tucker?” he says, squinting at the screen.

  “It’s his account,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s his foot kicking the can but he posted it.”

  “Yeah, but . . . show it to me again,” he says, and she studies his face as he watches it a second time. “For all we know, it’s not their can. It could be something they found on the ground.”

  “Jason, come on. Look,” she says, tapping to get to the kid with the Juul or whatever the stupid thing is. “It’s an e-cigarette, Jason. Do you know what those do to kids? To their lungs? Kids end up with irreversible damage. They end up in the ICU. They did a whole thing about it on the Today show when I was there last week. I was in the greenroom with the doctor.”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. They’re fifteen.”

  “Jason.”

  “It’s not good. I’m not saying I like it, but at least the kid holding the vape pen isn’t Tucker.”

  “But what about the beer can?”

  “I don’t know.” He rubs his hand over his mouth. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “He’s dating your daughter,” she says, and when he doesn’t react, she repeats herself. “He’s dating your daughter.”

  “I’m not saying I like it, Charlotte, but this . . .” He sighs. She can tell he’s more rattled than he wants to let on. “This is our reality now. Teenagers do stupid shit. We have to accept that fact a little bit, right? Not every kid she dates is going to be an Eagle Scout.”

  “Why is your first instinct to protect him?”

  “Why is your first instinct to think the worst of him?” He picks up the newspaper.

  “Forgive me for parenting,” she says under her breath.

  “What?” He drops the paper.

  “Never mind.” She walks to the sink to rinse her coffee cup. She does not have the desire or energy to fight with him today.

  “It would be awesome if we could make it to lunch without you telling me something I’m doing wrong,” he says.

  “Jason, please.” She turns off the water. “You started this.”

  “Just give her some space, Charlotte,” he says. “Or spend some actual time with her, instead of spying on her through your phone.”

  She freezes. “What did you just say?”

  He stands, his eyes boring into her for just a moment before he looks away and walks with his dirty plate in his hand to the sink, where he lets it clatter into the basin.

  “Are you actually accusing me of not spending enough time with Birdie?” she says to his back. He’s standing in front of the refrigerator, filling his glass from the water spigot on the door. “Because I’m pretty sure that I’m the one who picked her up from practice twice this week, once on a day when I had to leave a department meeting early to do so, not to mention all of the lunches I packed, the dinners I made, and the clean laundry folded in the basket in the hall upstairs—”

  He holds a hand out, stopping her. “I’m so sorry, Charlotte,” he says. “How could I accuse you of anything? Not when you were actually here last week.”

  She clenches her teeth, feeling a familiar anger build inside her. “I do not neglect Birdie,” she says evenly. “You know that. My entire life is this family.”

  He turns to her, making a face like what she’s just said is incredibly amusing, and her stomach goes hollow. They both know that her schedule would suggest otherwise. Since the book came out, she’s been on the road constantly, slotting speaking engagements into the open spaces outside of her teaching schedule. The university has been happy to accommodate this. Actually, they sort of insist on it, realizing the opportunity that her newfound popularity presents: The more attention she gets, both in the classroom and on the road, the more they can use her as a selling point to get wealthy alumni to donate money to the school.

  Nobody, least of all Charlotte, expected the momentum to be so strong two years later. Her department head now clearly resents her absence, which isn’t surprising since she’s never exactly been Charlotte’s biggest fan. What’s been harder is the change in Jason’s attitude. He seems to hate how much she’s gone, but he won’t come right out and ask her to stop taking these gigs, Charlotte suspects, because of the money they bring in. For an hour onstage, she can now earn five figures. It feels almost illegal, a stupid amount of money for something so small. The first time it happened (Google offering her eighteen thousand dollars for a breakfast seminar), they celebrated with champagne. Now Jason barely acknowledges her when she rolls her suitcase out to the car.

  “If anything, I beg Birdie to spend more time with me!” she says. “And you’re talking out of both sides of your mouth! Two minutes ago, you told me to give her some space. Now, you’re saying to spend more time with her. Which is it, Jason?”

  He turns. “You’re right, you’re right. You spend plenty of time with her,” he says, in a condescending tone she hates. Like he’s talking to a fool. “But if you’re so worried about what she’s up to, you could ask her instead of checking Instagram or Snapchat or whatever.”

  “Got it,” she says. “Because teenagers are so forthcoming with their parents about what they’re actually doing and feeling and thinking. Especially when they have their first boyfriends.” She pauses. “Boyfriends who are a year older.”

  “Oh, come on!” He groans. “It’s not like he’s twenty-five and sneaking her into bars. He’s fifteen.”

  “It makes a difference. And his fam—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with his family,” he says. “I’ve known Finch since high school.”

  “Going to the same parties with Tucker’s dad twenty-five years ago doesn’t mean you know them. I’ve seen the mom around, Jason. They’re not our kind of people.” Charlotte bites her tongue, thinking about the rumor that Stephanie told her about Dayna, Tucker’s mom, that she goes around town bragging about all her conquests on Capitol Hill when she first moved to DC after college, as if sleeping with a congressman from Florida is on par with bedding George Clooney.

  “Then why the hell are we having dinner at their house tonight?” He starts down the hall and Charlotte follows, watching as he turns for the stairs.

  “Because they invited us!�
�� She groans, her frustration taking over. “Because our daughter is dating their son!”

  He turns, his hand on the banister, his face scrunched up like he’s in a commercial for migraine medication. “Why are you yelling? What are we even fighting about? Tell me, Charlotte! You’re the expert!”

  She wipes her hands over her face. He’s been throwing this expert word at her lately, knowing how much she hates it. “Stop it, Jason,” she says, closing her eyes for a moment and taking a deep breath. Outside, she hears the sound of a car door slamming. Birdie. “Why do we fight over every goddamn thing?” she whispers, saying it as much to herself as to him. “Why do we even bother?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t—”

  The door opens.

  “You’re still in your pajamas!” Charlotte says, compensating for the tense atmosphere with too much enthusiasm.

  “Hey, Mom!” Birdie says, smiling and sleepy in a Yorktown tennis T-shirt and flannel pajama pants, closing the door behind her. Her backpack slides off her shoulder and onto the floor behind her. “Hey, Dad!”

  “How was it?” Jason says. “Did you girls have fun?”

  Charlotte goes to her, wrapping her arms around Birdie’s blanket of long, unbrushed hair. Sometime last year, Birdie passed her in height. Charlotte inhales her daughter’s familiar scent; residual hair product, fruity bubble gum. And, this morning, the faint scent of maple syrup. Steph must have made pancakes.