Imagine Us Happy

by Jennifer Yu

  “Oh, I dunno,” I say, cutting him off. “How could you believe me? Maybe...trust me? You know, like people who are dating are supposed to trust each other?”

  “You spend all of your time with him, Stella!” Kevin says. “After school. After cross-country. During the weekends. Between class—”

  “First of all, that’s not even true. I spend at least six hours a week arguing with you about how much time I spend with him, which may very well be more time than I spend with him. Secondly, we’re doing a project together. We are literally forced by the Bridgemont curriculum to spend time together. So take it up with Holmquist, not me!”

  “That’s funny,” Kevin says, “because I did the same project two years ago, and I don’t remember being forced to spend every single free afternoon at my partner’s house. In fact, we only met, like, once every other week!”

  People are starting to look at us. People we know are starting to look at us. Becca Windham and her boyfriend, Casey. Jesse Rogers’s parents. Four other adults I recognize from my mom’s book club. I can feel them stealing glances at Kevin and me every few minutes, probably thinking about how they knew all along that a pair like the two of them would just never work out.

  But there’s one person in the diner who doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to the two of us at all. She’s sitting in a corner booth buried in a history textbook that’s four inches thick, headphones jammed into her ears, scribbling furiously in a notebook. I’ve seen this expression on her face countless times—that relentless concentration, the sense that she’s blocked out everything other than the words and dates she’s currently committing to memory. And the fact that she’s shut me and Kevin out is even more devastating than having our very public blowout witnessed by Mrs. Rogers and the post–Sunday school crowd.

  Lin.

  I shut my eyes. Count to five. I am not going to cry, I tell myself. I am not going to cry. I am not going to cry.

  “Look,” I say. Precise, measured. Controlled. There will be no tears, not today, certainly not here. “Could we just stop? Let’s just go to your house. We’re causing a scene.”

  “Oh, who gives a shit, Stella?” Kevin says at full volume. Everyone at the diner (except Lin, except Lin, except Lin, my brain says) turns around to look at us.

  “Kevin,” I say.

  “Don’t say my name like that,” he snaps. “I’m not your fucking kid.”

  I have nothing left to say.

  Kevin sighs. His voice softens. “I’m really struggling with this, Stel,” he says. “I’m trying. But I’m really struggling with this.”

  “I know,” I say, softly.

  “Do you believe me?” Kevin says.

  The desperation in his voice is like a punch straight to the gut.

  “Of course I believe you!” I say. “But I don’t know how to help you, Kevin. I can’t—I can’t just half-ass this project. My parents are already on my ass about my grades and there’s no excuse for getting a C in health class, for fuck’s sake.”

  “You’re not going to get a C in health class.”

  “I know it doesn’t seem like this from your perspective, but there’s really—I mean, we don’t even spend that much time working on it. It’s just Saturday afternoons and sometimes after school during the week and that’s it.”

  “That’s it?” Kevin says incredulously. “Stella, you realize that we haven’t seen each other in a week, right?”

  “But that’s not because of this project! It’s because of all the other homework that I have, and you know I’m taking the SAT in a month, and my parents are—”

  “Yeah, I get that you’re busy,” Kevin snaps, his voice rising again. “Not like I’m also taking six classes and writing a forty-page research paper for senior seminar or anything. But I still make time to see you, Stella, because that’s a priority of mine. Your number-one priority with what precious little free time you do have is obviously not me.”

  I push my chair back and stand up. The chair legs screech loudly against the floor—not that it matters, because everyone is already staring at us—and Kevin looks taken aback. “What are you—”

  “Look,” I say, fumbling with my purse. I’m trying to get a twenty out of my wallet, but my hands keep shaking. “I can’t—I can’t have this conversation anymore. I’m sorry, Kevin, I’m just—I’m about to lose it, okay? I’m sorry. Here—this should cover my food. You can text me later if you want to come over. But I can’t argue about this anymore.”

  “Nice. Running away, that’s cool.”

  I don’t even bother to respond.

  When I’m a few steps away from the door, I look over my shoulder and take in the scene I’m leaving behind—or, as Kevin puts it, running away from. Becca and Casey, pity written all over their faces. Mrs. Georges, disdainful as she takes a sip of her coffee. Mr. Rogers, who averts his gaze the second my eyes meet his. And then Lin, who’s finally lifted her head out of her history textbook.

  It’s the first time our eyes have met in months.

  For a second, I think—I hope—that she’s about to stand up, shove all of her schoolwork into her bag, rush up to me and walk me home. This is Lin we’re talking about, for Christ’s sake. She’s always the first person ready with a pep talk, a box of tissues and a reassuring hug. This is the same Lin who stayed with Katie for a week straight after her breakup with Christian so she could “make sure she didn’t do anything stupid, like regret dumping that jackass.” Lin will come up to me and wrap me in a hug and know exactly the right words to say to make me feel better, because she always does, and she always has.

  But she doesn’t.

  Instead, she looks back down at her textbook. The concern on her face dissolves back into deliberate, determined focus. She picks up her pencil again and starts writing.

  45.

  It takes me forty minutes to bike home and it starts raining half an hour in, which pretty much confirms my suspicion that I am sitting pretty at number one on the universe’s shit list. By the time I get home—miserable, tired, angry at Kevin, angry at myself, angry at the universe and soaking wet—the last thing I want to do is talk to my mom. But there she is: sitting at the dining room table, a pot of tea in front of her, staring expectantly at the front door.

  “Please,” I say. “Just let me go upstairs. Take a hot shower. And hibernate in peace until Monday.”

  Unsurprisingly, my plea goes unacknowledged.

  “I got a call from Jesse Rogers’s mom about half an hour ago,” she says. “She had some very troubling news.”

  “Did you seriously just ignore everything that I said?”

  “Stella,” my mom says gently. “Please sit down.”

  “I’m going to drip all over the floor and ruin the carpet if you don’t let me go upstairs,” I say.

  “Stella, you are so much more important to me than the carpet,” my mom says, already weepy. This is the last thing I want to deal with right now, but what choice do I have? I get a towel from the laundry room, throw it over the chair and sit down.

  “Sometimes when you’re young,” my mom starts, and I have to hold back a groan. No good conversation has ever started with a parent telling her child, “Sometimes when you’re young...”

  “Sometimes when you’re young, and you’re—and you think that you’re in love, it can make you feel like you’re invincible. I know this, honey, because I was young once, too.”

  “Mom,” I say. “Please—”

  “And I remember what it was like to be your age, Stella, and in my first serious relationship,” my mom continues. “It was my freshman year of high school, and his name was William—Willie—Jenkins. He had this beautiful head of curly blond hair, and all the girls in the grade wanted to—”

  I can’t listen to this anymore, not one more word about what all the girls in the grade wanted to do to William �
��Willie” Jenkins and his beautiful hair. “Okay, Mom, I get what you’re trying to do here, but there’s really no need. Trust me, I’m not feeling invincible right now.”

  “Mrs. Rogers sounded very concerned about you,” my mom says.

  “That’s really great of her,” I say. “Really. Tell her thank you from me. And also tell her that her son Jesse has missed three philosophy classes in a row now because he keeps getting too high during his study hall and can’t find his way back from the parking lot to the classroom, so she might want to consider redirecting her concern.”

  “She said that Kevin sounded very possessive and that you both lost your tempers, and it was quite the spectacle.”

  “Glad Kevin and I could fuel conversation for the next book club meeting,” I say. “Wouldn’t want the only item for you guys to gossip about to be Andrea Goldstein’s nose job.”

  “She also said,” my mom finishes, “that it didn’t seem like you and Kevin have a very healthy relationship. That it didn’t seem like you two were very good for each other.”

  My mom pours herself a new cup of tea. And me? I listen to the rain fall outside for a few seconds, the steady patter of the drops hitting the deck. And then—

  “Where’s Dad?” I say.

  “What?”

  “Dad,” I repeat. “My father. Your husband. Partner at Porter and Canavas LLC. Haven’t seen him around lately—work must be pretty busy. Tell me something, Mom—do you think that you and Dad have a very healthy relationship?”

  “Stella,” my mom says, looking shocked. Her hand shakes a little, and the tiniest bit of tea splashes over the edge of the teacup and onto the dining room table.

  “You guys ever lose your tempers? Cause a spectacle? Probably not at the most popular diner in town on a weekend afternoon, I guess—boy, would that be immature—but, oh, I don’t know, maybe in the middle of the night while your sixteen-year-old daughter is trying to sleep upstairs?”

  I shouldn’t be saying this—I shouldn’t be saying any of this—but I’m so angry—livid—and all I can think is how dare she say that about Kevin. How dare she say anything about Kevin when she and my father have been—when they’ve—three times a week, for the past few months, before one day it all suddenly stopped because...because—

  “Kevin is the only thing,” I say, and my voice is surprisingly steady—disturbingly steady, actually, because it feels like I’m shaking on the inside. “The only thing that’s been keeping me sane this semester. Do whatever you want with your relationship. But leave mine alone.”

  I’ve barely shut the door of my room before I start crying, and then it’s like the floodgates open and I’m really crying, hiccupping with the tears and trying to keep the snot from dripping into my mouth. What I want, I think, is to go back to the beginning, when Lin and I were still friends, when my dad still lived at home and I didn’t say horrible, horrible things to my mom in fits of anger, when Kevin and I looked at each other like the two of us were living in a game that no one else knew the rules to. Back to the fall, when the leaves were just starting to change colors and the humidity had just begun to leech out of the summer air; when you could have told me that things with Kevin would crash and burn and I still would have dove in, headfirst, hand-in-hand and eyes squeezed tightly shut.

  Because that was fall, and that was the beginning, and that’s how it always feels at the start, you know? Like no amount of eventual hell or high water could make the high of the moment any less sweet.

  17.

  After I get home from brunch with Lin and Katie on Saturday, I spend the rest of the weekend trying to figure out how to be honest enough with Kevin so that I can find out if he’s into me or not without being so honest that it’s awkward for us to be friends if the answer is no. This involves no less than ten internal pep talks, four three-way calls with Lin and Katie and an entire monologue that I write out for myself.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this a bit excessive? All you have to do is go up to Kevin and say that you may or may not have been completely full of shit when you fiercely denied being attracted to him, and ask him if he feels the same way. He took you to a park, for fuck’s sake! Who ditches school and goes to a park with someone they don’t like? Making an entire speech out of this is only going to prolong the embarrassment.

  Which is true. But Lin—who is probably at home trying to finish her common app essay and slamming her head into the wall every time my number shows up on her phone—tells me halfway through call number three that even Cicero back in 100 BC knew that the best way to organize your thoughts was to write them down. Now, it’s true, I’ve never really felt the need to be organized, but look where that got me on Friday afternoon: babbling incoherently about mathletes. So I decide to give Lin and Cicero a shot. Here’s what I come up with:

  Me: Hey, Kevin.

  Kevin: [Makes that face that he makes every time we talk that’s fifty percent smile and fifty percent extremely serious glare that is a) completely indecipherable, and b) ridiculously hot.]

  Me: Look, I know that Friday was weird. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I had a really good time, and I hope you did, too. But there was that whole part during the car ride home when I was just babbling and I, um, may have insulted you by saying that I’m...not at all attracted to you.

  Kevin: Yes, I do recall something about mathletes.

  Me: Right. Yeah. I’m glad you remember. So what I wanted to say was, that statement that I made, you know, about me not being attracted to you and you not being my type and me not wanting you to get the wrong impression about us—it was actually...not entirely true.

  Kevin: Oh?

  Me: Yeah. Like, if I had to rate those statements on a scale of truthfulness, I would give them maybe a five.

  Kevin: Out of ten?

  Me: Out of a hundred. I would give them a five percent.

  [A pause as Kevin struggles to process this revelation.]

  Me: It’s not that I wanted to lie to you. Because I didn’t. I mean, I never want to lie to anyone except maybe my parents sometimes and Lin when she asks how far I’ve gotten in East of Eden. It’s just... I don’t know, you had seen those text messages that Katie had sent, and even though you kept saying that it wasn’t a big deal to you, it was a big deal to me. Katie says I have issues with vulnerability. My therapist also says that. Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, most people I know have said that to me at one point or another.

  The point is, I didn’t want you to think that I was—that I am—attracted to you because I didn’t want you to laugh at me, or to make fun of me, or to think I’m some silly girl who loses her wits just because she has a crush. And I guess I may have self-sabotaged there because I totally lost my wits just because I had a crush.

  Kevin: Wow. That was so eloquent and self-aware and honest. Did you practice that?

  Me: No. I did write it out, though. Because Cicero.

  Needless to say, I will not be pursuing a career as a screenwriter after graduation.

  I’m full of nervous energy by the time Lin picks me up on Monday morning. While I wouldn’t go so far as to describe it as a good feeling, I will say that it’s surprisingly not unpleasant. There’s definitely a part of me that’s scared shitless that I’m going to come face-to-face with Kevin, immediately forget everything I learned this weekend and end up recanting my attraction to mathletes only to profess my “real” attraction to, I don’t know, the Weeaboos of Bridgemont Academy (a real club, mind you). But there’s also a part of me that’s nervous in a fluttery, excited way; part of me that thinks there might be something really amazing on the other side of this ordeal that makes it all worth it; part of me that really just wants to see Kevin again.

  I don’t know if I’ve ever really felt like this before. I’ve had crushes, of course, and I’ve even gone to a couple of dances with guys who I liked well enough. But
this nervous energy is on another level. I spend the entire car ride bouncing my foot up and down and fidgeting my thumbs and I don’t even notice until Lin, halfway through the ride, says: “Good Lord, Stella, could you stop that? It’s making it impossible to drive!”

  The other thing Lin points out is that I’ve been smiling the whole time. And I guess that’s really the best way to describe it: it’s the kind of mind-numbing, terrifying, illogical nervousness that leaves you smiling.

  There’s just one tiny hitch that reveals itself after I get to school on Monday, ready to come clean and show Cupid who’s boss. And that’s that Kevin has started avoiding me.

  18.

  At first I don’t realize that something’s up. Kevin and I don’t have lockers or homeroom in the same wing because we’re in different grades, so it makes sense that we don’t really see each other in the morning. When I walk by him between third and fourth period and he practically sprints down the hall, I figure that he’s in a rush and just didn’t see me. Then he’s not at lunch—but that could be for a number of reasons, right? Meeting with a teacher. Working on a project for class. Buried himself in a philosophical treatise and forgot to resurface. But then it’s right before last period and I’m walking to art class and Kevin is directly down the hall, walking in my direction, and there’s this moment when we make eye contact. Then, of course, I break into a smile—because I’m happy to see him, stupidly happy to see him, surprised, even, by how happy to see him I am—and he promptly turns left into the hallway that leads to the cafeteria. So unless Bridgemont has created a special last-period lunch for seniors that I just never found out about, I think it’s safe to say that Kevin is avoiding me.

  It takes longer than a day for the reality of this to settle in. On Tuesday, I’m mostly just confused. He didn’t seem angry or bothered the last time when we were in the car together, and how much could possibly have changed over the course of half a week? A part of me actually thinks that I’m going to be able to catch him after Dr. Mulland’s class and ask him what the hell his problem is, but then he’s out the door the second the bell rings, before I’ve even managed to finish putting my books in my backpack.