Imagine Us Happy

by Jennifer Yu

  “Lin,” I say again, choked up. “You have to know that I didn’t mean to forget.”

  “Yeah,” Lin says. “But you didn’t try very hard to remember, either, did you?”

  There’s not much I can say to that.

  “And you know what, Stella?” Lin says. She hits the space bar on her laptop and cuts the music off. I start to wish that she would yell, I really do. If Lin were yelling, I wouldn’t have to listen to myself desperately trying to choke back tears and failing.

  “It’s not just the fact that you forgot the thing that I’ve worked the hardest for and cared the most about in my entire pathetic life,” she says. “It’s about the fact that you just—you just got yourself a boyfriend and peaced the fuck out of our lives! Who does that, Stella? We make fun of Katie for being boy crazy, but she’s always texted us back when we needed her, she’s always showed up when we needed her, she remembered December 10 even though she doesn’t give two shits about Brown, because she knew it was a big deal to me—the biggest deal to me—and that made it a big deal for her, too. At the end of the day, I know that Katie will be there for me, regardless of what wayward Bridgemont athlete she’s managed to stumble into this time. Meanwhile, you find some pseudo-intellectual hipster who thinks that he’s way too cool for the rest of us just because he drives a stick shift and disappear off the face of the planet.”

  I don’t know what to say. I don’t know if there’s anything I can say. I don’t want to be crying, but I’m crying. I don’t want to be angry at myself, but I’m angry at myself. I don’t want to be angry at Lin, but for some reason I’m angry at her, too.

  “You shouldn’t take your feelings out on Kevin,” I finally say. Because this is my fault, not his, and Lin should know that.

  Lin stares at me. “All that,” she finally says, “and what you get out of that whole thing is that I shouldn’t take my anger out on Kevin?”

  “I said that I’m sorry,” I say. I have to say the next sentence in two breaths because I can’t make it through the first time I try. “I really—I really am.”

  “I think you should leave,” Lin says flatly.

  And what am I supposed to say to that? “No”? “I’m sorry,” again, ad nauseum, until she physically kicks me out? I can’t just stand here and cry; I can’t think of anything else to say; I don’t know how to fix this situation and the person who I would ask for advice is ten feet away from me, watching me fall apart with an icy dispassion.

  “I know,” I say. I’m stuttering. Voice barely above a whisper. “But the problem is, I don’t want to leave.”

  It’s a problem without a solution. I am asking her to help me. Please, Lin. Please.

  Lin shrugs. She looks out her window at the car parked on the curb outside her house. “Would hate to keep Kevin waiting,” she says, and turns back to her computer.

  34.

  So I leave.

  35.

  “Stel,” Kevin says, the moment I’ve gotten in the car.

  “I’m fine,” I say. But I’m not. I’m crying, I can barely breathe, I’m a mess. I’m even more of a mess than I was three minutes ago in Lin’s room, mostly because Dr. Chen called out, “Too busy for dumplings tonight?” from the kitchen as I made my way down the stairs, and I couldn’t even bring myself to respond.

  “Stella...” he says quietly.

  “Drive,” I say. “Drive, just drive, let’s go somewhere.”

  “Do you want me to take you home?” Kevin says.

  “God, no,” I choke out.

  “Okay,” Kevin says. “I won’t take you home.”

  He starts rubbing circles on my back, the motion rhythmic, soothing. And for some reason, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, I am completely and utterly consumed by the desire to push Kevin into a wall and kiss him. Furiously. Stupidly.

  “Let’s go to your place,” I say.

  “The paint,” Kevin says.

  “Who gives a shit? I don’t need those brain cells, anyway.”

  Kevin drums his fingers on the wheel, unsure, but then takes another look at me and seems to decide that I’m in no state to be argued with. “Sure, Stel,” he says, starting the engine. “We can go to my place.”

  Kevin is right. The second we walk into his house, it feels like I’m being suffocated with the smell of paint. But honestly, I don’t mind. The strength of it—the sheer toxicity—is welcome. Relieving, almost. It’s hard to think about how I’ve thrown away my best friend of two and a half years when I can barely breathe.

  I drop my backpack and my coat onto the floor as he closes his bedroom door, then walk up to him and press my lips into his. Forceful. Desperate.

  “Stel...?” he says.

  I don’t have to open my eyes to hear the surprise in his voice.

  “Shh,” I say.

  I back up toward the bed and pull his shirt off. I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with me. I just need—I need to touch him. I need him to touch me.

  “Don’t want to think anymore,” I say, pulling him onto the bed and under the covers. I take my shirt off, too, and fling it across the room. His eyes are wide, flickering between my face and my chest like he can’t decide where to look, like he can’t decide where he should be looking. “Just touch me, Kevin, c’mon,” I say.

  “Stella,” Kevin says. He pulls back slightly, but I can still feel the heat radiating off his body, a few centimeters away. He’s so close that the smell of his shampoo is starting to overpower the smell of the paint. It’s intoxicating, being so close to him. It always has been.

  “This feels wrong,” he says. But his voice is low and catches as he says the words and his eyes are bright, bright blue and I never thought it was possible to want someone like this, to be with someone who could make me feel so unlike myself.

  “It’s not wrong,” I say. I reach out and place a hand over his chest, feel his heartbeat pulsing through the gaps between my fingers.

  He closes his eyes. I count nine beats before he opens them again.

  “I don’t want to take—I mean, you’re upset. We shouldn’t.”

  He has one hand resting against the small of my back, the other along the side of my face. He pulls it away and his fingers are wet. Am I still crying? I can’t even tell. I want to drown in him.

  “Please,” I whisper. “You’re the only thing that gets me out of my head.”

  I hold my breath.

  He bites his lip.

  I can barely smell the paint anymore.

  He runs his hand down my cheek again. This time, it comes away dry.

  I thread my fingers through his. Breath still caught somewhere inside my lungs.

  Then he leans in and kisses me hard.

  And I breathe.

  57.

  The problem, you see, is that he’s locked the door.

  “Kevin,” I say. My voice is shaking. I’ve been outside the bathroom door for half an hour now, begging him to open it, alternating between kneeling when I’m too exhausted to stand and standing when I’m too desperate to stay kneeling. As if throwing my entire body weight against the door will make it open somehow. As if I can press myself into the wall and find myself on the other side through sheer force of will.

  “Kevin,” I repeat, after the door remains a) locked, b) solid, and c) between the two of us. “If you don’t open the door, I’m going to call your mother.”

  “My mom doesn’t give a shit,” Kevin says. His voice is sharp, bitter.

  “Kevin, please,” I say. I have nothing else. I don’t have the energy to think of something better and I don’t have the pride to keep from begging. I don’t even remember what this fight started over. Was it Columbia? Was it Jeremy? Was it the fact that my parents have forbidden him from coming into the house?

  “Please open the door,” I say. “Please don’t—”
/>
  My voice cracks.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” I finish. So quietly I wonder if it’s even possible for Kevin to have heard the words.

  “Don’t do this to you?” Kevin says.

  He’s heard the words.

  “Don’t do this to you?” he repeats, and I can hear the anger rising in his voice.

  “That’s not what I meant, Kevin,” I say. “You know that’s not what I meant. Please don’t be upset—”

  “I’m not upset,” Kevin says. His voice goes totally flat, which is even worse. The last time he talked like this, it took two weeks for him to even look at me again. “I’m not upset, because I don’t care. It’s fine, I’ve accepted it. I’m not good enough for you and I’m not good enough for my mom and you know what? That’s fucking fine. I guess I was good enough for Columbia, not that that did any fucking good in the end.”

  “You are good enough for me,” I say. “Kevin. You are the only one who has ever been good enough for me. You are—you are better than me. I don’t know what the fuck I would do without you. You know that.”

  “But Jeremy—”

  “I DON’T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT JEREMY, KEVIN,” I shout.

  There’s no response.

  “I know what you think,” I say. “I know. And I’m sorry that you think that, but I’ve told you a thousand times that I don’t care about him, I really don’t, and I know you don’t believe me, and you know what, Kevin, I don’t even care that you don’t believe me. I’ll tell you a thousand more times, I really will, I just—I don’t know—”

  I can’t finish the sentence.

  “Stel...” Kevin says softly.

  See, this is the thing. This is how it always goes. He gets angry, or I get angry. The other one of us gets desperate, starts crying, gets on their knees, begs. And then guilt drives out the anger. Kevin suddenly remembers that he loves me. I think of the first time I stayed the night at his house, way back in the fall, when the trees still had leaves and every sentence that came out of Kevin’s mouth seemed like a revelation. Kevin remembers what it feels like to hold me, and I remember that I’ve never felt safer than when I’m in his arms. We have done this a thousand times. I know that the tenderness is as temporary as the flash of anger that preceded it, but I can’t help but let myself soak in it, cling on to it like a drowning man to a rope. Everything will be okay if Kevin talks to me like that.

  And then I realize that now Kevin is crying, too.

  “I’m really sorry,” he says.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say. “About Columbia. About me.”

  I can hear his scoff through the door. “Stella, you haven’t done anything. And you know that. And I know that. I just—sometimes I just lose my mind. I don’t know, it feels like Columbia was the only thing I was looking forward to for so long, and it could have happened, it really could have, if it weren’t for the fact that—”

  “Shut up and open the door, Kevin,” I say. “I want to kiss you.”

  A beat of silence.

  And then, very quietly: “I’m afraid to.”

  “You’re afraid to open the door?”

  “Stella...”

  “Kevin, come on. It’s not like—”

  “Stel.”

  Something about the tone of his voice stops me short.

  “Sometimes I get... Sometimes I feel very out of control, Stel,” Kevin says. It’s the tone of voice he uses when he’s considering every word very carefully before he says it. “And sometimes, when that happens, I do really stupid things.”

  “You remember who you’re talking to, right?” I say.

  “I don’t... I don’t want you to be mad at me.”

  “I’m not going to be mad at you. I’m just tired of talking to you through this stupid door—oh.”

  Kevin swings the door open midsentence, and it takes me a moment to register that anything is wrong. I mean, it’s just Kevin. His brown hair is slightly messier than usual, but still normal, and his eyes are red and puffy, but it’s not like we haven’t been there before, and his T-shirt is wrinkled, and his—

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  “Sometimes, I just—I hate myself,” Kevin says. He is explaining himself to me. He can see the shock on my face and he wants to make me feel better. He is acting like the bloody razor sitting on the sink and the cuts running up and down the inside of his left arm are things that are actually quite reasonable, if you really think about it—

  “...And I just need to—I need to put all of that anger somewhere, you know, I need to just—I need to just get rid of it somehow. I need to make it stop. I’m not trying to kill myself,” Kevin adds hastily, as if that makes everything better.

  “Why,” I say, “why does it sound like you are trying to convince me that this is no big deal?”

  I feel strangely, perhaps even alarmingly, calm. I think that my brain has officially exceeded some scientific threshold of panic and I’ve lost the ability to experience that particular emotion for the next twenty-four hours.

  “I’m not saying that it’s not a big deal,” Kevin says. “I’m just saying that it’s a thing that happens sometimes, and I don’t want you to be worried about it.”

  “I’m worried about it,” I say flatly.

  Kevin bites his lip.

  “I thought—I thought you said you stopped,” I say.

  “I had stopped,” Kevin says.

  “This could kill you,” I say.

  “No, it couldn’t. I don’t cut that deep, I promise.”

  “You really think that ‘I don’t cut that deep, I promise,’ makes me feel any better? Are you insane?”

  I guess I was wrong about that panic threshold.

  “Look, just please don’t tell anyone about this,” Kevin says.

  “Kevin, I—I have to. I have to. You get that, don’t you?”

  There are droplets of blood along the cuts, shockingly red against the pale skin of his inner arm. A few of them slide down the inside of his arm and leave faded streaks behind them.

  “You don’t have to,” Kevin says. He cups my chin and lifts my head back up so that I’m looking away from his arms, away from the razor, away from the blood. At his eyes. Blue and red-rimmed. His eyelashes are wet.

  “If this were me,” I say, “you would tell my parents. You would tell Katie. You would tell someone. I know you would, Kevin, and you know you would, too.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Kevin says fiercely. “Not if you didn’t want me to.”

  “How can you say that?” I say. I make it halfway through the sentence and start crying again. Because I need to tell someone. Because I know I can’t. Because there is exactly one person in this stupid, fucked-up world who needs me, who really needs me right now, and I can’t do jack shit to help him. Because half the time, I’m the reason why he’s upset in the first place.

  “I wouldn’t tell anyone,” Kevin insists. He blinks, and when he opens his eyes again, there are tears trailing down his cheeks. “Not if you didn’t want me to.”

  “How can you say that?” I repeat. Hysterical, this time. I bury my face in my hands because I need to get it together, I don’t want Kevin to see me like this, stop crying, Stella, Jesus, but then Kevin pulls my hands away and wraps his arms around me, pulls me in until I’m crying into his shirt, until all I can smell is the scent of his body, until it’s dark all around and my eyes are squeezed shut and he’s everywhere. There’s going to be blood on my shirt, but I don’t care.

  “I wouldn’t tell anyone if you didn’t want me to because I’d love you, Stella,” Kevin says again. His voice is raspy. I can feel the vibrations in his chest when he speaks.

  “Even if you couldn’t love yourself,” he finishes.

  58.

  So I don’t tell anyone.

  37.

  It
wasn’t always that bad, of course. The first time Kevin and I fight, the week after winter break, the experience is so new and unexpected that a part of me is excited by the novelty of it all. It starts over something so insignificant, and then escalates so quickly, that it’s not until the immediate aftermath—not until after Kevin has walked out of my room, leaving a trail of swears behind him and slamming the door as he goes—when I start to react to what has just happened. Of course, then all of the feelings hit me at once: by the time I hear the front door slam a few seconds later, my stomach hurts and my chest is so tight that it’s hard to breathe and I can feel the tears starting to well up behind my eyes.

  It’s like every nerve in my body is suddenly flooded by panic. All I can think is, What the fuck have you done, Stella? And, Why did you do that, Stella? And, You’ve really gone and ruined things this time, haven’t you? I replay Kevin walking out of the room over and over and over again, picture the look of disgust that he throws me on his way out, think about the possibility that he’s never going to talk to me again and feel like I might throw up. And I know that it all sounds so ridiculous and dramatic, and that I should be smart enough to understand that feelings like that aren’t rational. But in the moment, I don’t care about what’s rational. In the moment, the only things that I know are that Kevin is gone, and that I need him. I really do.

  So I call him. I take long, deep breaths, I feel the tears starting to run down my face, I tell myself that it’s going to be fine, he’s going to pick up, one ring, two rings—

  “What?” Kevin’s voice snaps, and I’ve never been so happy to hear someone address me so rudely.

  “Come back,” I say.

  Kevin hangs up.

  My stomach twists. The tears start coming down harder, and I can’t get through a breath without gasping.

  That look of disgust. It kills me to think about it.