by Jennifer Yu
69.
Five days after Jeremy’s party and two days after my last fight with Kevin, Jennie von Haller walks up to the table where Katie and I are eating lunch and says, “Hey, Stella. Can you talk for a sec?”
At first, I’m so certain that she’s here to talk to Katie that I don’t even really hear her say my name. But then Katie elbows me in the side and says: “Stella. You all right there?”
“Uh,” I say. I look up from my lunch and realize that Jennie is making eye contact with me.
“Sure,” I say. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“I meant, like, alone,” Jennie says.
“I was just going to go to the library to print out my history homework,” Katie says, standing up. Which is a blatant lie. We don’t even have history homework due today. But before I can grab her arm or beg her to stay or pass her a note that says PLEASE DON’T LEAVE ME ALONE WITH THE EXTREMELY POPULAR GIRL WHOSE BOYFRIEND FATHERED MY CHILD, she leaves, and Jennie slides into the seat across from me.
“What do you want to talk about?” I ask.
I’m starting to get really nervous. The last time Jennie and I talked to each other was at Katie’s Halloween party right before Jeremy shotgunned that beer, and even then, it was more Jennie talking toward my general vicinity than Jennie talking to me. Of course, it’s quite possible that Jennie and I had any number of conversations at Jeremy’s party over the weekend, but those hours are lost to me, so I guess I’ll never know.
“Jeremy told me about what happened the other night,” Jennie says, her voice low. I figure that this is not the appropriate time to ask why on Earth she is wearing her cheerleading uniform despite the fact that the football season ended five months ago.
“Oh,” I say. And then, because I can truly think of nothing else, I add, “I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?” Jennie says, frowning.
“Uh,” I say. “Well, I threw up. A lot.”
“Oh,” Jennie says. “Oh! Don’t worry about that, Stella, oh my gosh. It happens to everyone.”
She leans in conspiratorially, which is very confusing, because from what I understand, that’s something that you do when you’re talking to someone who you’re trying to become friends with, and the only possible explanation I can come up with for why Jennie von Haller would want to become friends with me is that she has suddenly realized that graduation is six weeks away and she’s still short of the ten-hour community service requirement.
“Don’t tell Jeremy I told you this,” Jennie is saying, her voice as alarmingly conspiratorial as her posture, “but one time, after we won this really big game last season, he got so drunk that he threw up while the two of us were—well, you know where I’m going with this.”
“Yes,” I say. “I know where you’re going with this. And I am starting to get the impression that no one else is particularly embarrassed by the things they do when they drink to excess.”
“But that’s not even what I was talking about,” Jennie says. She tucks a few strands of her long, blond hair behind her ear and bites her lip. “He told me about when you were telling him about Kevin.”
“Oh,” I say.
And I’ll admit it. It hurts to hear his name.
I know that that doesn’t really make any sense, because it’s not like I haven’t been thinking about Kevin all day, nonstop, for the past week, in between crying in the bathroom when I can’t hold it together in class anymore and going to the nurse with fake period cramps so she lets me spend the next hour lying down. It shouldn’t feel worse than it already does just because someone said his name out loud.
“We broke up,” I say shortly. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Oh, gosh,” Jennie says. “I’m really sorry.”
I shrug.
“Hey, hear me out for a sec, okay?” Jennie says. She looks at me, wide-eyed and sympathetic and earnest, and it’s the earnestness that does me in. It’s the same quality that Jeremy has: effortless sincerity. Like they’re just saying what they’re saying because it’s true to them, and that’s enough to say it without irony or sarcasm or endless internal deliberation.
“Okay,” I say.
“When I was a freshman, the year before you got to Bridgemont, I dated this guy. He was a junior at the time, so you may have known him, actually—Corey Andrews?”
“Didn’t know him,” I say. “But he’s got two first names, which is never a good sign.”
Jennie laughs. “Wish I’d had you around to tell me that at the time,” she says. “Not that it would’ve changed my mind about him, but at least I could’ve laughed about it later.”
“Oh, okay,” I say. “I see where this is going. You’re going to tell me that Corey was a terrible guy but you were still madly in love with him, because you were a freshman and all freshmen are idiots. Then it ended disastrously, because that’s how these things always end, but eventually you realized that it was actually a good thing that it ended, because now you’re with Jeremy, who is perfect and nice and aggressively hot. Is that it?”
“Er,” Jennie says. “Well. I wasn’t really going to talk about why Corey and I got together, or why I’m grateful that it ended—although I am grateful that it ended, and not just because my current boyfriend is perfect and nice and aggressively hot.”
“I didn’t mean that in a weird way,” I add hastily. “Jeremy and I were just—”
“Just friends, I know,” Jennie says.
I choose to take the complete lack of concern on Jennie’s face as a testament to her trust in Jeremy rather than my utter lack of sex appeal.
“Where you’ve got the story wrong is that Corey wasn’t a terrible guy,” Jennie says. “He was just a regular guy who liked playing baseball with his brothers and went to church on Sundays and really wanted to go to college somewhere warm.”
“Okay,” I say.
“But the relationship,” Jennie continues, “was terrible, and it ended terribly. And after it ended terribly, the thing that bothered me the most—more than the fact that I spent six months with him, more than the fact that I no longer had an invite to junior prom—was that he wasn’t a terrible guy. He wasn’t a terrible guy, and I certainly didn’t think I was a terrible girl, so the fact that our time together was such a shitshow—well, it just didn’t make any sense.”
“Okay,” I repeat.
“And I spent months beating myself up over that, trying to figure out why things were the way they were. Was it him? Was it me? Was it school? Was it his chemistry lab partner who he started dating two weeks after we broke up?
“I thought about those questions, like, every second of every day. I stopped going to cheer practice—that’s how upset I was. But no matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t come up with an answer. And eventually I realized that sometimes, things just don’t work. You bring out the worst of each other. You fight even though you have no reason to. You break up even though you’re still totally convinced that you’re perfect together. And you drive yourself nuts trying to explain it all, but there is no explanation. Sometimes you just have to let it go. Does that make sense?” Jennie says.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Okay, good.” She stands up and picks up her notebooks with the satisfied expression of someone who has completed their community service for the day. “I’m going to tell Katie to give you my number, okay? Text me if you want to talk.”
“Okay,” I say.
As Jennie walks away—her heels clicking against the bricks on the ground as she goes—I find myself feeling grateful that Jennie came over at lunch, even if the reason why I find myself feeling grateful is not, in fact, Jennie’s Disney Channel sentiment that “sometimes you just have to let things go.” The part of that conversation that sticks with me and occasionally even makes me smile over the next few days is the part when I backtracked furiously
after calling Jeremy aggressively hot.
“Jeremy and I were just—” I started. And even though I had every intention of finishing the sentence with “health class partners,” I never got around to saying the words. Because then Jennie cut me off and said, “Just friends, I know.”
It’s a silly thing to take away from that conversation, and I spend as much time rolling my eyes at myself for being happy about it as I do...well, actually being happy about it. But still. Given the state of my life, I suppose I’ll take what I can get.
70.
I’m not expecting to run into Lin on the day that I do, but when it happens, there’s this sense of inevitability about it all. Like, of course Lin is at Joe’s Kitchen on the Saturday morning before her graduation, reading The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. And of course I choose that day to stop by and pick up a breakfast sandwich on my way back home after a run.
And of course I’m going to walk up to her and sit down at her table, and of course she’s going to look up at me with an expression somewhere between surprise and embarrassment, and of course we’re both going to sit there in screaming awkwardness for half a minute while neither of us can figure out what to say.
“Good book?” I ask.
“It’s all right,” Lin responds slowly. She looks taken aback, and I can’t say I blame her for that. It’s been a long time.
“I find Hemingway’s prose to be irritatingly spare at times,” Lin adds, “but the short stories are way better than the novels.”
“I’ll have to read one sometime,” I say. “After I finish East of Eden, that is.”
Lin laughs. Well, half laughs—something between a sharp exhale and a snort, something that says: Progress. We’re not all the way there, but we’re making progress.
“Katie told me what happened with you and Kevin,” Lin says. “And I’m sorry, Stella, I really am. I know you really cared about him.”
“It was for the better,” I say. “And it was a couple of months ago, so...”
Then I think about what I’m saying. And who I’m talking to.
“But yeah,” I admit. “It still fucking sucks.”
Lin slides a bookmark between the pages of her book and closes it. She pushes it to the side of the table.
“Katie tells me you’re going to Yale,” I say. “Congratulations.”
“Thanks,” Lin says.
We’re quiet for a bit, and that’s okay, I think. It’s not always easy to fall back into the rhythm of an old friendship. But I have faith that the two of us will be able to keep count if only we can find a familiar first note to grab on to.
“Hey,” I say. “Listen. I don’t know if you want to talk about this right now, but—I’m sorry. About what happened in December, I mean. And I’m sorry that it’s taken so long for me to come up to you and say that again. I should’ve done it ages ago, but I was afraid that it would end the same way it did last time.”
“It could still end the same way it did last time,” Lin says sharply.
“I know,” I say. “And I’m okay with that. You deserve to make the call.”
There’s a split second during which it seems like Lin may very well tell me to get out of the diner and leave her alone. She’s silent, and her shoulders are tense, and there’s hurt in her eyes that looks real, and raw, and resentful.
But then her body relaxes. And the walls behind her eyes come down. And I think to myself: Of course.
“I’ve missed you a lot,” Lin says.
“I’ve missed you, too,” I say.
“Katie made me go to prom, and it was terrible,” Lin continues. “And then she made me go to afterprom, which was somehow even more terrible.”
“Unsurprising,” I say. “But unfortunate.”
“I got drunk and accidentally made out with Yago Evans,” Lin says, looking far more proud than embarrassed. “You know he got into Harvard? But I feel bad about that,” she adds. “Because I know that he and—”
“Trust me,” I say. “There’s nothing to feel bad about.”
Lin takes a sip of coffee.
“Are you okay, Stella?” she says. “Like, generally? It’s okay if the answer’s no, I swear. I just really want to know how you’re doing.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m okay.”
I pause.
“I’m not, like, super thrilled about how junior year went,” I say. “And my parents are making me go back to camp this summer. But... I’m okay, I think.”
Lin nods.
“It’s just hard,” I say.
“Yeah,” Lin says softly.
“And everyone’s got some kind of lesson that they think I should take away from all this, you know? My therapist thinks it’s that love isn’t enough to make relationships work, and my parents think it’s that I should go back to camp, and Jennie von Haller—”
“Jennie von Haller gave you relationship advice?”
“Yes,” I say. “Life has gotten weird.”
“Clearly,” Lin says. “So what was it?”
“Oh, right. Well, Jennie von Haller thinks it’s that sometimes bad things happen for no real reason and you just have to accept them and let them go.”
“That’s not bad,” Lin says, looking impressed.
“Well, sure,” I say. “But I don’t want a lesson. I don’t want a cute, feel-good saying to embroider onto my pillow or copy into my journal a thousand times. I just want none of this to have happened.”
“I get that,” Lin says.
“Plus, I have my own lesson that I got out of this year, and it has nothing to do with love, or camp, or the universal nature of unexplainable misfortune. The lesson that I got out of all this is about me. It’s that people like me shouldn’t be in relationships because we’re just going to fuck everything up.”
Lin takes that one in for a second, and then two, and then three. She starts to look very thoughtful, which makes me increasingly worried that what comes next is a going to be a reference to a classic American novel that I haven’t read. But then she takes a deep breath and says: “Listen, Stella. Everyone is going to project their own experiences onto yours and tell you what they think the moral of the story should be, because that’s what people do. You can’t control any of that. You can’t control what your therapist tells you, and you can’t control what your parents make you do this summer. The only thing that you can control is what you tell yourself the moral of the story is.”
“Ugh,” I say. “No wonder you got into Yale.”
“It sounds like the moral you’ve decided on is that people ‘like you’ don’t deserve to be in happy relationships. And I have to be honest, Stella—I don’t even know what that means. People who are kind and witty and smart? People who have had a rough couple of years? People who really need to read East of Eden?”
I’m tearing up, even as I laugh. I should probably be embarrassed, but—
It’s Lin.
“So I guess what I’m saying is: Pick a better moral for yourself. All right?”
“I’ll try,” I say.
“Okay,” Lin says.
The silence is comfortable, this time.
“So you and Yago...” I say, and the look I give her is so aggressively suggestive that the two of us burst into laughter at the exact same time.
And it’s one of those moments, you know? That’s kind of silly, and kind of stupid, and kind of moving despite it all. That you remember even though there’s no way to explain it to anyone who wasn’t there.
Two friends rediscovering an old rhythm. A small, simple, fragile thing. Like a bubble sitting on a six-year-old’s palm that may very well be about to burst.
But still. Given the state of my life, I suppose that I’ll take this one, too.
* * * * *
Keep reading for an excerpt from Four Weeks,
Five People by Jennifer Yu.
Acknowledgments
I wrote this novel over the course of a two-and-a-half-year period that included a number of highly distracting milestones, including:
Graduating from college (which was sad)
Publishing my first book (which was terrifying)
Turning twenty-one (which was long overdue)
Learning how to drive, ski and play a number of new Taylor Swift songs on the guitar (which precipitated much swearing, many bruises and countless unwelcome renditions of “All Too Well”)
Surviving my first full year of real-world employment (which was, to be honest, a very close call)
That I managed to complete Imagine Us Happy while being dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood is far less a testament to my skill and determination (which are sort of like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot in that they have been sighted very rarely and only by shady characters with highly questionable motives), and far more a testament to the support of the following friends, mentors, accomplices, drinking buddies, etc.:
Christina Teodorescu, who has been reading my shitty first drafts since the days when “beta readers” were just known as “suckers with poor taste in friends”
Jesse Victoroff and Shinri Kamei, who provided feedback and invaluable pats on the head from their respective SPG hotels
Molly, Ana, Hannah, Dorothy, Ami and Russell, whose kindness, compassion and faith have been with me in my lowest moments
Laura Dail, who continues to devote her time, her energy and a steady stream of “don’t panic” emails to my writing career despite my deficit of time management skills and social media prowess
T. S. Ferguson, whose support and guidance shaped Stella and Kevin’s story into the novel before you today
Four Weeks, Five People
by Jennifer Yu
STELLA
A FEW WORDS of advice for those attending Camp Ugunduzi for the first time:
Contrary to what the brochure may have told your parents, siblings, grandparents, estranged uncles, teachers, psychiatrists, well-meaning friends, not-so-well-meaning friends, and other people of distant relation who “care about you” and have therefore shipped you to the middle of upstate New York (read: out of their lives) for one month of summer while everyone else just goes kayaking and eats hot dogs, you will probably not discover a way to change your life at this camp.