More Happy Than Not

by Adam Silvera

  “Don’t let that ruin your day, Walking Dead. And definitely don’t let it ruin your girl’s day.” He picks up the cord and shakes it. “This connects down to my window and through my bedroom. It’s all set up already, but text me if you have any issues.”

  I walk over to the small black-and-gray projector, facing toward an old chimney that’s sealed off with cement. A smile spreads across my face.

  “I’m so excited,” Genevieve says. She picks out a pre-fired vase at Clay Land, a pottery studio on 164th Street that doubles as a tattoo parlor after 4:00—just in case someone wants to make a poor life decision after painting mugs for their parents. The pottery sessions cost thirty dollars with the two-for-one coupon, which sort of sucks for my wallet, but we’re creating something that’s lasting, like us. Especially considering her father mistook yesterday for her birthday.

  We sit at this table in the corner. Genevieve doesn’t wait for the instructor before she grabs a paintbrush and goes to work. Her hands race around like she’s on a timer with only seconds left, and she traces yellow and pink lines around the vase from a starburst of red.

  I paint a happy zombie on the mug I picked out. “I’m sorry we didn’t do this sooner.”

  “No sad stuff on my birthday, Aaron.” Genevieve’s smile widens as she trails two fingers soaked in purple around the vase. “I love this more than a bath of Skittles.”

  She dropped That Word. Not at me, but about something we’re doing together, and I freak out a bit in my head. And also not freaking out—she didn’t say she loved me—but still freaking out enough that I almost knock over my mug. It might be the paint fumes, but I ask: “Do I make you happy?”

  She stops rubbing the neck of the vase and looks up at me. Then she holds out her hand that’s soaked in a blend of paints and when I reach for it, she punches me in the arm and leaves a colorful fist print. “You know you know the answer to that.” She dips her finger in a can of yellow paint and traces a smile over my dark blue shirt. “Stop fishing for compliments, you tall dumb-idiot.”

  Genevieve probably thinks I’m finally bringing her to my apartment, something I’ve always avoided since it’s not very girlfriend friendly. It’s always messy and smells like wet socks. We just keep walking past my building, into Thomas’s, and we ride the elevator up to the roof.

  The sun is now completely tucked away and the moon is doing its thing. There’s a picnic blanket on the ground held down by the cinder blocks; this was Thomas’s doing, and it’s a surprise to both me and Gen. “So you’re likely wondering what the hell we’re doing here.”

  “I always suspected you were psychic,” she says, still holding on to my hand like she’s dangling from the edge. She looks up and finds some stars hanging out up there in the faraway sky, but I’m about to beat them.

  We sit on the blanket and I press the proper buttons on the projector and CD player. “Okay, my plan to take you to the planetarium was a no go because of reasons you would punch me for getting worked up over. So I figured if I couldn’t take you to some constellations, I would bring them to you.” The projector whirs to life and a light beams onto the chimney. An ominous-sounding female voice says, “Welcome to the known universe.” Thomas downloaded the star show from online and even got the audio onto the CD player for us.

  Genevieve blinks a few times. There are tears forming in the corners of her eyes, and you shouldn’t be happy when your girlfriend is crying, but it’s okay when they’re Aaron-did-something-right tears.

  “From here on out you’re in charge of my birthday,” Genevieve whispers. “The picnic blanket, the pottery session, the stars, and now this woman who sounds like God.”

  “We both know God is a dude, but nice try.”

  She punches my arm. I pull her close to me and we lie down for our trip across the universe. It’s pretty strange feeling sucked into the stars in front of us when there are actual stars above us. Artificial satellites orbit the planets and I act like I’m flicking them away, clicking my tongue each time. Genevieve punches me again and shushes me. I would’ve shut up anyway after seeing the planets fall into the distance so we can admire constellations, like the twins for Gemini (which she whoops at), the Pisces fish, the Aries ram, and the rest of the zodiac family. The constellations fall away. The captions tell us that we’re a light-year away from Earth when boring radio signals zoom in . . . on and on until we end up in the Milky Way galaxy 100,000 light-years later. This feels like something straight out of a video game.

  We travel 100,000,000 light-years from Earth—into other galaxies, where we see lots of greens and reds and blues and purples glowing against the black of space, like splattered drops of paint on a dark apron. I don’t know how we’re not space sick once we hit 5,000,000,000 light-years away from Earth. There’s something shaped like a butterfly, and we discover it’s the afterglow of the big bang, which is pretty damn beautiful.

  Everything begins zooming away, space and time undoing its present to us, my present to Genevieve, and it throws us out of the cosmos. This trip changes everything for me. Or maybe doesn’t change anything, only makes clear of what I can find here on Earth, my home. Space is pretty damn unreachable for most of us. I turn to Genevieve, to the girl I brought to the stars and back, who waits for me through times dark as space. I hold her hand and say, “I think I sort of, maybe kind of . . . I think I love you.”

  My heart is pounding. I’m so dumb. Genevieve is out of my league, out of this universe. I wait for a reaction, for her to laugh at me, but she smiles and blows all my doubts away—until her smile falters for a second. I could’ve missed it if I blinked or rolled my eyes back in relief.

  “You don’t have to say that,” Genevieve says. I check her hands to see if the ax she just slammed into my chest is as big as I think it is. “I don’t know if that’s what you think I want to hear.”

  “I’ll be real. I didn’t think kids our age could do this, you know, but you’re more than my best friend and definitely more than some girl I like sleeping with. I’m not waiting for you to say it back—in fact, never say it. I’ll be okay. I just had to tell you.”

  I kiss my girlfriend on her forehead, untangle our hands and legs, and get up. It’s hard, seeing as there’s this crushing weight in my chest that makes me feel like that time I tumbled under the waves at Orchard Beach. I follow the orange cord to the ledge and look down at the street: two guys are either shaking hands or swapping money for weed, a young mother is struggling to pop open a baby stroller and a couple of girls are laughing at her. This world is full of ugliness like drugs and hate and girlfriends who don’t love you. I look over at my building a couple blocks down. I could really go for being home now.

  Genevieve grips my shoulder and hugs me from behind. In her hand is a folded piece of paper. She shakes it until I take it from her.

  “Look at it,” she says, slightly muffled. This is a goodbye hug that comes with a goodbye letter with goodbye words. I unfold the wrinkled sheet and it’s an illustration of a boy and a girl in the sky with a backdrop of many, many stars. The boy is tall and when I examine it more closely, the girl is punching him in the arm—it’s a constellation of us.

  Genevieve turns me to her and looks me in the eyes and I almost want to turn away. “I drew that after our first date and have carried it around a lot wondering when I could share this with you. All we did was walk around and it was easy, like we were hanging out for the hundredth time.”

  Then I realize our first clumsy kiss was the inspiration. “I laughed after we kissed and you didn’t get offended or anything. You smiled and punched me in the arm.”

  “I should’ve punched you in the face. I guess I like hurting the boy I love.”

  I don’t move. I told her to never say it but I’m damn glad she did. We’re locked in some strange staring contest and our mouths are curving.

  This is still an ugly world. But at least it’s
one where your girlfriend loves you back.

  7

  THAT TIME I’M ALONE

  It hasn’t even been twenty-four hours and I miss Genevieve. I would sell our firstborn child—a little guy I think we’ll name something ironic, like Faust—just to have her back to punch me.

  I didn’t even change clothes when I woke up because the shirt had her fist print, not that I would ever tell my friends. I tried distracting myself with some Sun Warden sketches. Funny how I was so big a distraction to Genevieve that she had to fly to New Orleans just so she could get some work done.

  I never do anything right.

  These are bad thoughts for me to be thinking. That shitty therapist Dr. Slattery told me to speak to someone—friends, a stranger on the subway, anyone—whenever I find myself in an unhappy and lonely place: obvious advice and not worth the bank we spent on him. I go outside and search for Brendan since there’s no one home for me to talk to. Not that I’d be chitchatting with my mom and Eric anyway. I try calling Brendan; he doesn’t pick up his phone.

  Outside, Skinny-Dave is playing handball. He lets me join him, which is great because it keeps me busy enough to suffer through his small talk about “procrastination masturbation,” where you save a porn link for later because you can’t be bothered with the cleanup at that moment. But it’s not long before he stops playing so he can check on his laundry, leaving me alone with a handball I “better not fucking lose” or he’ll castrate me and my future sons. (Sorry, Faust.)

  Twenty days.

  I only have to survive twenty more days without her.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s Aaron.”

  “I know, Stretch. What’s up?”

  “Nothing, which is a problem. I should be doing something instead of sitting here and only missing Genevieve. You free to hang out?”

  “I’m sort of in the middle of something right now. You doing anything tomorrow morning?”

  “Nope. Unless whatever you’re about to suggest is stupid, in which case, yeah, I have plans to save the world or something.”

  “Well, if you’re done saving the world before noon we could go see a movie.”

  “I guess the city can take care of itself for a couple hours. So what are you up to right now?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  He sounds kind of ashamed and dodgy, sort of like the way someone (not Skinny-Dave) gets really uncomfortable when you ask them if they watch porn or not, even if the answer is obvious. But I let it go and instead get him to talk to me about stupid things, like what superpower he would like to have—invincibility, which Skinny-Dave always confuses for invisibility.

  It’s better than handball, at least.

  8

  NO HOMO

  Thomas looks tired as hell when I meet him on the corner of his block the next morning.

  It’s a little after 11:00. Not sure if he got any sleep or if he’ll be able to stay awake for the entire movie.

  “Are you cloning yourself?”

  “What?” Thomas groggily asks.

  “I’m trying to figure out what you’re obsessively working on.”

  “I don’t think anyone wants two clueless Thomases walking around.” We take a shortcut through some shady projects to get to the theater as fast as possible. “I don’t want to tell you or you’ll think I’m some lost puppy.”

  “Nah, you’re more like a work in progress. We all are,” I say. I hold my hands up in surrender. “But I’ll drop it.”

  “You’re supposed to try and force me to spill the beans.”

  “Okay. Spill the beans.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  So we don’t.

  Again.

  Instead, he goes on about how he loves summertime mornings because of the eight-dollar ticket charge for a movie, which usually doesn’t even matter since he knows how to get in for free because he worked there for two weekends last summer before—you guessed it—quitting.

  “But you want to be a director. Isn’t working at the movies a good first step?”

  “I thought it would be, but you don’t get a vision for any projects working behind the concession stands. You’re constantly burning yourself from popcorn oil, and your classmates bully you at the box office when you don’t let them into R-rated movies. Ripping off tickets won’t turn me into a director.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I figure if I keep taking odd jobs I’ll get some material for my own scripts. I just haven’t figured out a story to tell yet.”

  When we get to the theater, Thomas pulls me by my elbow toward the parking lot. We pass a couple of emergency exits before continuing down an alleyway I know we have no business walking through. He pulls out a savings card for a drugstore and slides it down the crack of a door until there’s a click. He turns and smiles when he opens the door.

  I only feel slightly guilty, and it’s such a rush that I’m not scared of getting caught. It’s also a good trick to know for when Genevieve gets back, even if seeing a movie is the last thing I’ll want to do after she’s been gone for three weeks. The door leads us out by the bathrooms. We head for the concession stand, buy some popcorn—See? We’re not total criminals—and go to the condiment bar where he drowns his popcorn in butter.

  “I always come to this theater for midnight showings,” Thomas says. “The energy always surprises me. No one on my block would ever dress up on a day that’s not Halloween because they’re not comfortable in their own skin. But for the midnight showing of Scorpius Hawthorne, so many people who I wish I’d made friends with were dressed up as demonic wizards and specters.”

  “I didn’t know you read that series!”

  “Hell yeah,” Thomas says. “I brought my copy to the midnight showing and readers signed their names and underlined their favorite passages.”

  I wish I’d gone. “Did you dress up?”

  “I was the only brown Scorpius Hawthorne,” Thomas says. He tells me about other midnight showings too, where he had people sign the video game cases and comic book anthologies that inspired them all. These are all cool mementos. But I’m just happy to have another friend who’s read and seen the Scorpius Hawthorne series.

  We look at the movie posters to decide what we’re going to see. Thomas wishes a new Spielberg movie was out but is ready to settle on a black-and-white film about a boy dancing on a bus. “No thanks,” I say.

  “What about that new movie, The Final Chase?” Thomas stands in front of a poster of a pretty blue-eyed girl sitting at the edge of a dock like it’s a park bench, and a guy in a sweater vest reaching out for her. “I didn’t realize this was out yet. You down?”

  I’m pretty sure the commercial for this movie leans toward the romance side of things. “I don’t think I can.”

  “It’s PG-13. You are of age, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, smart-ass. Looks like something Genevieve might like. There’s nothing else you want to see?”

  Thomas looks around and turns his back on movies promising explosions and gunfights. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that French movie again. It starts in an hour, though.”

  It’s obvious he doesn’t want to see the French movie again because who in the hell would want to see a French movie twice? “Let’s go see The Final Chase. I can always see it again when she gets back.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. If it sucks, she’s on her own.”

  We go inside and there are plenty of seats available. “Preference?”

  “The back row but don’t ask why,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “I have this pretty irrational fear of having my throat sliced inside a movie theater, so I figure that can’t happen if no one sits behind me.”

  Thomas stops chewing on his popcorn. His eyes are grilling me on whether I’m being
serious or not before he busts out laughing so hard he almost chokes. I sit down in the back row, and he collapses into the seat next to mine as his laugh winds down.

  I flip him off. “Don’t act like you’ve never been freaked out by something ridiculous.”

  “No, I definitely have. I used to bother my mother when I was a kid, maybe nine or ten, to let me watch horror movies, especially slasher flicks.”

  “Probably not the best thing to say to someone afraid of having his throat sliced.”

  “Shut up. So my mother finally gave in one evening and let me watch Scream. I was scared shitless and was up until five in the morning. Ma always encouraged me to count sheep when I couldn’t sleep but it only made things worse. I was counting sheep that night and every time they hopped over the fence . . .” Dramatic pause. “The Scream guy would stab each of them and they would fall down, bloody and dead.”

  I laugh so loudly other people shush me, even though previews haven’t started yet, and it’s hard to stop. “You are so disturbed! How long did this go on for?”

  “Never stopped.” Thomas screeches and mimes someone getting stabbed. The previews come on and we shut up.

  There’s a rom-com, Next Stop: Love, which is about a train conductor crushing on this new attendant; a typical horror movie where creepy little girls appear after someone turns a corner; a miniseries called Don’t You Forget About Me about a husband trying to convince his wife not to forget him with a Leteo procedure; and, finally, a comedy about four postgrad guys on a cruise ship that doesn’t look funny at all.

  “Those all looked terrible,” I say.

  Thomas leans over and says, “I will slice your throat if you talk during the movie.”

  This movie is total bullshit.