by Libba Bray
“Meet me in the bowling alley,” she whispers. “Five minutes.”
When I get there, the church is empty except for Library Girl. She’s perched on my favorite ball return, chewing a huge wad of pink gum and blowing bubbles she pops with loud smacks.
“So, tell me,” she says, sucking a dead bubble back into her mouth. “How do you like it here?”
“It’s great.”
“Yeah,” she says, staring at the ceiling and swinging one leg. “Great. Special. We’re all special.”
“Exactly.”
“Wanna put that to the test?” she says.
“What do you mean?”
“A little scientific experimentation. Go ahead. Bowl a perfect game. You can’t lose. If you believe you can do it …”
“… Then you can!” I finish.
“So why don’t you test it. Think the worst thing you could possibly think and let the ball roll. See if the universe gets mad.”
“If I get sad, the alarm will go off and the commandos will come in. So you can’t really test it,” I say.
“Huh.” She pushes up her sleeves, revealing a pair of kick-ass biceps. “Here’s a secret,” she says, looking around. “Sometimes, they’re busy ordering stuff and don’t watch. Like now.”
She flips a switch and the balls come to life, bouncing along on their well-oiled, shiny grooves. My favorite purple ball is within reach. I haven’t had any unhappy thoughts for days. I’m out of practice. I’m sort of annoyed at Gonzo for what he said earlier but not enough to really work myself up about it. Dulcie pops into my mind, the way she just left. And then a thought I have no control over works its way into my brain: What if I never see her again?
“Oooh, you look pretty bummed. Let her rip.”
I throw the ball at the lane. It bounces and skitters across the smooth, polished wood, careening unpredictably. By all rights, it should hit the gutter, but it doesn’t. Instead, it scoots right back to the center and delivers a perfect strike.
“Try again,” Library Girl urges.
I imagine all sorts of things this time: Mom and Dad and Jenna back at the hospital. Kids too poor to have Christmas. Beloved pets being put to sleep. Losing all my Great Tremolo CDs. Pep rallies. Still I hit strike after strike after strike. I couldn’t lose if I tried, and I am definitely trying.
“Not so fun anymore, is it? Now for the rest of our experiment …” Library Girl pulls a magnet from her pocket and does something to the console with it. Then she uses the magnet on the other lanes. “This time, do what they say: embrace the positive.”
I close my eyes and say my mantra: You can do it if you think you can. You deserve to win.
When I launch the ball, it rolls down the center and drifts off to the side, sliding into the gutter and out of sight without knocking down a single pin. “Whoa. What just happened?”
Library Girl holds up her magnet. “They’re magnetized. There’s a little magnet in the ball and another in the gutters. They repel the ball. Like I said, you can’t lose. You achieve every time.”
“But it’s not an achievement if the game’s rigged.”
Library Girl holds up two fingers on each hand, making quote marks in the air. “Failure doesn’t increase your happiness.”
I give it six, seven more tries, and the best I can do is take out four pins. “Maybe you made the game too hard now,” I say.
“Or maybe you’re just not that awesome, special, and perfect all the time.”
“That’s harsh,” I say, even though my gut says she’s right; I’ve sort of gotten used to hearing only the good stuff. “But what about what they say here, that competition hurts your happiness. We have to get rid of our bad feelings to be happy.”
She rolls her eyes and lets out a growl. “You can’t ‘get rid’ of any of your feelings! We’re human beings! When some jerk pisses me off, I have the urge to kick the living shit out of him. But I can’t, because if we went around kicking people all the time, we’d never be able to buy groceries or take the dog for a walk or eat out. It would be complete chaos. That’s why we have civilization. And table manners.”
“Exactly! But that’s why this church exists. To make us better people. And to be better people, we have to get rid of all our negative feelings.”
“No. We have to learn to live with them. What if those so-called negative feelings are useful?” Library Girl spins the shiny pink ball that’s sitting on the metal grid waiting for a game. It wobbles like the Earth on its axis. “I mean, suppose you take your anger and you channel it into a painting. Pretty soon, you don’t care about getting back at that idiot who pissed you off anymore because you’re totally into your painting. And then maybe that painting hangs in a gallery someday and it inspires other people to find their thing, whatever it is. You’ve influenced the world not because you wanted to hug it and cuddle it and call it sweet thing but because one day you wanted to beat the crap out of somebody but you didn’t. You made a painting instead. And you couldn’t have made that painting without that feeling, without something to push off against. We human beings can’t evolve without the pain.”
“What do you mean?”
“Bad stuff happens.” She flicks out a switchblade and cuts through one of the commando ropes that’s been left hanging after an earlier sadness incident and wraps the length around her wrist. “People fail. They get dumped. They bomb tests. They lose the big game or screw up in a hundred small ways or get rejected or have to start over. They feel confused and scared. Or sometimes they just don’t feel like they fit in. They’re part of some kind of primal, universal loneliness and that’s just the way it is and you have to learn to deal and a big vanilla smoothie is not the answer, you know?”
“But what if we didn’t have to feel that?”
“But we do! It’s what makes us human.”
“So you don’t think human beings can be made happy.”
“I didn’t say that,” she says, fashioning the rope into a sort of double bracelet with a sliding knot. “I just don’t think happiness is a sustainable state. You can’t have it all the time. That much happiness makes people unhappy. And then they start looking for trouble. They start looking for the next thing that’s going to make them happy—a happiness fix.”
I feel like a balloon slowly settling to earth, slightly deflated but kind of glad the trip is over. It’s weird, but it’s sort of a relief not to have to be happy all the time.
“So if you don’t believe any of this, why are you still here?”
“To do what needs to be done.” Library Girl strokes the side of my face. “Cameron, you are a really nice guy. And that’s why I’m sorry about this.”
“Sorry about what?”
Superquick, she slips the rope bracelet over my wrists and tightens the knot so I can’t move my hands.
“Hey!” I tug but it only tightens the knot.
“Don’t struggle, Cameron. It’ll be easier.”
“What the f—”
Alarms go off at an earsplitting volume, louder than I’ve ever heard them.
“What’s that?” I say, wishing I could cover my ears.
“That, friend, is the beautiful sound of revolution.” Library Girl tugs on the rope, and all I can do is follow her.
Pandemonium has erupted in the rest of the Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack ’N’ Bowl. People in varying degrees of CESSNAB dress run through the halls, screaming that we are under attack. The walls are crawling with commandos. It’s like some kind of extreme soap-on-a-rope. Five teens with a shopping cart pass us by. At first, I think they’re from CESSNAB because they’re wearing the big yellow happy face shirts, but then I see it’s really a sad face, a mad face, a stoned face, and a face with a raised middle finger under the chin. The shopping cart is full of books and newspapers, which they toss at anyone they see.
A guy brandishing an open newspaper screams, “The world’s fucked up! Stop ordering jeans and pull your heads out!”
“Ha
ppiness is a fascist state!” one of the hurlers yells. It’s Thomas. “What if I don’t want to chill, huh? What if I miss my dog, Snuffy?”
A guy in a CESSNAB sweatshirt zigzags by, hugging himself frantically. “Embrace the positive! Embrace the positive!”
Library Girl looks up into the ceiling camera. With a wicked grin, she leans over and kisses me hard on the lips.
“Whoa,” I gasp.
“Come on,” she says, dragging me into the radio station’s recording booth. She bolts the door behind us, and for a split second, I have the crazy idea I’m about to pop my cherry under the weirdest of circumstances—a total coup de virginity. But Library Girl cuts my hands free of the rope handcuffs and abandons me for the console. Switches are flipped, knobs are turned, the volume is set at ten.
“Hand me that backpack that’s under the CESSNAB locker,” she says.
Still kiss-dazed, I bring it to her and she pulls out a well-worn copy of Anderson’s Anthology of English Literature and opens to a bookmarked page. Her voice zips into the micro phone and floats out into the compound.
“Shakespeare, people. Complicated. Beautiful. Sad and violent. And the language is a bitch. Let me blow ya minds with a little Hamlet:
“To be, or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to? ’Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance, to dream, ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come—”
The door shakes with pounding. An ax bites into the wood, scaring the shit out of me, but Library Girl keeps her lips pressed to the mike:
“… who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death—
The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
No traveller returns—puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?”
The door bursts open with a sick splintering sound, and Ruth stumbles in. She takes one look at me there with Library Girl and her lower lip starts to quiver. “Cameron. You are so hurting my happiness right now.”
Daniel’s right behind her, brandishing a torch. He speaks into his bracelet. “Roger one-niner, we have a situation in the radio room.”
“Roger one-niner? Isn’t that airplane code?” I ask.
His lips go tight. “It makes me happy to say it.”
A commando squad, all wide shoulders and, holy crap, honest-to-God guns this time, arrives on the scene. They grab Library Girl, who tries to hold on to the microphone. The commando picks up the mammoth anthology and brings it down hard three times on her hands, making her scream in pain till she’s forced to let go.
“What are you doing?” I shout, running toward them.
Daniel grabs a gun from the commando’s holster, points it at me. “Happiness. By any means necessary.”
He lifts the gun by the nose and brings the butt down hard on my head, and the room slips away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
In Which Some People’s Happiness Gets Its Butt Kicked and Gonzo and I Make Our Escape
Blacking out isn’t so bad, really. All in all, it’s a lot more pleasant than, say, celebrating a family birthday at a medieval theme restaurant or pretending you care about your GPA. Unconscious, I float out into a black universe where stars are winking electric Christmas candles, past the Buddha Cow raising one hoof in a Zen salute. It’s like I’m on some cool ride, chugging past automated exhibits: Mom and Dad are sitting in the hospital cafeteria, not talking over cups of lukewarm coffee. They look like shit, like a couple of toothpaste tubes that have been grabbed in the middle one too many times till whatever’s left is too hard to get out. Raina walks through the doors. She doesn’t look like shit. She looks fresh and alive and full of promise. Dad sees her and stands up, gives a little smile. Mom watches him like he’s a stranger she’s seeing for the first time. Raina hands Dad some papers and says “I’m sorry” and “If there’s anything I can do,” and Dad answers, “You’re doing so much already, Raina.” In the way she blushes and tucks her hair behind her ear, in the way Dad pays attention to that one small gesture, Mom’s face changes. She knows.
The ride loops around. To my right, the roadrunner keeps pace with me. It zips into a cave, and when it comes out, it’s the Wizard of Reckoning, the fire giants burning a giant black hole into the sky behind him. He reaches out, but the ride drops, making my stomach tingle. It creeps up the invisible mechanical hill toward a brightly lit room, where Glory’s taking the empty bag off the IV pole. “Just need to switch you out, honey.” She hooks the new fat pouch on the pole. The ride slows till I’m even with her. Her face is like one of those carved totems I saw once in a book about Easter Island—dark, beautiful, forever.
She strokes my cheek, and I swear I can feel the warmth of her skin. Her big brown eyes look into mine. “Cameron, child, are you awake in there?”
“I said, are you awake?”
My aching eyes open to see Daniel sitting across from me in a chair with his arms crossed. He looks like his happiness is more than hurt; it’s pissed and coming out swinging. I’m tied to my chair and Library Girl is nowhere to be seen. At least the gun’s gone. The bright lights of the Snackateria are little needles of pain slipping into my head.
“Yo! Cameron.”
“Yeah,” I croak. “Where’s Library Girl?”
“Who?” Ruth asks.
“Never mind,” I say. “Where’s Gonzo?”
Daniel sneers. “The midget freak? Maybe you can tell us. We haven’t found him yet.”
I’d like to beat the crap out of him for calling Gonzo a midget freak, but I’m tied to a chair and the lizard part of my brain has been activated and is now occupied with survival. Daniel gets right in my face. “So, tell us: how long have you and your spies been planning this little attack?”
“Me? I couldn’t even plan dinner. I didn’t have anything to do with this—”
Ruth cracks me on the knuckles with the anthology.
“Ow!” I screech.
“That’s for reading this depressing, hard stuff over the loudspeakers.”
“Wait, it wasn’t me. I—”
She cracks my knuckles a second time.
“And that’s for breaking the smoothie machine! They say it might take twenty-four hours to fix it. Twenty-four hours! That’s like a lifetime!”
Daniel paces the room. He’s a little scary. In fact, I’d give him just about anything that would increase his happiness right now before he goes commando on me. “We saw the security camera footage—she kissed you! And you handed her the backpack. We know you’re in this together. All the order stations have been hacked into so when you try to order a CESSNAB product you get rerouted to a book called My Happiness Wants Your Happiness to Go to Hell with quotes like ‘Read a damn book already. It won’t kill you.’ ‘People screw up all the time. Deal with it.’ ‘Not everybody gets to be famous.’ ‘If you’re so special, why am I so annoyed?’”
“Read that really bad one, Daniel!” Ruth says.
Daniel flips on a screen and reads the word flashing there. “No.”
“I want a smoothie,” Ruth says quietly.
Daniel’s face is so close to mine I can see the acne cream on his chin. “You’ve hurt a lot of people today, Cameron. And now you’re going to have to pay.”
“What if that hurts my happiness?”
“Little late for that. Friend.”
“Okay. I’ll leave. You know? I’ll just leave a
nd never come back.”
Ruth hits me with the book again so hard I swear Beowulf is lodged in my cheek. “Ow! Quit it!”
“No, Cameron,” Daniel says, stepping back. “Your lack of complete happiness is a threat to our happiness. It’s like a cancer. And you know what you have to do with a cancer?”
“Hope it goes away?”
Ruth drifts closer and I flinch, but five hundred years of the world’s least exciting literature does not come near my flesh.
“No. We have to cut it out so the good cells can continue to grow.” Daniel turns to the commandos. “Get him on his feet and meet me in the church. We’re going bowling.”
Ten minutes later, with two CESSNAB camo’d goons on either side of me, I’m half dragged into the packed Church of Everlasting Satisfaction and Snack ’N’ Bowl to face my doom. The church band is plugged in; they’re playing an uptempo tune with a vaguely rock-pop beat. My head still hurts from where Daniel smacked me with the gun, but I think the words say something about happiness only belonging to the right kind of people.
Daniel cuts a path through the throng and the band fades into a little feedback and then nothing. He stands in Lane #7, right under the big-screen TV that shows the dancing pins when you make a strike. The pins usually say things like Wow, you’re awesome and The universe loves a winner, so the universe must really love you! The screen’s off today. I imagine the pins have heard all about me and Library Girl and the supposed revolution and they’re scowling and flipping me the bird and gathering implements of torture.
Daniel holds out his hands like a preacher. “Friends, I want you to know that the smoothie machine is being fixed.”
The walls of the church shake with the sound of applause, wolf whistles, and whoo-hoos.
“I also want you to know that even though Cameron has hurt our happiness, he’s really hurt his own happiness more. This is what happens when people don’t embrace the positive. But are we going to let Cameron disappoint himself?”