Happy People Live Here

by C. Sean McGee

9A

  Linda stood outside the games room, leaning against the doorframe and looking at all the balloons bouncing about the floor. There were lots of them, so many in fact that Linda couldn’t see the carpet underneath. She knew it was there, she just couldn’t see where it had gone.

  There were so many balloons. And even though they weren’t the type that flew up into the sky (unless you held onto them with a string or you sticky taped them to the back of a chair of course), they still looked like they would be so much fun to run through or to lie beneath, like the colored balls in the magic fun castle where could cover yourself until you disappeared completely and only when another kid jumped on you and you squirmed and squealed and maybe even shouted to your mum, did anyone know that you were actually there to begin with.

  These weren’t flying or runaway balloons, they were the normal kind. They were the kind that filled up the floor with lots of colors like red and blue and green and yellow and purple and white. Green was Linda’s favorite color so the green balloons were her favorite. She couldn’t see many, though. The room was filled with mainly pink ones.

  Linda couldn’t see any children. There was just a lot of party stuff kind of half done. Streamers that were stuck to one wall but not to another so they were just hanging from different walls and going down onto the floor where the other ends; they disappeared under the sea of balloons.

  They were supposed to look like fancy colored rainbow bridges. And they were supposed to go from one wall to the other on both sides of the party room and they should be wavy and look like big ‘w’s across the sky and they should be just high enough so the children would want to try and jump up and catch them with their hands and pull them down and tear them up like Christmas wrapping. But they should be just high enough so the kids couldn’t and then that would make the kids want to try even more. And they would jump and jump and jump some more and there would be the sound of balloons popping and mums and dads laughing and one child shouting “I nearly did it, I was so close, did you see me? Mum, did you see me?”

  But they didn’t look like fancy colored bridges in the sky. They looked unfinished, like a kid with only one shoe on, as if someone had stopped to do something else for some reason and then forgotten about them altogether.

  “Excuse me,” Linda said quietly.

  So quiet was it that the woman talking on her cell phone didn’t even turn her head to see what all the fuss was about. She just kept shouting into her phone and pulling on one of the streamers. And though it sounded like she was trying to keep her shouting some kind of a secret and to not appear to be mad in a place where people might see, Linda could still hear that she was saying some bad words and that she didn’t much like the way the other person was speaking to her or what they were telling her she should do.

  “Excuse me,” Linda said again, this time louder.

  The woman was shouting now, into the phone. Linda wanted to run away, like she did when her mum and dad used to fight, and play with her dolls and imagine that they were all going to see Mickey Mouse with their friends from school and that Mickey would say “Heya” so loud that she wouldn’t be able to hear the sound of mum cursing and dad wishing that it had all been different; whatever that meant.

  Linda wanted to run. She wanted to think about her happy place. But she also wanted the woman on the phone to stop shouting. She wanted her to see that the room was only half done. She wanted her to stop being so mad and to stop using such bad words and she wanted her to find the other ends of the streamers and to stick them to the other ends of the walls and to fix the damn fancy colored bridges so they looked pretty and made the children smile; and not shouted on the stupid phone and make the party all about them and their stupid fighting.

  “Excuse me,” she said again, even louder this time.

  The woman was still shouting.

  “Excuse me,” Linda said, now speaking as loud as a principal in a school.

  The woman was shouting even still and her nails were about to cut through a streamer. Linda could see, even from where she was standing, that the woman didn’t even know it was happening. She was so caught up in being so mad.

  “Excuse me,” said Linda, as loud as a policeman in a crowd of people.

  Still nothing.

  The streamer was about to tear.

  “Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me. Excuse me” she shouted, screaming the last so her voice twisted and turned like the stretching streamer, the last syllable sounding like the squelch of a pig having its throat cut.

  The woman turned, the phone still against her ear, but no longer shouting and no longer acting like her stupid fight was more important than the streamer that was about to rip. And she didn’t say anything, the woman that is; she just looked at Linda like a kid might look at a bully, right before they get punched in the nose.

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Linda said, almost in tears, her lip trembling and her hands shaking like two tiny leaves in a gale of adrenaline. “You’re gonna rip it. And you’re gonna ruin everything. It’s supposed to be a colored bridge” she said, her words becoming the sound of crying, the second they were spoken.

  “O…K,” the woman on the phone said.

  “It looks stupid. It’s not a colored bridge. And you shouldn’t fight. And you shouldn’t be so mean” Linda said.

  “Wait, I…,” said the woman on the phone.

  “I like the balloons, they’re really pretty” Linda shouted, turning and running from the doorway.

  Linda didn’t hear anything the woman said after that. She didn’t even see the woman rushing to the doorway and waving for her to come back. And she didn’t see the bunch of boys that were sitting by the pool. And though she heard them laughing, she didn’t know what was so funny.

  She ran all the way into the lobby and tapped the button for the elevator a hundred times. They had gotten new sofas and two new paintings in the lobby. She didn’t know when but the paintings didn’t look like anything special. They didn’t look like a real artist had painted them. Not like the Mona Lisa. They looked like someone spilled something and then just let it dry. Art was stupid. And people were stupid, for thinking this was art.

  The sofa didn’t look very comfortable either. It looked like someone had just painted golden petals onto a stone tablet and called it a sofa. She didn’t know for sure, though. She’d have to sit on it first and see. She’d have to do it now, though before the elevator arrived. Because she wouldn’t get a chance after the weekend and then when she thought about it in the future and if she ever told anyone about it, she’d never know for sure whether it was as good as it made itself out to be.

  Not knowing would be like leaving a fancy colored bridge only half done. So, as the numbers of the elevator made its way past four, she quickly raced to the sofa to the left of the elevators and turned so she was facing the big mirror on the other side. She studied her own expression as a drunk might, the filling of an empty glass, lowering herself onto the sofa as if its rigid golden cushions were a searing pool of bathwater, about to sting her bottom.

  “Ugh,” she said, trying to bounce on the seat. “So boring.”

  She gripped her hand on the side of the sofa and tried to squeeze her buttocks as hard as she could into the cushions to try and make some kind of an impression, to try and make some kind of a dent but nothing happened. It really was as if she was sitting on a big old slab of concrete, as if someone had taken a bit of the sidewalk, the bit that people had to sit on when they were waiting for a bus, and paid someone to cut it and sand it and make it smooth so it looked just like a cushion; and then painted it yellow and gold and silver so that it looked shiny and expensive; and then put it in next to an elevator in a posh building where nobody would ever really use it so it looked just like a sofa, but it wasn’t.

  Rich people were so boring sometimes. They liked things, without really knowing what they were, what they did, or what they were like when you used them; just as long as it cost a lot. That
was the only important thing.

  The sofa was really uncomfortable. It made her have to keep her back straight and the cushions didn’t make her bum feel comfortable. The way she was sitting, she felt like she was probably dirtying it or breaking it in some way. Not that it would matter if she was or if she even cared for that matter. It’s just, the way she had to sit, it made her feel like she was taking up too much time and that she was making a mess and it even made her feel like that was a bad thing.

  How did it do that?

  It was just a sofa.

  A boring sofa.

  A boring uncomfortable sofa.

  Rich people were so stupid. It was good then that she wasn’t going to be one. It was good that she wasn’t going to have to live amongst them anymore. And it was good then not to not have to pretend to be just like they were and to pretend that the stuff that they liked was even good in the first place.

  The elevator dinged and the doors whooshed as opened and Linda quickly sprung up and ran before the doors closed. There was nobody else there which made her so happy that she forgot all about the camera in the top right hand corner and looked at herself in the mirror and danced, the second the doors closed.

  She turned her hands into clenched fists and pulled her arms tight against her hips and she swung those hips back and forth as if she were a swollen cork, trying to twist its way back into a stubborn bottle. She twisted and she turned and she went up and she went down, bending her knees so that she twisted and turned all the way to the ground and then as she was about to explode, jumping up into the air with her arms and legs sticking out like the points of a star.

  Linda had never danced in an elevator before. She had never had the desire to do so and honestly, the thought of doing it had never even crossed her mind. She didn’t even dance at home where there was less chance of somebody seeing, even though there probably was, peeking from their apartment across the way; still, this was an elevator. And Linda hated elevators. She got nervous when other people were on there with her, and she got even more nervous still, when she was alone, thinking that at any second, those very same people were probably, no definitely, about to get on at any second and that the elevator would break down and she would be stuck between floors with the other people, and she’d have to hold her breath the whole time, because she breathed too loud.

  And yet, as she twisted and turned and scrunched her face, she felt none of the normal awkward shame and surmounting worry. She spun in circles and she curled herself into a tight ball and then she thrust her arms up and out like a spring flower, swaying back and forth with her two feet pinned together as if the back and forth rocking of the moving elevator were a light and felicitous breeze.

  And she danced and she danced, all the way to the ninth floor. And she didn’t want to get off, but the elevator was dinging and telling her that she had to and so she jumped out into the dark hallway as if she were jumping out of a rocket ship for the first time ever, onto the surface of the Moon. And she didn’t at all think that there was someone hiding behind the plant anymore or that there was someone hiding inside one of the other apartments, ready to jump out and steal her and keep her behind locked doors and do really scary things to her. She didn’t think that anymore because they weren’t there. Because there was nothing behind the stupid pot plant except for the stupid wall. And there was nobody inside the stupid apartment expect for a bunch of stupid empty rooms. And there was nobody spying on her from the camera and there was no one lurking or leering or lying in wait, about to snare her like a hungry spider in the darkest part of the dark, where the sinister made its occasion.

  Linda just wanted to dance.