Imagine Us Happy Read online

  “No justice,” Lin agrees glumly. “Only sleep deprivation.”

  “That sucks,” Katie says. She gives us three seconds of silent mourning for all of Lin’s lost sleep before her pep returns. “But anyway...”

  Katie places her fork down next to her half-eaten salad and looks up at Lin and me with the most innocent of innocent expressions.

  “No,” Lin says. She finishes chewing the bite of burger in her mouth and repeats the word even more emphatically: “No.”

  “You don’t even know what I was going to say!” Katie says.

  “You only make that face when you’re about to ask us to do something you know we don’t want to do,” I say. “Like every time you tried to get me to ditch math class with you in freshman year. Or when you tried to convince Lin to host afterprom at her house last year just so we could crash it. Or when—”

  “I get it,” Katie says smugly. “I’m the interesting friend.”

  “Not,” I say, “what I meant.”

  “Look,” Katie says. “Lin, I know that you have to spend, like, eight million more hours filling out your college applications with every single award you’ve won since the fifth grade, and that you, Stella, are irrationally prejudiced against all things that any normal human being might consider to be fun. Buuuuuut Ashley Kurtzmann is having a back-to-school party this weekend and it’s supposed to be—”

  But we never find out what Ashley Kurtzmann’s back-to-school party this weekend is supposed to be, because both Lin and I have groaned at the exact same time.

  “The last time we went to one of Ashley’s parties,” Lin says, “you ended up miserable because Casey Bishop decided to make out with Victoria Lee instead of you.”

  “Um, have you seen Casey Bishop?” Katie says.

  “Um, you had a boyfriend?” Lin says.

  “Oh, yeah,” Katie says. She bites her lip. “Well, look how that turned out. The point is, I refuse to let you spend your entire senior year sitting in front of a computer screen writing sixteen different drafts of your common app essay when everyone knows Harvard is just going to take one look at your GPA and let you in, anyway.”

  “That’s really not how college admissions works,” Lin says, but it’s no use.

  “And Stella! After everything that happened last year, don’t you think that you deserve to have a little fun?”

  “Well—well, yes,” I say, “but—”

  “All you do now is listen to mopey acoustic music and go on long runs and listen to more mopey acoustic music and go on even longer runs and listen to even more mopey acoustic music while you’re running. What happened to the Stella I used to know? The one who dressed up as Jekyll to my Hyde for Halloween? The one who egged Lucy Sherman’s house with me after she made fun of my lunchbox?”

  “That was in the fifth grade,” I say, only to be cut off by Katie’s increasingly hysterical implorations.

  “I know this can be the hardest thing in the world to believe sometimes,” she says, her sincerity now starting to reach levels of absurdity, “but you deserve to have some fun. You deserve to go to a party. You deserve happiness.”

  “Katie,” I say. “Have you ever considered that Ashley’s parties...aren’t...really... fun?”

  “How would you know?” Katie says. “You’ve literally gone to one in the last year! Come on, Stella, give it a shot.”

  “My parents—”

  “Oh, give me a break, Stella. Your parents will be delighted that you’ve taken an interest in socializing, and you know it. You know what your mom told my mom at the book club meeting at my house last month? That she’s starting to think they were too strict on you growing up and now you’re afraid of talking to your peers.”

  I open my mouth to retort, and then close it again in disbelief. “They talked about me?”

  Katie nods solemnly.

  “At book club?”

  I can hear Lin suppressing her laughter next to me.

  “I’m moving out of the suburbs,” I declare.

  “So you’ll come?” Katie says. The warning bell—signaling the start of fifth period in six minutes—rings, and I look sadly at my barely touched, barely edible excuse for a meal.

  I sigh. “Fine. I will go to Ashley Kurtzmann’s party,” I start. And then, over the sound of Katie’s squeal of delight: “If—if Lin also comes.”

  Katie turns to Lin.

  “Fine,” Lin sighs. “But you’re going to have to find someone else to drive us, Katie. There’s no way I’ll get through one of those parties sober.”

  “Well, obviously,” Katie says. “No one could get through one of Ashley’s parties sober.”

  7.

  Lin and I have study hall together in the library last period on Wednesdays and Fridays. This is great for my sanity, because Lin is exactly the kind of sympathetic-but-no-bullshit friend that I need after a long day of barely managing to slog through classes, but terrible for my productivity, because we inevitably end up talking the whole time.

  The two of us take a table in the center of the study lounge—one of the good ones, with the plushy chairs instead of the plastic wheeled ones. I watch as Lin slides her laptop out of her backpack, closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Some of her hair flutters in front of her face, then flutters upward when she sighs.

  “Sorry,” Lin says. “I know I haven’t been very fun lately. Katie’s probably on the verge of staging an intervention for my social life.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Lin,” I say. “If Katie was about to start throwing interventions for that sort of thing, I’m sure I’d be first on the list.”

  “Their English program is just so good, you know? And the arts scene in Providence... And it’s close to home but not too close to home, you know, so my parents can’t make me come home every other weekend. Anyway, sorry to make you listen to all this rambling for like the eightieth time. I know you know how much I love Brown. I mean, everyone knows how much I love Brown. I should spend less time talking about how much I love Brown and more time working on my application, which is due in—”

  I watch her do the math in her head.

  “Six weeks. Oh, God.”

  “I thought people didn’t have to submit their applications until the winter,” I say.

  “I’m applying early so I can find out early,” Lin says. “This way I’ll know by the middle of December if all of my dreams have been crushed or not.”

  “You’re being dramatic,” I say. I make a mental note to buy some chocolate at the end of November, just in case.

  “This, from the girl who once said she had to drop out of Bridgemont because ‘douchebag might be contagious.’”

  “Hey.”

  Lin and I both look up at the guy standing next to our table, then look at each other in confusion, then look back. Standing before us is Yago Evans, Bridgemont’s resident weed dealer, looking lankier, blonder and even more stoned than I remember him being last year. Next to him is the Kevin from my philosophy class yesterday, shifting uncomfortably. It clearly wasn’t his idea to strike up a conversation.

  “Me and Kevin are gonna take advantage of senior privileges and get out of here. We’re going to Dr. D.’s. And you’re the only other senior in this study hall, so...you wanna come?”

  Lin looks too confused to reply. I’m fairly sure that neither of us has never ever talked to Yago before in our lives. In fact, I’m shocked that Yago even knows who Lin and I are. Thankfully, Lin manages to gather herself and say: “I think I’m going to stay here and hang with Stella. I was gonna give her a ride home after school, anyway, so it doesn’t really make sense to leave. Thanks for the offer, though, really.”

  Yago shrugs. “No worries, dude. Maybe next time.”

  I watch until they’re both out of the library before turning back to Lin. “That was...weird,” I say.

&
nbsp; Lin looks thoughtful. “You know, I had AP Lit with Yago last year and he was actually pretty smart. Which just makes it so much weirder that he—you know.”

  She mimes taking a hit from a bong, which is hilarious.

  “Well, anyway,” Lin says. “We should do some work.”

  “I guess,” I say. Lin puts her headphones in and starts typing on her laptop, and I spend the rest of study hall flipping through our first philosophy reading of the semester and wondering what kind of parent would name their child Yago.

  8.

  After school on Thursday, Lin takes a fifteen-minute detour into Hartford proper on her way home so she can drop me off at LiveWell Connecticut Counseling in time for my 4:00 p.m. appointment.

  LiveWell is housed in one of the tall, concrete buildings in downtown Hartford that all look pretty much the same. Karen’s office is on the seventeenth floor, where you can see almost the entire city and lines of cars stuck in traffic on the highway. There’s a desk in the back of the office with half a dozen framed pictures—Karen and her husband on her wedding day, some school photos of her kids. Behind the desk is a bulletin board where she pins a new, vaguely inspirational quote every couple of weeks. It currently reads:

  What Are You Grateful For Today?

  “So,” Karen says, after I’ve poured myself a cup of water and sunk into her couch. “How are we feeling today?”

  Karen asks me some variation of this question every week, and for some reason she always uses the pronoun “we” instead of “you,” as if her feelings and my feelings are fundamentally bound together by some weird therapist-patient emotional link.

  “I’m all right,” I say. Which is also pretty much a variation of the answer I give every week.

  “Ten milligrams of the fluoxetine still working well for you?” Karen asks.

  “Hasn’t made me suicidal yet!” I say. I flash her a thumbs-up.

  Karen does not find my joke amusing.

  “I understand that you started school this week.”

  “I did indeed,” I say, taking a long gulp of water. The worst thing about therapy is that I have this habit of lifting the cup to my mouth and drinking reflexively every couple of minutes, just to have something to do with my hands. I can never even tell that I’m doing it until I realize how urgently I have to pee thirty minutes into my eighty-minute session.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Karen says. “And how has that transition been?”

  “Fine,” I say. “Just trying to pass my classes. Stay out of the way of all the imbeciles at Bridgemont—which is, you know, everyone. Not have another meltdown. Normal junior year goals, you know.”

  “Mmm. How would you compare yourself emotionally now versus last spring?”

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  Karen looks at me.

  “Fine-ish,” I amend.

  Karen raises an eyebrow.

  “Fine-er. More fine.”

  Karen taps the side of her pen against her notebook thoughtfully.

  “What do you want me to say? I don’t feel good, but I do feel better. Less...”

  I waggle my finger around my ears. “Less crazy thoughts.”

  “No suicidal ideation?” Karen asks.

  “No,” I answer.

  “No feelings of self-loathing?”

  “Not like last year,” I say.

  I don’t know how to explain it. It’s like...it’s like there’s another me—this crazy, unpredictable, terrifying version of the real me—locked in an iron box deep inside my brain. And I know that it’s really the same person, and that everything I felt last semester was as real to me then as how unreal it is to me now. But it just doesn’t feel that way. It doesn’t feel like I could ever be that off the rails again, even though I’m sure that’s how I felt before everything started going to shit the first time around.

  “Is there any way I could just be... I dunno, like, cured?” I ask. I know it’s a stupid, naive question, but I can’t keep the note of hopefulness from filtering in my voice.

  “Mental health isn’t something that comes down to being cured,” Karen says. “What’s more likely is that, last semester, many separate factors came together to put you in a bad place emotionally. Perhaps something in the nights before your history exam triggered you or pushed you over the edge. You’re still experiencing symptoms of depression now, but you’re more stable, so you’re having difficulty relating to how you felt then. But that doesn’t mean,” Karen adds, “that the same thing can’t happen again.”

  “Great,” I say. “So I’m a ticking time bomb, is what you’re telling me.”

  “Of course not,” Karen says. “However, this is why I’d like to focus on developing healthy coping mechanisms. So that in case the stress builds over the course of the school year or things aren’t going according to plan or something does trigger you again, or in moments when you might feel the way you did last semester again—when you might feel less stable, less invincible, less healthy—you know what to do.”

  “But I spent my entire summer developing healthy coping mechanisms,” I say. “Breathing, running, music—good. Eating, screaming, retreating into isolation—bad. What more is there to develop?”

  “Emotional health is like a muscle,” Karen says, and then launches into a long speech about how coping mechanisms need to be practiced. I find myself zoning out, thinking about latest class with Mulland, about Kiekegaard and the nature of despair, and about Kevin, who continues to make comments in class that suggest that he’s already taken the class once or twice or five hundred times and has gotten a bit too familiar with nineteenth century philosophers and all their existential despair.

  “...which reminds me, Stella, I wanted to ask you if you’ve discussed these things more openly with your parents?”

  The long silence after Karen’s question snaps me out of my reverie. “Um,” I say.

  She raises an eyebrow.

  “Not...really.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Karen says. She pauses. Then, full speed ahead: “You know, Stella, I really think a family session—”

  “Ugh, again?” I say, before Karen finishes the sentence. It sounds petulant, but Karen has been trying to get me to agree to a family session for the past six months. She seems to be under the impression that it will help my parents and myself understand each other better, which sounds well and great and all, except for the part where having to sit in this stuffy office for an hour and a half talking about my feelings with both of my parents and Karen mediating seems like a particularly cruel, twenty-first-century version of purgatory.

  “From what you’ve told me, it does not seem as if you and your parents have an emotionally close relationship,” Karen says.

  “Well, yeah,” I say. “We don’t.”

  “Your parents are your most direct support network,” Karen says. “Not to mention that your relationship with your own feelings is shaped by their relationship with you.”

  “My mom gets even more upset than I do when I tell her that I’m the slightest bit sad, even if it’s over something trivial and ridiculous that I know will blow over in a few days. Plus, she’s already so worried about me that if I told her something was wrong, she’d never leave my side ever again! And my dad—well, I don’t know if I’ve ever even seen my dad have feelings. Do people that smart have emotions?”

  “But those are issues that you should discuss together,” Karen says. “Your mother’s concern may be rooted in how little information she has to go on. And your father—”

  “I’m just not interested, okay?” I say, throwing my hands up. “I know that it might be better in the long run, but I just—I really—it would just be so uncomfortable talking about these kinds of things with them. Like, what am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, hey, Mom and Dad, sorry that I sometimes hate myself!’ I can’t even imagine it. Can we talk about something els
e, please?”

  “All right,” Karen says. “It’s your decision.” But the look on her face says that I haven’t heard the last of this, not by a long shot.

  9. Why I Run

  Here’s a funny story for you:

  When I first tried out for the Bridgemont cross-country team, my parents were in the middle of one of their countless, endless fights. My dad had just gotten promoted the year before, which meant that he was working overtime almost every day of the week, which meant that my mom quit her job to spend more time at home. The thing is, though, that I don’t think my mom actually wanted to quit her job. I think it was one of those things that she did because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time, and then by the time she realized that she actually really missed her job—well, it seemed like it was too late to go back.

  The point is, by midway through September, my mom was perpetually miserable and resentful and angry; and every night when my dad got home they’d have these huge blowout arguments about how late he was working and whose responsibility it should have been to pick me up after school in which they said the exact same things, over and over again, night after night, just in angrier and angrier voices. So I thought to myself, well, Bridgemont sports teams have practices four times a week, for two hours every day, which comes out to eight hours a week that I don’t have to be at home. Volleyball, soccer and tennis were all out, because an incident in middle school when a poorly aimed half-court shot landed squarely on my unsuspecting head left me with a crippling fear of all sports involving balls. Which is—well—almost every single sport. But running? All I needed to run was a pair of sneakers (old Nikes that I’d had for four years and used maybe three times) and a direction to run in (away from my parents) and I was set to go.

  And that’s how I ended up on the cross-country team.

  The other funny thing is that I was terrible. I had the third-worst mile time of everyone who tried out, and I didn’t even manage to finish the wind sprints before walking off the track, exhausted and dehydrated and depressed. But Bridgemont has a team for all the freshmen who spent their entire middle-school years watching YouTube videos of cats all day instead of training, and—voilà!—there I was, on the freshman cross-country team.