Imagine Us Happy Page 5

  For obvious reasons, I’ve been wary of alcohol since.

  But Ashley’s party is surprisingly fun—at least, compared to last year’s debacle. Yeah, it reeks of weed, and the song “Don’t Stop Believin’” has been played four times by 10:30 p.m., but chilling in her kitchen getting buzzed off beer while talking with Lin is not actually that far from my ideal Saturday night. Eventually, the music has been blaring so insistently and for so long that it almost fades into the background, damage to my eardrums be damned.

  It almost feels like I’m having a good time, right up until the point where I walk to the bathroom and am greeted by the unmistakable sound of someone retching on the other side. I knock. No response. Knock again. More puking noises. I wait two, three, five minutes. “Are you okay?” I call, when there’s a temporary pause in the vomiting.

  “I’m fine!” a male voice calls back weakly.

  “Oh, great,” I say. “Hey, do you mind if I just—”

  But the rest of my words are drowned out as whoever is inside the bathroom dissolves into another round of puking.

  “Kinda seems like a lost cause, if you ask me,” a voice behind me drawls.

  I spin around.

  “Hi, Stella,” Kevin Miller says. He has a beer in one hand and the other in his pocket. “How’s your evening going?”

  For a second, I’m not sure how to respond. Kevin is looking at me like the two of us are friends and it’s totally normal for us to be making small talk at Ashley Kurtzmann’s house at midnight on a Friday while the sound of the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” drifts down the hallway. Then I remember that I’m at a party, and that this is what people do at parties, and that if Katie were here, she’d have pinched me in the back already to try and get me to say something half-normal, like: “It’s going great, thanks—how’s yours?” or “I’m so glad I came—have you seen Jennie’s outfit?”

  “I need to get this idiot out of the bathroom before I explode,” I say instead.

  Which I suppose is why I don’t get invited to more parties.

  “Well, as I was saying, he kind of seems like a lost cause,” Kevin says, looking remarkably unperturbed by my disastrous attempt to impersonate half-normal.

  There’s some more retching noises that probably prove his point.

  “But there’s another bathroom upstairs, second door on the left. I had to find it earlier because—well...”

  I’m already making my way toward the stairs.

  “You’re very welcome!” Kevin calls out from behind me. I can hear the smile in his voice.

  * * *

  When I get back downstairs from the bathroom, Kevin is sitting at the chairs where Lin and I had been before I left. I wonder if he’s sitting there because he knew that that’s where I was, or if it’s just a coincidence. Probably just a coincidence, I decide. Or maybe he saw Lin sitting there and recognized her from a class that they took together at some point.

  But Lin isn’t there anymore, I realize. Because Lin has joined the ring of smokers crowded around the table.

  “Is this a prank? Tell me this is a prank,” I say, walking up to her. “Have you ever even smoked before?”

  Lin shrugs. From the hazy, lopsided smile on her face, I’m guessing the weed is having an effect. “Nah,” she says. “But you were gone for, like, twenty minutes, and I thought, hey, first time for everything, right? Plus, Katie is always telling me to relax.” She takes the pipe from the girl next to her, breathes in deeply and offers it to me.

  “And I feel,” she says, “rela-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-axed.”

  Then she erupts into coughs.

  “No, thanks,” I say, while Lin takes a long drink from her beer to smother her coughing. She shrugs again, passes it to the next person. “I’m gonna go...back over there,” I say. “Because no offense, but you all smell like crap.”

  Lin smiles demurely. “No offense taken, Stella.”

  “Right. Um, find me when you wanna head out? Are Katie and Bobby still here?”

  Lin waves in the general direction of the living room, which is now playing “Iris” by the Goo Goo Dolls. I pray that the switch from brainless upbeat pop music to brainless downbeat pop music means that the party’s nearing its end. “I’ll find you,” Lin says. Then she turns around and starts talking to the girl next to her, picking up a conversation that has apparently been going on for some time about whether Hemingway or Fitzgerald did more to capture the existential ennui of the Lost Generation.

  I walk back to the Chairs of Social Irrelevance, where Kevin is now sitting.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Hi,” he says. He does that thing again, where he smiles at me like we’re old friends, and I immediately run out of things to say.

  “Surprised you’re here without Yago,” I say. “Uh, not that you can’t go anywhere without Yago and vice versa, just that I’m surprised that you’re here and Yago isn’t. It seems more of his scene, that’s all I’m saying. Also, what kind of name is Yago?”

  I clamp my mouth shut before I can ramble on any further.

  “That’s not his real name,” Kevin says, looking bemused.

  “Must be pretty bad if he chooses to go by Yago instead,” I say.

  Kevin laughs. “Must be,” he agrees. He looks slightly mischievous, and I take a drink to avoid thinking about that look any longer than I need to.

  “And also,” Kevin continues, “it is more of his scene. But you know, I haven’t been at Bridgemont for a year and thought, What better way to jump back in than one of Ashley’s parties? Now, of course, I realize that that was totally idiotic, and that spending two hours of my night whacking myself in the head with a hammer would be a more efficient way of shedding unwanted brain cells.”

  So that’s why he’s so unfamiliar, I realize. He was gone all last year.

  “What’d you do last year?” I ask.

  Kevin takes a drink. “Oh, I was around,” he says after a long pause. He waves his hand in the air.

  “Um,” I say.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kevin says. “What are you doing here? You don’t look drunk and you won’t get high and you’re sitting here all alone, so—what’s the draw?”

  “My friend Katie dragged me here,” I admit. “In the interest of saving my social life. But I’m pretty sure it was mostly so she had an excuse to make out with her biology lab partner for a few hours.”

  “Nothing sexier than dead frogs,” Kevin says. He takes another drink. The corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles.

  “My thoughts exactly. Plus, if he’s anything like his best friend Markus, he’s a total jerk. Markus—he—he made the most inappropriate comment about Katie’s boobs on the way over, as if he wasn’t talking to two of her best friends? It was—gross.”

  “A high school boy obsessed with boobs,” Kevin says. “That’s something new.”

  “Just because something is predictable doesn’t mean it can’t also be disgusting,” I say. “Every year during the open houses, Holmquist goes on and on and on about how much we value equality and how we don’t tolerate sexist behavior and how we even offer a class on feminism and yada yada yada. But clearly—”

  “No one takes Modern Feminism except people who are already feminists,” Kevin says.

  I glare at him. For his tone of voice—which is annoyingly similar to mine when I know that I’m right about something—and for interrupting me right as I was about to get into a really good down-with-the-system rant. “Just because you’ve never been catcalled or—or had people think you can’t do something because you’re a girl, or—”

  “Hey,” Kevin says. He puts a hand on my arm to calm me down, and for some reason my desire to slap it away is met head-on by an equal desire to grab it and pull him close to me. I pull back, alarmed by the strength of my own reaction. It’s the alcohol, I tell myself,
even though I’ve only had two beers.

  “Just because I stated a fact doesn’t mean I think it’s right,” Kevin says, his hand falling back to his side. If he’s noticed my micro-panic-attack, he doesn’t say anything. “I think it would be great if everyone understood feminism. But let’s be realistic for a minute here. How many dudes were in your class?”

  “Four,” I say.

  “Out of?”

  “Twenty-five,” I admit.

  “And how many of them were gay?” he asks.

  I pause. “I plead the fifth.”

  Kevin laughs, and I can’t help but drink in the sound of it, his movements, the way he smiles. When was the last time I laughed like that?

  “That’s what I thought,” Kevin says. “But hey, there’s hope yet. There’s, like, ten guys in our class and we’re reading Beauvoir. Hard not to be a feminist after reading Beauvoir. Genius, that woman.”

  “Kevin,” I say very seriously. “Don’t take this the wrong way. But...why are you in this philosophy class? You clearly—like, you understood Kierkegaard and you’ve already read Beauvoir. What’s the point?”

  “Here’s the thing about philosophy,” Kevin says. “You know in math, say, you’re learning calculus, right? You’re learning how to do derivatives so you can calculate the maximum volume of some storage thing that fills at a rate of blah, blah, whatever. Eventually, you figure it out. You know how to do a derivative, and that’s it. You move on to the next thing—integrals, maybe—and then you learn that thing, too, and then the next thing, and so on and so forth until you’ve finished the school year or gone insane. Whatever.

  “Or, like, biology. Mitosis is the process through which cells replicate. There are twelve organ systems in the body. Blah, blah, blah. You read those chapters in the textbook, they tell you the information that you’re supposed to know, then you take a test on it, you forget all about it and you move on to memorizing the next set of facts.

  “But philosophy... Philosophy isn’t like that,” Kevin says. He’s starting to sound like Lin explaining her feelings about the closing scene of Of Mice and Men or Katie talking about MAC’s newest eye shadow palette. He is so, so into this, I realize, and something about the feverishness with which he talks makes it hard for me not to get into it, too; makes it hard to remember that ten feet away there’s a pipe being passed around, and twenty feet away Katy Perry is blasting through the speakers, and fifty feet away the couple upstairs is probably naked and passed out by now.

  “You’re never done with an idea in philosophy,” Kevin says. “You never close a text or a chapter or even a sentence for good. Instead, you read Camus, and you read Sartre, and you read Kierkegaard, and you try to find your way through that glorious, glorious mess, and eventually maybe you come through the other side with your own conclusions about the human condition, about meaning, about where we find the will to live.

  “Or maybe—maybe, you know, you don’t. Maybe you get through Being and Nothingness and you’re like, damn, this Sartre guy is full of shit. Well, that’s fine, too. Maybe you’re just not in a part of your life when Sartre’s faithless skepticism rings true to you. Maybe you’ll die thinking that Being and Nothingness is the worst excuse for a philosophical magnum opus ever written.

  “But the magic of it is—even if that happens, even if that’s how you feel this time around, you never know when it’ll make sense. You never know when you’re going to pick up that book again and look up at the world around you and the life you’ve lived and realize that it all clicks into place, it all makes sense, and you understand yourself better for it.”

  Kevin finishes talking. Finishes his beer. I blink a few times as the smokers, the music, Ashley Kurtzmann’s house—as everything surrounding us fades back into my consciousness. The party is ending, I realize. The music’s been turned off; everyone’s grabbing their coats or trying to find their purses or lamenting their newly cracked phone screens. Lin and Katie will be here soon: Katie, drunk and giggly from her night with Bobby; Lin, somehow even smarter when she’s high, because the world is unfair like that.

  “You give that speech to everyone you meet at parties?” I ask.

  “Just to the smart ones,” Kevin responds, not a beat missed, that half smile on his face, and then it’s silent again and I’m at a loss. Me. Stella Canavas. I literally don’t know what to say.

  It’s not that there’s nothing I could say, because that—as my parents often remind me—might signify impending apocalypse. I could tell Kevin that it was a beautiful speech, almost as great as one of Mulland’s, maybe even better because I actually understood it. I could tell Kevin that there’s something charming about the way he talks, about his words, about his obvious, unabashed love of something other than scoring free beer, or who won Bridgemont’s last football game, or, God forbid, boobs. I could even tell him that there’s a part of me that wants nothing more than to sit here and listen to him talk like this for the rest of the night, stringing together sentences that I want desperately to hear and to understand and to believe in. But the truth is that I can’t tell him any of those things, not really, not now, and so instead I pick up my purse and say: “I have to go find Katie before she leaves—I’ll see you on Monday?”

  “Sure,” Kevin says. “I’ll see you, Stella—Mulland’s class. When our intellectual journey continues.”

  He contorts his face into a gravely serious expression and drops his voice so that he sounds like Mulland at the beginning of class, and I make a noise that is suspiciously close to but definitely not a giggle.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, instead of what I could tell him, which is that I’m looking forward to it—to seeing him again, to talking about Sartre and Camus and the human condition, of all things. These are things that I will tell Kevin later, when his laugh has become familiar and comforting; when that speech has become engrained in my mind so deeply that I could recite it to you backward and forward; when I’ve come to love the way he loves philosophy as much as he loves the subject itself. But right now we’re just two strangers who happened to be sitting at the same place at the same time at a party neither of us really wanted to be at. And it’s not the time for that, not yet.

  48.

  It’s midway through February, and there’s a snowstorm howling outside my bedroom window. Six inches of snow overnight, said the meteorologist. Wind speeds topping forty miles per hour. Trees toppling over like Lego towers.

  But all I can hear is the shouting.

  This hasn’t happened in a while. Then again, my dad hasn’t been home in a while, either.

  The digital clock on my nightstand reads 2:04 a.m. in red, spidery letters. They called the snow day six hours ago.

  What do you want from me, Anne? You want me to go to work, bill sixty hours a week so I can provide for this household, track all of Stella’s academics, run all the errands, fix the car, save the world while I’m at it?

  Next to the clock is a big stuffed animal bear that I got as a gift from my grandparents for my third birthday. His name is written on a button stitched to his chest in my grandma’s cursive: Grizzly.

  I want you to BE PRESENT in this household. INVOLVED. As a FATHER. As a HUSBAND.

  A stupid name for a bear, I know, but what more can you expect from a three-year-old?

  You haven’t exactly made this a welcoming house to be involved in.

  The shelf above my writing desk has five framed photographs on it. The first: me and my parents at the San Francisco Zoo when I was four. The second: me and my grandparents and cousins at my oldest aunt’s wedding when I was six. A classic Canavas family photo in which no one, no one, is looking at the camera. The third: me walking down the aisle, an explosion of pink-white tulle, as a flower girl at that same wedding.

  So you just—you just leave?

  The fourth: me, Katie and our moms at the beach the summer after fifth grade. The fif
th: me, Katie and Lin smiling together, all braces and pimples and unnecessary hairspray, at the fall dance in freshman year of high school. I should just rip the Band-Aid off and take that picture down, because things between Lin and me are never going to be like they were in that photograph ever again, no matter how many hours I spend staring at it. But the three of us look so happy, and I know Lin has the same photograph hanging in her room, and every time Katie comes over she says that Lin hasn’t taken hers down yet, either. So the photograph stays.

  I haven’t left. I’m here, aren’t I?

  You haven’t been here in weeks, Thomas!

  I was here five days ago.

  You were here five days ago to pack a new bag!

  The sixth photograph is new. It’s a photo that Katie took of me and Kevin while we were trying to build a snowman in my backyard over winter break. It’s a horribly unflattering picture actually—we’re both wrapped in so many layers that we look like giant cotton puffs, and neither of us knows that Katie’s taking a picture. We’re in the middle of an argument about whether or not our snowman’s middle is too big for its bottom, but our faces are exaggerated, almost comically set, as if the outcome of our argument will determine the fate of the known universe. Kevin, mid-eye-roll, hands thrown up in the air in fake surrender; me, mouth half-open in some long-forgotten retort.

  Earlier this year, after one of my many fights with Kevin, I was sitting at my desk writing and deleting text message after text message, trying to come up with something to say that would fix things between the two of us this time around. Desperate and nearly delirious from crying, I texted Kevin a copy of the photograph that Katie took and said:

  Look how crazy we look right here. How comical in our anger. This is what this fight will look like in hindsight, too, you know. We’re going to laugh about this one, too.

  And, miracle of all miracles, it worked. Kevin came over and we spent the afternoon reliving that day, that argument, that moment; laughing together at our expressions; trying (and failing) to re-create them. Periods of calm never last very long between Kevin and me—that one certainly didn’t—but in that moment, I felt like I had figured it all out. This photograph, I thought, is going to make everything okay.