More Happy Than Not (7 page)

“Sorry to hear that.” Thomas sits on the ground and stares at some empty bottles. Nothing fascinating there, but I'm guessing it's less awkward than looking me in the eye. “I don't get why you thought Genevieve would break up with you.”

“There's more to it,” I say. My eyes wander to the curved scar on my wrist.

“Tell me who you are,” Thomas says.

“What?”

“Tell me who you are: stop hiding. I'm not going to sell your secrets, Stretch.”

“Didn't you just sell out
your
friends yesterday to win over
my
friends?”

“They're not my friends,” Thomas says.

I sit down across from him. Before I can change my mind, I hold my arm out so he can see the smiling scar, two words that don't fit together. From his angle it'll look more like a frown, but he shifts next to me, leans over, and wraps his hand around my arm. He pulls my wrist closer to his face, inspecting it.

“No homo,” he says, looking up at me. “It's weird how it looks like a smile. A happy face without eyes.”

“Yeah. That's what I always thought, too.”

He nods.

“I kept blaming myself for not being a good enough son, and my mom swore he killed himself because he was unhappy, and it just got me thinking I might be happier dead, too
. . .
” I trace a nail over the scar, left to right, right to left. “So I did this as a cry for help, I guess, because I didn't like the bad place I was in.”

Thomas traces the scar too and pokes my wrist twice. His fingers are dirty from the yo-yo and other crap on the roof. But now I see; he's added eyes with two dark fingerprints above the scar. “I'm glad you didn't do it, Stretch. Would've been a waste.”

He wants me to continue existing. I want that too, now.

I pull my arm away and fold my hands on my lap. “Your turn: tell me who you are.” His eyebrows meet in the middle, like he's considering the possibilities of who he might be. When he doesn't say anything, I ask, “Childish question, but what do you want to be when you grow up?”

“I think a film director,” Thomas quickly answers. “Though you're probably catching on that I don't have a whole lot of direction in life.”

“I wouldn't say that, but I wouldn't
not
say it either. Why a film director?”

“Been interested in it since I saw
Jurassic Park
and
Jaws
as a kid. I bow down before Spielberg, whose directing made dinosaurs and sharks even more terrifying.”

“I've never seen
Jaws
.”

Thomas's eyes widen like I just spoke in Elvish. “I would gouge out my eyes and give them to you if it meant you could see the magic that is
Jaws
. Spielberg does this awesome thing at the end where—actually, I won't spoil it for you. You'll have to come over and watch it sometime.”

A window slams shut behind us.

We both freak out for a second and find Brendan and Baby Freddy standing there. I jump to my feet like someone just caught me with my pants down doing something with someone I really shouldn't be doing anything with. “Uh. Have you guys been caught yet?”

“Nah,” Baby Freddy says. “What are you doing?”

“Catching our breath,” I lie while Thomas simultaneously says, “Talking.”

Brendan is looking at us funny, but then his eyes widen. I turn to see Nolan coming toward us while Fat-Dave is struggling to come through the window. We run back to the window on the other side. Thomas is beside me one second, down on the ground the next. I have a tenth of a second to decide to keep going or to help him out. I stop to see if he's okay.

Nolan grapples me. “Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three.”

I'm caught but don't really care. I crouch beside Thomas where he's massaging his knee. “You good?”

He nods, whistling in and out, and then it hits me that he could push me down and make a run for it and leave me chasing after him the rest of the game. Fuck that. I grapple him. “Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three. Manhunt one, two, three.”

We all go back downstairs to search for Me-Crazy before the game ends. I pair with Thomas while Brendan and the others fan out in the garage. We run up to the balcony—Thomas limping behind a bit—and look for Me-Crazy in empty porches, behind barbecue grills, and under deflated pools.

“So I know a little about you and you know a little about me,” he says, wincing as he tries to keep up. “Tell me Genevieve's story.”

“I'll destroy you if you make a move on my girl.”

“Don't worry about that, Stretch.”

“Genevieve is
. . .
She is just the fucking greatest. She gets obsessive when she discovers new artists and is always sending me rambling emails about her favorites and why they should be more famous. She stays up late for daylight savings time so she can see the hours change on the clock. Oh, and she used to rely on her horoscope when she was younger and took it personally whenever it duped her.” I look up at the sky and it's in that weird blue-and-pink phase without any stars. “She wants to go to the park to look at stars tomorrow, but I want to top that.”

“Planetarium?”

“Ruled it out already. I'm scared she'll want to grab lunch or something like that and I can't afford it.”

Thomas knocks over a shovel leaning against a wall in one of the porches and it clatters loudly. He quickly hops out and hides against the wall before the neighbors can come and curse him out. I crawl over to him and we wait it out a bit before running back down the stairs. “You have anything planned so far?” he asks, once we're safe.

“My mom's coworker gave me a two-for-one coupon for a pottery session. So in the morning we'll make something cool together, but I just need a good finish.” Something tells me sex in a crappy motel room wouldn't count as a real gift unless you're a complete arrogant bastard in a high school prom movie. “Any ideas?”

“Show her stars like she wants,” Thomas says. “I know where to get you some.”

He tells me his plan and it's so fucking boss.

6

HER HAPPY BIRTHDAY

I
like waking up from nightmares.

Sure, the nightmare itself is a mind fuck, but knowing I'm okay? That's what I like. The nightmare I've just woken up from started off as a dream.

In it, I was a kid, maybe eight or nine. I was at Jones Beach with Dad, just the two of us. We were throwing a football back and forth. I missed one catch and chased down the ball, but when I turned around Dad was gone. The sand around me exploded like land mines and riding on a wave of red water was my dad's corpse, and I woke up right after it splashed on me and took me under.

“Good morning,” Mom says.

She's taking Dad's college basketball trophies off the window ledge, throwing them into a box stuffed with his old work shirts.

I jump out of bed. “What are you doing?”

“Turning our home back into a home.” She bends over and picks up another box, packed with God knows what. “I'm done watching people lose their lives at the hospital only to come back to this graveyard.”

That's why she's home; another patient lost to drug overdoses, abuse, who knows what today.

And I get what she means. I can see a drawing forming in my head now of what it would be like if we could set our home on fire: warped windows, concaved walls, flames eating everything we didn't want, and then all of us leaving our footprints in the ashes as memories melt and disperse around us. Except I would never draw myself surrounded by black smoke, because I'm not ready to watch it all burn away.

“Why do we have to do this now?”

Eric comes out of her bedroom, pulling himself away from the
Stars Wars
marathon he planned for himself on his day off. He actually helps Mom out with the boxes. This is the same guy who won't wash a single dish or fold his own shirts.

“My son, it's been four months already. What use do we have keeping empty cigarette cartons and unopened mail? It's too much. I don't like his ghost around me.”

“But he was your husband,” I say. “And our dad.”

“My husband used to bring me ginger ale when I was sick. Your father played with you beautiful boys throughout your childhood. But we didn't lose that man—he took himself away from us.” Mom chokes on her words and cries as she admits, “Part of me wishes I never knew him.” I think back to the Leteo pamphlets on her bed.

“Maybe there's something more we should've been doing to keep him happy,” I whisper. “You said so yourself a few days ago.”

Eric scoffs. “That's zombie talk. He's gone, okay? Just shut it and leave her alone.”

There's a hole inside me too, and questions in my head I can't just ignore. I miss the man my mom misses, who laughed when my friends and I were in his car pretending it was a spaceship being chased by alien invaders; who watched cartoons with me whenever I had a nightmare; who made me feel safe when he put me back in bed so he could leave for his night shift at the post office. I don't like thinking about the man he was right before we lost him.

Mom puts down a box. I think I've won, but instead she holds my hand and sobs some more while tracing the raised smile on my wrist. “We're scarred enough, okay?”

Eric moves some more boxes out into the hallway, where the next stop is the incinerator. I'm completely motionless. Soon all the boxes are gone.

Thomas meets me in
front of his building, and we ride the elevator straight up to the rooftop. I ask him if the alarm above the doorway is going to go crazy, but he says it's been busted for the past couple of years, since some big New Year's party. He rarely uses this entrance anyway. He prefers the fire escape because of the view and exercise, but we're on limited time before I have to meet up with Genevieve. The sun is sinking behind the cityscape, and I can already feel the brutal heat dying down.

“
. . .
so then Eric tells me I'm speaking in zombie talk because I don't think death is the end of a person,” I say, catching him up on what went down earlier. I spot an orange cord trailing across the ground and follow it to the edge of the roof. “Well, when I say it like that I feel like I should be biting into a brain.”

“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.”