More Happy Than Not

Thomas’s desk chair creaks—the one where he sat last night to show off his “mad origami skills.” (Except when he tried to make a seashell it just looked like crumpled paper.) I sit up and rub my eyes. I can tell it’s early because of the slant of the sunlight through the windows. I can’t believe he’s already awake, hunched over, writing something while quietly tapping his foot; it’s like he’s taking a final exam and doesn’t want me copying off of his test.

“Yo. What are you doing?”

“Journaling.”

“You journal a lot?”

“Pretty much every morning since seventh grade,” Thomas says. “I’m almost done. How’d you sleep? Are my sheets still dry?”

“Fuck you.” My back does hurt a bit, but not so much that I can’t get used to it.

“I left a new toothbrush and towel out for you in the bathroom if you want to wash up before breakfast.” His eyes are still on the page.

“You’re cooking breakfast?”

“Yeah right. I only know how to make toast and Pop-Tarts. We’ll figure something out.” Thomas smiles and returns to journaling.

I have to wait a second before I throw off the covers because of that thing that happens to guys when they first wake up. But he isn’t even looking at me. I hurry out of his room and can only assume his mother’s gone off to work already by the way he’s freely letting me walk around the place. I find the bathroom and take a piss while looking around the shelves piled with clean and fluffy towels. At home, we share the same batch, raggedy and torn, washed at best twice a month. When I’m done brushing, I go back to Thomas’s room, and he’s already gone.

I follow the sound of clattering utensils into the kitchen, stopping once to check out all the photos on the wall. There’s Thomas as a kid playing baseball—the same crazy eyebrows. The kitchen is twice the size of mine. There are red pots and pans hanging from the wall and they look so spotless. There’s a mini TV on top of the fridge, and Thomas has the news playing like a grown man, but he’s not listening because he’s on the phone.

“. . . I can mail those back to you,” he says, pouring Corn Bran into two bowls, handing me one. “No, Sara, I think it’s too soon to meet up . . . Look, I . . .” He looks at the phone before setting it on the counter. “She hung up.”

“Everything okay?”

“She wants every letter and card she wrote to me. I don’t know . . . She’s hoping I’ll reread them or something so I’ll miss her.” He sits down across from me, and shrugs. “Anyway, enough with that. Sorry to report this was the only cereal we had left. I ate all the Lucky Charms the other night, but we have cookies and marshmallows. And a leftover chocolate bunny from Easter we can use. I hope that’s cool.”

The last time I sat down for a meal in a kitchen was at my grandparents’ house, and they’re both dead now. Still, I jump out of my seat and crumble Chips Ahoy into my cereal, and Thomas gives me the biggest smile.

After breakfast, we head out, walking nowhere in particular—in fact, walking away from my block. “So who are your friends around here?” I ask him.

“You,” Thomas says. “And I think Baby Freddy and Skinny-Dave like me just fine.”

“I meant on your block.”

“I know you did. It’s embarrassing. My only friend here is Mr. Isaacs on the first floor. He’s big on cats and obsessed with factories.” He shrugs. “I had to outgrow my friends after they played me.”

I’m a little nervous asking, but I have to. “What’d they do?”

“After what my father did on my birthday, I stopped wanting to celebrate it, but last year my friend Victor kept calling. He was going to throw a party, a night of board games and drinking. I was about to go to Victor’s house, but then he called and canceled last minute to go to some concert with our friends. I thought it was part of some bigger surprise. My phone never rang after that. I was too depressed to drink alone so I just sort of sat in my room and did nothing. They didn’t even bring me back a T-shirt.”

Without knowing Victor, I know he’s an asshole. “You don’t need dickheads like that in your life anyway. They slow you down.”

Thomas stops walking, turns me toward him, and says, “This is what I like about you, Stretch. You care about what happens to you. Everyone else seems resigned to grow up and become nobodies who are stuck here. They don’t dream. They don’t think about the future.”

I have to look away because all this talk of the future shakes me. I massage my scar. “You’re wrong,” I say. Maybe I should turn around and go home so I don’t waste his time. “I thought death was a happy-ending exit strategy. I appreciate everything you’re saying, but—”

“But nothing.” Thomas grabs my wrist. “We all make mistakes. Every wrong job I take is a mistake, but it’s also a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it’s a step away from the wrong one. You would never do that to yourself again, right?” He’s looking at me, forcing me to meet his eyes.

“Never.”

Thomas lets go and keeps walking. “And that alone makes you different.”

We continue down the block in silence until a young woman with a picket sign walks past us in the other direction.

leteo is here today but needs to be gone tomorrow

I chase after her, and Thomas follows. “Excuse me, excuse me. Sorry. What’s with the sign?”