More Happy Than Not

I don’t understand.

It all felt so right in that moment I agreed to date her. I was the straightest guy I knew, but when I got home that night, I was still thinking about other guys. Not Brendan anymore; I got turned off from him after hearing him talk about sleeping with girls as conquests. No, I think about the dudes I see undress in the locker room at school, the ones sitting across from me on the bus staring at nothing and likely thinking about their normal crushes.

I don’t think about Genevieve. She’s staring up at me now like I’m all she thinks about, like I should be inching toward her lips, as she is mine. I go for it, to prove myself wrong. I turn at the last second and we bump heads.

“Ow!” Genevieve laughs. “Watch it, dumb-idiot.”

“Sorry.” I rub my forehead.

“Take two?”

I nod and she jokingly backs away as if she were in danger of another head-butt. She pulls me toward her and when she turns left, I freak out and turn left too and we hit each other again. Maybe this time she’ll take it as a message from the universe that I’m the wrong boy to be kissing.

I know I can’t possibly be fooling her, or anyone, and that’s my problem—without her, I definitely won’t be fooling anyone. I pull her to me, and this time I get it right, and when it’s done I laugh, which probably wouldn’t make anyone feel good. But Genevieve smiles—and then punches me in the arm.

“I suspect I’ll be hitting you a lot.”

(AGE SIXTEEN—OCTOBER, NINE MONTHS AGO)

I’m in the school library rereading Scorpius Hawthorne and the Legion of the Dragon when I catch him looking at me from the fantasy section. Collin Vaughn is another junior, and he’s what I like to call an almost-jock: he hasn’t been able to get on the basketball team since freshman year but acts superior anyway during gym class.

Collin walks over with two books and pulls out the chair across from me. “Cool if I sit?”

“Cool,” I say. “I see you reading these fantasy books and comics a lot during class and lunch.” His brown eyes wander to my Scorpius Hawthorne book. “Are these any good?” He slides over The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Hobbit.

“Hitchhiker’s Guide is really fucking funny,” I say.

The librarian rolls her eyes at me before returning to her trashy-looking romance novel.

“I haven’t read The Hobbit, but the movies are epic,” I add.

He knocks on the Scorpius Hawthorne book. “Ha. I haven’t read these books, but saw the movies.”

Some people are obsessed with the works of Jane Austen or William Shakespeare or Stephen King, but I grew up with the demonic boy wizard, so whenever someone my age tells me they haven’t read these books, I imagine a Reaping spell being fired into the sky because a childhood is dead. “Why the hell not?”

Collin smiles. “Never got around to them.”

“But you willingly walked into those movie theaters and kicked your feet up?”

“Aren’t they the same thing?”

“You are the worst,” I tell him. “If I bring you the first Scorpius Hawthorne book tomorrow, will you read it this weekend?”

“I’ll give it a shot. Meet back here tomorrow?”

“We’ll keep meeting back here until you can recite The Seven Laws of Hybrid Magic.”

I’m acting like I’m reading the final pages of Legion of the Dragon when Collin comes into the library looking for me. He sits right across from me, not asking this time, and says, “You got the goods?” It’s a tone someone might mistake for drug dealing.

I slide the backpack over to him. I packed the first two Scorpius Hawthorne books plus The Once and Future King, A Game of Thrones, and a couple comics in case he’s in the insanely minuscule percentage of the universe that doesn’t like the demonic boy wizard who inspired a fucking amusement park and seven films. “I tossed in some classics too. What got you into fantasy?”

Collin opens the backpack and opens the first page of Scorpius Hawthorne and the Monster’s Scepter; if this Leteo Institute weren’t bullshit and I could get a free procedure, I would definitely have my memory of ever reading this series buried so I could relive these books again for the first time. “I like pretending, I guess.” The pages are yellowed and he sees my illustration of the horn

ed Alastor Riggs, the Overlord of the Silver Crown School. “You draw?”

“Yeah. It’s a thing I do,” I say. I normally don’t think I’m an awesome artist, because one should always exhibit some modesty, but Collin studies my drawings like he would bid high for them in one of our dumb school auctions. “You should be honored I’m loaning you my original and sacred copies, but I should warn you that I will destroy you like a Bone Grinder if you ruin them.”

“I actually get that reference,” Collin says, and it makes me feel like there’s still hope for him. “Those are the trolls from the first movie, right?” He just compared a skinless demon to a dumb troll—hope killed.