Happy Again (This is What Happy Looks Like #1.5)(12)

“I need to find a role that requires me to gain some weight. Then it’ll be milk shakes all day and all night…”

“So what are you doing next?”

He narrowed his eyes. “How come you’re avoiding the subject?”

“What subject?”

“Harvard. You hate it that much, huh?”

Ellie took a pull from her straw. “I wouldn’t go right to hate…”

“Well, what, then?”

“I’m just not sure it’s the right fit.”

“Come on,” Graham said, leaning forward. “You’ve wanted to go there forever. And you loved it when you were there for the poetry course.” He sat back again, looking suddenly concerned. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said quickly. “I loved it. But that was different. That was two weeks. This is four years.”

“Yeah, but you’re only a few weeks in. So what’s the problem?”

“I don’t know. It’s not really Harvard. It’s me.”

Graham laughed just as he was about to take a sip, and little bits of whipped cream went flying off the top of his glass. “That’s the oldest line in the book,” he said, wiping at his chin. “Does Harvard know you want to break up with it yet?”

“I’m not breaking up with it,” Ellie said, tossing her balled-up straw wrapper at him. “It’s just been harder than I thought. Everyone seems to know everyone else already, and they’re all sort of the same, and I’m…”

“You’re different,” Graham said matter-of-factly.

Ellie nodded. “But not in a good way. I feel like a foreign exchange student or something.”

“What, they don’t speak Henley up there at Harvard?”

“I think it’s more that I don’t speak New York City. Or Greenwich. Or Hamptons. Or whatever. Everyone’s perfectly nice, but it just takes so much effort to keep up, you know?”

“My best friend is a pig,” Graham said. “Trust me, I get it.”

“Yeah, well, he’s a pretty magnificent pig.”

“Humble,” he agreed with a smile.

“Radiant.”

“So what about the other book nerds?”

“What about them?”

“Well, why don’t you hang out with them? There must be tons up there.”

Ellie chose to ignore this. “It’s not just about that. It’s more that I…I can’t seem to find my footing. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Even in class—”

“Even in class?”

Ellie nodded. “For some reason, I haven’t said a word.”

“At all?”

“At all,” she confirmed as their food arrived.

Graham had begun eating his burger almost before the plate was fully on the table, but the waitress didn’t seem to mind. She simply pulled a few extra napkins from her pocket—as if to suggest that he’d need them—and headed back to the counter.

“So yesterday,” Ellie said around a mouthful of grilled cheese, “in my Shakespeare section—which is my favorite—the professor called on me for the first time.”

“Uh-oh,” Graham said without looking up from his food.

“Exactly. I completely froze. I just kind of stuttered a little, and then I turned really red, and then there was this ridiculously long silence, and then she gave up on me.”

“Did you know the answer?” he asked, lowering his burger.

“That’s the worst part,” Ellie said with a nod. “The thing is…I know I’m a huge chicken in other ways, and I can be completely hopeless about stuff like this, but school was always the one place where I was fine.”

Graham looked thoughtful as he chewed. “I think you just need more of a game face.”

“What?”

“A game face,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s like, when I’m about to do a big scene, where I need to act like someone bigger and braver and bolder than I really am, I stand in front of the mirror first and practice my game face.”

He demonstrated it for her now, furrowing his brow and twisting his mouth into a deep scowl, so that he managed to look both utterly intimidating and completely clownish at the same time.

Ellie was trying not to laugh. “I’m not sure that will help me much in Early Plays of Shakespeare.”

“You don’t have to actually do the face,” he said, his features relaxing again. “I mean, it definitely helps if you need to get psyched up. But it’s more about the way it makes you feel. The idea is to sort of pretend you’re as tough as you look just then.”

“Even if you’re not.”

He nodded. “Even if you’re not.”

Ellie thought about that moment in class when she’d sat numbly beneath the heavy gaze of the other students. She thought about the way she’d been trailing Lauren and Kara and Sprague all day, and how her first instinct when she realized Graham would be showing up on the red carpet had been to flee.

“Though she be but little, she is fierce,” she said, and Graham—who had been swirling a fry into the pool of ketchup on his plate—looked up.