Happy Again (This is What Happy Looks Like #1.5)(2)

Nobody, of course, knew the financial-aid kid from a small town in Maine.

Watching them, Ellie often felt like a scientist observing some strange new species of bird, these girls who were so impossibly confident. She couldn’t believe that they had bags as expensive as her entire wardrobe, and that none of them had ever had a paying job, and that they never thought twice about throwing down a credit card. In turn, they seemed to be just as mystified by her, endlessly amused when she pronounced Greenwich like Green-witch or said things like good grief or declined an invitation to a party because she wanted to finish writing a poem that wasn’t an assignment for any sort of class.

Ellie didn’t mind. They weren’t friends in the way that Quinn—whom she’d known since she was little—was a friend, and they probably never would be. But whatever this was seemed like a first step on the path to belonging, and that was enough for now.

So yesterday, when Lauren mentioned they were going away this weekend and asked if Ellie might want to come along, she paused before saying no.

“Really?” she asked, looking up from her psychology book.

Lauren had shrugged. “Well, my parents are out of town, so we have the apartment to ourselves. And we were thinking it’d be nice to do some shopping, get manicures, that sort of thing. I just really need a New York fix, you know?”

“Totally,” Ellie said, afraid to admit that she’d never been to New York. She glanced down at her pajama pants, which had little ducks on them and which she hadn’t taken off all day, and surprised herself by saying, “I’d love to come.”

Lauren had been making her bed, and she paused with a blanket in her hands, the corners lined up, mid-fold. “Well, great,” she said, clearly taken aback. But Ellie was relieved to see that she looked pleased too. “We’ll leave right after my econ seminar.”

And so this morning, Ellie had sat in the backseat of the car as it flew down the expressway, singing quietly under her breath as the other three girls shouted the words to song after song, the music so loud it made the doors vibrate. When they reached the city—a jagged landscape of buildings so striking that Ellie forgot to be self-conscious for a moment, pressing her forehead against the window with wide eyes—they dropped their bags at Lauren’s apartment, in a building that looked like a museum. The living room alone was bigger than an entire floor of Ellie’s house.

Afterward, they spent a few hours shopping on Fifth Avenue—which for Ellie turned out to be an exhausting exercise in trying not to look too shocked by the prices—and then went to the Museum of Modern Art, where she pretended to appreciate a series of paintings that looked as if they’d been done by a four-year-old.

By the time they started walking back across town, on their way to dinner at an Asian fusion restaurant that Lauren and Kara and Sprague were apparently desperate to try, the sky was dusky and pale, the light of the buildings already starting to glow. Ellie could no longer hide the fact that she was lagging behind the others. Being with them felt a little like being on camera for an extended period of time, and trying to maintain a brighter, cheerier, cooler version of herself for so long was completely draining. All she wanted to do was sit down in a dark restaurant and eat her noodles while the others talked.

But as they neared the corner of Fifty-Fourth and Sixth, they saw a series of blue police barricades cordoning off the street, and beyond that an enormous crowd gathered beneath an old-fashioned marquee that read ZIEGFELD in sweeping letters.

“Must be a premiere,” Lauren said before they’d even crossed the street, and Kara’s face lit up as she stepped off the curb, already moving in that direction.

“I wonder what movie it is,” she said, but somehow Ellie already knew.

Three

No matter how you looked at it, one year, two months, and twenty-one days was a very long time.

But sometimes it didn’t seem that way to Ellie at all.

Sometimes it felt like she was still in the middle of a conversation with him, that they’d only paused for a beat; that this was nothing more than the space between musical notes, the timeout on a playing field, the long, slumbering winter before an inevitable spring.

At other times it felt like the whole thing had just been a dream.

Four

When Graham left the beach that morning last summer, Ellie didn’t go with him.

They agreed that they didn’t want to say good-bye in front of his trailer, or in the lobby of his hotel, or even at her own house, with her mother hovering nearby, pretending not to listen. They didn’t want to be on display in town, now that their secret was out, and they didn’t want to walk up the road together, each step heavier than the last, each one closer to good-bye.

Instead, Ellie wanted to remember him like this: at their spot on the beach, the pink-streaked sky behind him so brilliant it almost looked like a scene from one of his movies.

But it wasn’t.

If it had been one of his movies, they’d have been making promises right then. They’d have been making plans. They’d have been saying they loved each other.

But they didn’t do any of those things.

Graham was going back to his life, and Ellie was staying right there in Henley.

In two weeks, she’d be going to Harvard for a summer poetry course, while Graham would be on a soundstage in L.A., wrapping the film they’d been shooting all summer.