HAPPY PLACE
MATTINGLY, VERMONT
A NEW APARTMENT for our senior year, the first floor of a peeling white Victorian at the edge of town. Windows that rattle whenever the wind blows, a half-collapsed porch where Sabrina and I intend to spend the fall sipping brandy-spiked hot cider, and a patch of side yard where I promise to help Cleo plant a vegetable garden: broccoli, cauliflower, kohlrabi—things that can withstand the frost that will arrive in a few short months.
Wyn was supposed to be in New York right now, sharing a loft with Parth, making his way in a new city while his best friend studies law at Fordham. If he hadn’t failed that math class a second time or overlooked his history gen ed requirement, everything might be different.
Instead, he’s living with us. To save money, Cleo and I share the biggest room. Sabrina gets the next one. Wyn has the shoebox originally intended for me.
The morning after move-in day, Parth has donuts delivered for us. The note reads, If you don’t all come to grad school in New York next year, I will be pressing charges.
Realistically, I’ll have to go to whatever medical school will take me. Likewise, Sabrina will have to choose her next city based on her own law school admission, and Cleo will do the same with an MFA program. But the
idea is alluring—all of us together in a new city—even as I’m unsure how I’ll survive one year as Wyn Connor’s roommate.
Our whole first week in the place, we manage not to be alone together. Finally, though, we bump into each other early one morning in the stuffy kitchen. The sun’s started to come up, and he’s making coffee. He fills a mug with the Montana state flag printed on one side and passes it to me. “I want you to know I understood what you said,” he murmurs. “Back in Maine.”
His voice, still husky with sleep, pulls all the tiny hairs on the back of my neck to eager attention. His closeness, here in the quiet morning, is overpowering.
“I don’t want you to worry about this year,” he tells me. “I won’t make things weird.”
I manage something that sounds sort of like “Oh . . . good” and sort of like someone with both stage fright and strep throat has taken a crack at public yodeling.
And then he’s nodding curtly, letting himself out the back door to cut our grass before the day gets too hot, and once again, I’m left waiting for a spell to break.
He’s true to his word all year. A couple of times a week, he goes out with women the rest of us never meet. Then, in winter, he starts seeing one woman, again and again, a dancer named Alison. She’s beautiful. She’s nice. But she never stops by for longer than a few minutes before the two of them leave for the night. I try to be happy for him. That’s what a friend would do.
You’re not my friend, Harriet sometimes replays in my mind.
He struggles with his math class, so I volunteer to help him. On Tuesdays, we study late into the night in Mattingly’s dusty golden library. He moans, groans, says his brain wasn’t made for this kind of thing.
“What’s it made for, then?” I ask, and he says, “Tumbleweeds. They like to just roll through.” I’ve noticed that he does that, talks himself down, self- deprecates, and he does it like it’s a joke he’s in on, but I think he might mean it, and I hate it.
While we’re studying for finals, he brings me vending machine coffee and chocolate chip mini muffins, Snickers bars, and Skittles, and even with all that caffeine and sugar and the rush of being close to him, I drift off to sleep, facedown on a textbook, and wake to him nudging my shoulder from across the table.
When I lift my face, he grins and smudges the transferred ink away from my cheek.
“Thanks,” I say sleepily.
“What are friends for?” he says.
You’re not my friend, Harriet.
The four of us cook elaborate dinners together in our cramped kitchen, Sabrina acting as sous-chef. We sit on the front porch while Cleo sketches us in a hundred different poses, and when it snows, Wyn and I take long walks through town to get hot chocolate or maple lattes, despite the fact that he hardly touches sweets.
When one of us goes to Hannaford for groceries, we double-check whether the other needs anything, and even if I say no, when Wyn walks into the apartment, he’ll set a pint of blueberry ice cream on my desk in front of me, without a word.
And when Sabrina and I get our respective acceptance emails from Columbia—her from their law school and me from their medical school— and in a shocking twist, Cleo announces she’s going to work on an urban farm in New York City rather than getting her MFA, I don’t even resist the prospect of the four of us finding a new place with Parth in New York, of sharing yet another set of walls with Wyn Connor.
He’s become my best friend the way the others did: bit by bit, sand passing through an hourglass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back.
He’s a golden boy. I’m a girl whose life has been drawn in shades of gray.
I try not to love him. I really try.
