Happy Place

THE KIDS’ ROOM. Warped floorboards and crooked windows, creamy drapes, and twin beds topped in matching blue-gray quilts on either wall. My first week back with my friends after my London semester, and I’m sharing a room with a virtual stranger.

A pleasantly musty smell, tempered by lemon verbena furniture polish.

By cinnamon toothpaste. By pine, clove, woodsmoke, and strange pale eyes that wink and flash like some nocturnal animal. Not that I’m looking at him.

I can’t keep looking at him. But within hours of meeting Wyn Connor, it’s obvious he has his own gravity. I can’t bring myself to look at him straight on in the full light of day, always start loading dishes or drawing a net through the pool when he’s too close.

From the early mornings curtained in mist to late at night, my subconscious tracks him.

I’m living two separate weeks. One of them is bliss, the other torture. Sometimes they’re indistinguishable.

I laze in the pool with Cleo while she reads some artist’s memoir or encyclopedia exclusively about mushrooms. I wander the antique shops, junk shops, fudge shops in town with Sabrina. Parth and I walk up to the coffee place and the little red lobster roll stand with the constant hour-long line.

We play chicken in the pool, Never Have I Ever around the firepit. We pass around bottles of sauvignon blanc, rosé, chardonnay.

“Will your dad mind that we’re drinking his wine?” Wyn asks.

I wonder if he’s worried, like I was the first time Sabrina brought Cleo and me here, if he’s realizing she’d have every right to present us with bills at the end of the week, bills that the rest of us couldn’t afford.

“Of course he’d mind,” Sabrina replies, “if he ever noticed. But he’s incapable of noticing anything that’s not inside a Swiss bank account.”

“He has no idea what he’s missing,” Cleo says.

“All of my favorite things happen outside of Swiss bank accounts,” Parth agrees.

“All my favorite things are here,” I say.

In the hottest part of the day, we take turns leaping off the end of the pier below the bluff, making a game out of not reacting to the icy shock of the Atlantic, then lie on the sun-warmed platform watching the clouds stampede past.

Sabrina plans our drinks and meals to perfection. Parth finds ways to turn everything into an elaborate game or competition, as in the case of the pier-jumping game we name DON’T FUCKING SCREAM. And Cleo, almost out of nowhere, asks questions like, “Are there any places you go back to again and again in your dreams?” or “Would you redo high school if you could?” Parth says he would, because he had a great high school experience; Cleo says she would, because she had a horrible time and would like the chance to correct it; and the rest of us agree it would take a many-dollared offer to tempt us to relive our own mediocre experiences.

After that, Cleo asks, “If you could have another life entirely, separate from this one, what would you do?”

Parth says, right away, he’d join a band. Sabrina takes a minute to decide she’d be a chef.

“Back when my parents were still together,” she says, “when we’d come out here for the summer, Mom and I would cook these elaborate meals. It was a whole-day thing. Like we had nowhere to be, nothing to do but be together.”

While she’s always shared blunt observations and flippantly self-aware comments about her family life and her past—like Sorry if that came out too strong. It’s my child-of-a-narcissist complex. I still think I have thirty seconds to make my case before everyone gets bored—it’s rarer for her to share happy memories.

It’s a gift, this bit of tenderness she’s brought out to show us. It’s an honor to be trusted with something so sacred and rare as Sabrina’s softness.

With Cleo’s extra life, she tells us, she’d farm, which makes everyone laugh so hard the wooden pier trembles under us. “I’m serious!” she insists. “I think it’d be fun.”

“Yeah, right,” Sabrina says. “You’re going to be a famous painter, with landscapes in every celebrity’s LA mansion.”

When she turns the question to me, my mind blanks. I’ve wanted to become a surgeon since I was fourteen. I’ve never considered anything else.

“You can do anything, Harry,” Sabrina presses. “Don’t overthink it.”

“Overthinking is the thing I’m best at, though,” I say.

She cackles. “Maybe in your other life you figure out how to monetize that.”

“Or maybe,” Cleo says, “in our other lives, we don’t have to figure out how to monetize anything. We can just be.”

Without sitting up, Parth reaches over to high-five her.

“I love you,” Cleo says, “but I do not high-five.”

He lets his hand drop to his stomach, unbothered. He asks Wyn what he’d do with his second life. I don’t look over, but I feel him stretched out under the sun on my left, a second star, a thing with its own gravity, light, warmth.

He sighs sleepily. “I’d live in Montana.”

“You’ve already done that,” Parth says. “You’re supposed to say you’d go to the South Pole and rehabilitate penguins or something.”

“Fine, Parth,” Wyn says. “I’d go to the South Pole, for the penguins.”

“There’s no right answer,” Cleo says. “Why would you move back to Montana, Wyn?”

“Because in this life, I decided not to stay there,” he says. “I decided to do something different than my parents did, be someone different. But if I had another one to live, I’d want the one where I stayed too.”

I chance a glance at him. He turns his cheek flat against the wooden pier, and our gazes hold for the span of four breaths, his damp arm and mine barely touching.

A silent conversation passes between us: Hi and Hi back and You’re smiling at me and No, you’re smiling at me.

I turn my eyes back to the sky and shut them tight.

By the time we crawl into our beds on opposite sides of the kids’ room, the buzzing in my veins still hasn’t let up.

Wyn, however, is so still that I assume he’s instantly fallen asleep. After some time, his voice breaks the quiet. “Why do you always start cleaning when I come into the room?”

My laugh is part surprise, part embarrassment. “What?”

“If everyone’s out back and you’re in the kitchen, the second I come inside, you go for a sponge.”

“I do not,” I say.

“You do.” The blankets rustle as he rolls onto his side.

“Well, if I do, it’s a coincidence,” I say. “I love cleaning.”

“They told me that,” he says.

I laugh. “How did that come up? Did you ask for the least interesting thing about me?”

“A few weeks after I moved in, the apartment was completely disgusting,” he says. “And I’m not even that clean of a guy. I finally asked Sabrina about it, and she said they must’ve gotten used to you always scrubbing everything. I think I’m the only person who’s taken out the trash in the last six months. Cleo picks up after herself, but she won’t touch Sabrina’s mess.”

I smile at the dark ceiling, my heart swelling with affection for both of them. “Cleo’s great at boundaries. She probably thinks if she lets Sabrina’s toothpaste splatter accumulate long enough, she’ll notice.”

“Yeah, well, if I didn’t intervene, the counter would be more toothpaste than porcelain by now.”

“You’re being unrealistic,” I say. “The entire apartment would be toothpaste.”

“You don’t seem to mind that our friend is a disgusting slob.”

“I’ve always liked cleaning,” I say. “Even when I was little.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Both my parents had to work a lot, and they were always stressed out about money, but they were also good about making sure my sister and I had everything we needed. There wasn’t a ton I could do to help, except cleaning. And I like how it’s so measurable, like you immediately see that what you’re doing is making a difference. Whenever I get anxious, I clean, and it relaxes me.”

A long silence. “Do I make you anxious?”

“What? Of course not,” I say.

His blankets rustle again. “When I came into the room tonight, you started rearranging the drawers.”

“Coincidence,” I insist.

“So you’re not anxious,” he says.

“I’m never anxious here,” I say.

Another pause. “What are they like?”

“Who?”

“Your family,” he says. “You don’t talk about them all that much. Are they like you?”

I prop my head up in my hand and squint through the dark. “What am I like?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says. “I’m not good with words.”

“If you’d rather, you can act it out,” I say.

He turns onto his back again, waves his arms in a circle.

“A gigantic orb,” I guess.

He laughs. “I guess I’m not good at charades either. I mean it in a good way.”

“A gigantic orb in a good way,” I say.

“So.” He faces me once more. It’s easier to meet his eyes in the dark. “Are they gigantic orbs too?”

“It’s impossible to say, since I still have no idea what that means. But my parents are nice. Dad’s a science teacher, and Mom works at a dentist’s office. They always made sure my sister and I had what we needed.”

“You said that already,” he says.

Reading my hesitation, he says, “Sorry. You don’t have to talk about it.”

“There’s not a lot to say.” We fall back into silence, but after a while, it bubbles over: “They don’t love each other.”

The words hang there. He waits, and it doesn’t matter that I’ve decided not to talk about this. It comes out anyway: “They barely knew each other when they got married. They were in college still, and my mom got pregnant with my older sister. Mom was supposed to go to medical school, and Dad was supposed to go to grad school for astrophysics—but they needed money, so she dropped out to raise Eloise, and he got a job substitute teaching. By the time I was born, it was already like this weird late-twentieth-century marriage of convenience.”

“Do they fight?” he asks.

“Not really,” I say. “My sister’s six years older than me, and she was kind of a wild child, so they used to argue with her, but not with each other.”

About her dropping AP classes without talking to them, or coming home with a belly button ring, or announcing her plans to take a backpacking gap year.

Mom and Dad never screamed, but Eloise did, and when, inevitably, they sent her to her room or she stormed out of the house, everything would always seem somehow quieter than before. A dangerous quiet, like one tiny peep might make the cracks spread, the house collapse.

My parents weren’t cruel, but they were strict, and they were tired. Sometimes one or both of them had to get a weekend job to fill in the financial gaps if the minivan broke down, or Eloise chipped a tooth, or I got a virus that led to pneumonia, which dovetailed nicely with a need for chest X-rays. By the time I was nine, I might not have known what deductible meant, but I knew it was one of those words trotted out when Mom and Dad were bent over paper bills at the kitchen table, massaging their eyebrows and sighing to themselves.

I also knew that my dad hated when my mom sighed. And that, conversely, my mom hated when my dad sighed. Like both of them were hoping that the other would be fine, wouldn’t need comforting.

All the quiet made me strain for hints and clues until I became an expert in my parents’ moods. Eloise had been out of the house a long time, since the blowup fight when she’d told them she wouldn’t be going to college, and things were a lot better now, but they’d never fully forgiven her, and I didn’t think she’d forgiven them either.

“They’re good parents,” I say. “They came to every single thing I was a part of. In fifth grade, for a talent show, I did this series of ‘magic tricks’ that were actually little science experiments, and you’d think they’d watched me give a lecture at NASA.

“We only ever ate out for special occasions, but that night they took me for ice cream at Big Pauly’s Cone Shop.”

Talking to Wyn like this feels like whispering my secrets into a box and shutting it tight.

A sliver of a grin appears through the dark. “So you’ve always had a sweet tooth.”

“All of us do. We ordered multiple rounds,” I say. “Like we were doing birthday shots.”

We stayed until the place was closed, well after my normal bedtime. One of my most vivid memories was falling asleep against the back seat, feeling so happy, glowy with their pride.

I lived for those rare nights when everything clicked and we were all happy together, when they weren’t worried about anything and could just have fun.

When I won the high school science fair my sophomore year, and Dad and I spent the night making s’mores over the stovetop and binge-watching a documentary on jellyfish. Or when I graduated salutatorian, and the front-office team from Dr. Sherburg’s dental practice threw me a mini party, complete with a truly hideous brain cake Mom had baked. Or when I got the letter about my scholarship to Mattingly, and the three of us stayed up late, poring over the online course catalog.

You, my girl, I remember Mom saying, are going to do great things.

We always knew it, Dad had agreed.

“What about your parents?” I ask Wyn. “They come from ranching families, right? And now they run a furniture repair business? What are they like?”

“Loud.” He doesn’t elaborate.

My first impression of him has proven true: Wyn doesn’t like talking about himself.

But I feel greedy for more of him, the real Wyn, the parts under the smoky-sultry eyes.

“Happy loud,” I say, “or angry loud?”

His smile lights up the dark. “Happy loud.” He pauses. “Plus, my dad’s deaf in one ear but insists on always asking questions from the other room, so sometimes just loud loud. And I’ve got an older sister and a younger one. Michael and Lou. They’re loud loud too. They’d love you.”

“Because I’m loud?”

“Because they’re brilliant like you,” he says. “And also because you laugh like a helicopter.”

Unfortunately, that causes me to prove his point. “Wow. Stop hitting on me.”

“It’s cute,” he adds.

Another full-body flush. “Okay, now you really need to stop flirting with me.”

“You make it sound so easy,” he says.

“I believe in you,” I say.

“And you have no idea how much that means to me,” he replies.

I turn over and bury my face in my pillow, mumbling through a grin, “Good night, Wyn.”

“Sleep tight, Harriet.”

The next night follows the same pattern: We climb into bed. We fall into silence. And then Wyn turns onto his side and asks, “Why brain surgery, specifically?”

And I say, “Maybe I thought it sounded the most impressive. Now I can constantly respond to things with Well, it’s not brain surgery.”

“You don’t need to be any more impressive,” he says. “You’re already . . .” In the corner of my eye, he waves his arms in that huge circle again.

“A freakishly large watermelon,” I say.

He lets out a low laugh, his voice gone all raspy. “So was that it? You chose the hardest, most impressive thing you could think of?”

“You ask a lot of questions, but you don’t like answering them,” I say.

He sits up against the wall, the corner of his mouth curling, dimples sinking. “What do you want to know?”

I sit up. “Why didn’t you want to guess what our friends told me about you?”

He stills. No hand running through his hair, no jogging knee. A very still Wyn Connor is an almost lewdly beautiful thing.

“Because,” he says eventually, “my best guess would be they told you I’m a nice guy who barely got into Mattingly and didn’t get my credits in time to graduate, and honestly might never manage to.”

“They love you,” I say. “They’d never say anything like that.”

“It’s the truth. Parth’s off to law school next year, and I was supposed to be moving to New York with him, but I failed the same gen ed math class for the second time. I’m hanging on by a thread.”

“Who needs math?” I say.

“Mathematicians, probably,” he says.

“Are you planning to become a mathematician?” I ask.

“No,” he says.

“That’s good, because they’re all going to be put out of business once this calculator thing catches on. Who cares if you’re bad at math, Wyn?”

His gaze lifts. “Maybe I hoped to make a better first impression than that.”

“No part of me believes,” I say, “that you struggle with first impressions.”

He brushes his thick hair up off his forehead, and it stays there, all except that one strand, of course, which is determined to fall sensually across his eyebrow. “Maybe you make me a little nervous.”

“Yeah, right,” I say, spine tingling.

“Just because you don’t see me grabbing a mop every time you walk into a room doesn’t mean I don’t notice you’re there.”

It feels like a bowling ball has landed in my stomach, a sudden drop. Then come the butterflies.

Blood rerouting, vessels constricting, I tell myself. Meaningless.

“Why?” I ask.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” he says, “and please don’t ask me to act it out.”

“You make me a little nervous too,” I admit.

He’s waiting for me to say more, the weight of his focus on me. An ache starts behind my ribs. Like having this small bit of him has transformed all the pieces I can never have into a kind of phantom limb, a pain where there should be more Wyn.

“Why?” he says finally.

“Too handsome,” I say.

A strange look flits across his face, something like disappointment. He averts his gaze. “Well. That has nothing to do with me.”

“I know that,” I say. “That’s the thing. Abnormally good-looking people aren’t supposed to also be so . . .”

“So . . . ?” He arches a brow.

I wave my arms in a circle.

He cracks a smile. “Spherical?”

I latch on to the closest word I can find. “Vast.”

“Vast,” he repeats.

“Funny,” I say. “Interesting. It’s like, pick a lane, buddy.”

He laughs, tosses a pillow across the room at me. “I never would have pegged you for a snob, Harriet.”

“Huge snob. Huge.” I toss the pillow back with another circular wave of my arms. It lands about three feet shy of his bed.

“What was that?”

“The pillow you threw at me,” I say, “perhaps you remember it.”

“I know it’s a pillow,” he says. “I’m talking about the throw.”

“Now who’s a snob?” I say. “Just because I’m not an athlete—”

“It’s a pillow, Harriet,” he says, “not an Olympic throwing hammer, and we’re four feet apart.”

“We’re like ten feet apart,” I counter.

“Absolutely not.” He stands and starts across the room, counting each step. I catch myself cataloging his arms and stomach, the juts of his hip bones above his gym shorts.

“Three . . . four . . . five . . .”

“You are taking massive strides right now.” I jump up to measure the distance myself. Our elbows graze as we pass, and every fine hair down my arm rises.

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.”

When I turn, he’s standing right behind me. The dark quivers between us. My nipples pinch, and I’m terrified he’ll notice, and desperate for him to notice, to feel his eyes all over me.

He clears his throat. “Tomorrow.”

My voice comes out thin. “Tomorrow what?”

“We’ll measure the distance,” he says. “Whoever’s guess is closest wins.”

“Wins what?” I ask.

His lips twitch. One of his perfectly curved shoulders lifts. “I don’t know, Harriet. What do you want?”

“You say my name a lot,” I say.

“You hardly ever say mine,” he replies. “That’s why I had to get you to say Wins what.”

I smile at the floor, which underscores how close we’re standing. “Wins what, Wyn?”

When I look up, his lips are pressed tight, his dimples out full force. “I honestly forget what we were talking about.”

Another head rush. A belly flutter. Warning bells clanging through my nervous system.

“We were talking about how badly we both need to go to sleep,” I say. He pretends to believe me. We climb back into our respective beds.

We talk through the next night too. I tell him I’m still not used to all the casual physical affection between our friends. How Cleo snuggles into my side like a cat nestling into towels fresh from the dryer, and Sabrina hugs me hello and goodbye, and Parth tousles my hair as he’s passing through a room.

“Would you rather I didn’t touch you?” Wyn asks quietly.

As quietly, I say, “You don’t ever touch me.”

“Because I haven’t known,” he says, “if you want me to.”

Everything in me twists and tightens.

He tucks a pillow under his ear and shifts onto his side, his bare chest and long, lean torso tinged with the first bit of morning, the freckles on his sculpted shoulders visible in the streaks of light.

My train of thought is disappearing around a corner, leaving me alone with a half-naked Wyn Connor, when he says, “Just to be clear, you’re always welcome to touch me.”

I become acutely aware of every place the cool silk sheets skim my legs. I shake the blankets out. “What an extremely generous offer.”

“Not generous at all,” he says. “I’m voracious for physical touch. Can’t get enough.”

“So I’ve gathered,” I say. “If I ever meet someone in need of casual physical touch, I’ll give them your business card.”

The corner of his mouth tugs downward. “Remember what you told me about Sabrina?”

“No, what?”

“That she exaggerates,” he says. “So does Parth.”

I pitch myself higher on my elbow. “So which were the exaggerations, Wyn? The hot TA who left her phone number on your last essay of the term? The flight attendant who bought all your drinks? The identical triplet Russian acrobats?”

“The triplets,” he says, “were literally just some girls I met in a bar and talked to for thirty minutes. And for the record, they were gymnasts, not acrobats, and they were very nice.”

“One can’t help but notice you didn’t protest about the TA and the flight attendant.”

He sits up against the wall. The man cannot stay in one position for longer than forty or so seconds. “How about we discuss your romantic history?”

“What about it?” I say.

“Sabrina said you were dating another American while you were in London.”

“Hudson,” I supply.

“You never bring him up,” Wyn says.

I don’t bring him up because he and I agreed our relationship was temporary, right from the start. We knew when we went home, we’d be too busy, too focused, for each other. Focus was the second biggest thing Hudson and I had in common. The first was a love of the same chip shop in London. Not the stuff of romantic legend, but it worked out okay, and no one got hurt.

“I’m an open book,” I say. “What do you want to know?”

Wyn’s teeth scrape over his bottom lip. “Is he a genius like you?”

“I’m not a genius,” I say.

“Fine,” Wyn says, “is he brilliant like you? Is he going to be a surgeon?”

Brilliant. The word fizzes through me.

“He wants to be a thoracic surgeon,” I say. “He goes to Harvard.”

Wyn scoffs.

“Tickle in your throat?” I say.

“What’s he look like?” Wyn asks. As I consider, his grin twitches. “Can’t remember?”

“Dark hair, blue eyes,” I say.

“Like you,” he says.

“Identical.” I sit up too. “Side by side, you couldn’t tell us apart.”

Wyn’s eyes slink down me, then climb back to my face. “You’re a very lucky woman.”

“The luckiest,” I say. “Once, when I was sick, he went to class as me.”

“Can I see a picture?” Wyn asks.

“Seriously?”

“I’m curious,” he says.

I lean over the bed and feel around for my phone on the ground, then carry it over to him, swiping through my camera roll.

I choose a picture of Hudson that shows off his high cheekbones, his pointed chin, his glossy dark hair. When I hold it out, Wyn grabs my wrist to steady it and squints at the screen. Then he slides my phone from my hand and brings it closer to his eyes. “Why isn’t he smiling?”

“He is,” I say. “That’s how he smiles. It’s subtle.”

“This guy,” Wyn says, “only smiles when he’s looking in the mirror. Which is also how he masturbates. While wearing his Harvard sweatshirt.”

“Oh my god, Wyn. You are officially the snob among us.” I reach for my phone, but he rolls onto his stomach, taking it with him.

Slowly, he swipes back through my pictures, taking each in before moving to the next. I flop down next to him and peer over his shoulder as he pauses on a shot of me in the library, hunched over a notebook, several towers of textbooks lined up in front of me.

“Cute.” He glances over his shoulder at me, then back to the phone before I can react.

He spreads his thumb and finger over the image to zoom in on my face. I watch him in profile, his face lit up, his dimples shadowing. “So fucking cute,” he repeats quietly.

Heat blooms in every nook and cranny of my body. This time when I reach for my phone, Wyn lets me take it. He sits up. Only a handful of inches separate our faces. I can smell his clove deodorant. His gaze is heavy on my mouth.

“I told you,” I manage, “you need to stop flirting with me.”

His eyes lift. “Why?”

Because my best friend has a crush on you.

Because this group of friends matters too much to risk ruining it.

Because I don’t like how out of control I feel around you, how whenever you’re nearby, you’re the only thing I can focus on.

I say, “You don’t date your friends.”

“You’re not my friend, Harriet,” he says quietly.

“What am I, then?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But not that.”

Our gazes lash together, a heady pressure building between us; his want and mine have started to overlap, two halves of a Venn diagram drawing together on the twin bed.

“We can’t,” I murmur.

“Because of Sabrina?” he asks.

My heart spikes. “No.” It comes out thin, unconvincing.

“I don’t see her like that,” he says.

“You see everyone like that,” I say.

“I don’t,” he says, voice firm. “I really don’t.”

“Wyn,” I say quietly. “This is . . .” What word did he use earlier this week? “Messy.”

“I know,” he says. “Trust me, I’m trying not to—feel like this.”

“Try harder.” I want to sound light and teasing. Instead, I sound as angsty as I feel.

“Is that what you want?”

I can’t bring myself to lie, so I just stand. “We should get at least a little sleep.”

After several seconds, he says, “Good night, Harriet.”