Adam Silvera - More Happy Than Not

“I don’t want to get my phone wet.”

“Just fold it inside your shirt. No one’s going to steal it.”

“You do know we aren’t in Queens, right?”

Thomas tucks his phone inside his shirt and leaves it against a mailbox. “Your loss, dude.” He runs with an athlete’s sprint and bounces back and forth through the sprinklers, the sun glinting off his belt buckle. Sure, some people are looking at him like he’s insane, but he doesn’t seem to care.

I don’t know what possesses me, what chokes out all my insecurities and allows me to pull my shirt off, but it’s freeing. Thomas gives me two thumbs-up. I don’t feel like a scrawny kid right now.

I pull my phone out — but before I can roll it inside my shirt, it buzzes. Genevieve is calling. I freeze.

“Hey!” I answer.

“Hi. I somehow miss your dumb-idiot face already. Fly out here so we can build a house in the woods and start a family,” she says.

“I miss you more but not as much as I hate camping.”

“It wouldn’t count as camping if we spent our lives here.”

“Truth.” I picture her smiling despite the distance and it makes me happy, no, happier. I want to beg her to come home, but I want her to stay focused on her art and not worry about me. “Have you started painting yet or is there some lame orientation?”

“The lame orientation was yesterday. We’re taking a quick break before doing some still life on trees and…”

I nearly drop my phone when I see Thomas doing push-ups from inside the sprinklers, showing off for these girls across the street. I put the phone back to my ear when I hear Genevieve calling my name. “Sorry. Thomas is making a dick of himself.” He doesn’t care like I would’ve.”

“You boys playing more Suicide?”

“Nah, it’s just me and Thomas.” I feel too exposed with my shirt off. “I think I’m heading home in a little bit, though. Pretty tired. You think you’ll be free to call me tonight? I want to hear all about the five hundred paintings you’ll finish today without me around to bother you.”

“Yup. Call you tonight, babe.” She hangs up before I can say bye or tell her I love her.

Now I feel like shit for getting distracted, but she’ll call later. I’ll explain how I really needed something fun to do, which is sort of her fault since she left me here, but if she hadn’t left, it would’ve been my fault, so I guess I can’t really go blaming her. Hopefully she’ll send me a punch across the country and all will be okay. I tuck my phone inside my shirt and kick my sneakers off, leaving everything on the ground. I charge toward the sprinklers in jeans and socks and jump through the jets of water. I’m laughing when I land on the other side.

“Woo-hoo!” Thomas whistles. “About time.”

I shiver from the cold. “Okay, uh, I miss my clothes.”

“Be free for sixty seconds, Stretch.” Thomas grabs on to my shoulders like he’s prepping me for the last game of the season — what game that is, I don’t know. “Forget about everything. Forget about your father. Even forget about your girlfriend. Pretend like you’re the only one around.” He lets go after coaching me and sits down on the ground. The water continues to wash over him.

I sit down across from him and get soaked. “I’m the only one,” I quietly tell myself, shedding my worries as if they could sink down the sewage drains. I squeeze my eyes shut and count up, feeling lighter as each second passes, more myself. “Fifty-eight, fifty-nine…” I don’t want to let go of the last second. “Sixty.”

I open my eyes to a group of kids playing tag around us.

“It’s going to be impossible to get out of these jeans,” I say. I can barely hear myself with the water crashing into my ears and the splashing and the children. Thomas stands and offers to help me up.

I clasp his forearm.

He shouts, “No homo!”

We’re both laughing as we go back to our abandoned belongings. Thomas dries his chest off with his shirt, soaking it up. “I don’t know if it’s because of that nap, but I feel great! I haven’t had that much fun since… nothing comes to mind.”

“Good to hear. I mean, sucks for you, but glad to know I’m not wasting your time.” I start putting my shirt on but poke my head through the wrong hole and get lost. I wrestle with myself until I feel Thomas’s hands steadying me.

“Stop! Stop!” Thomas is cracking up. There aren’t enough No Homos to excuse us from the fact that he’s dressing me right now. After some wrangling around, I’m sorted and find myself facing him. “I can’t take you anywhere. You’re making an ass of yourself.”

I look across the street. The girls who were checking out Thomas are laughing at me. I would’ve probably been really pissed if I didn’t have Genevieve. Then I see Brendan and Me-Crazy chilling not too far off, smoking the cigarettes Me-Crazy steals from his father. They’re looking at me like they don’t even recognize me. I nod my head to say hey, but they must be too high from smoking some of Brendan’s weed earlier.

“You doing anything tonight?” Thomas asks. “Besides sleeping, which you can do at my house.” He smiles. “Okay, that sounded wrong. No homo.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“Since I feel like The Final Chase may or may not have slightly disappointed you—”

“It one hundred percent did,” I interrupt.

“I thought we could watch Jaws on my rooftop.”

“I’m down.”

I’ve always felt the worst time to be treated like a kid is during the summer. Sure, most of the parents around here give us 10:00 p.m. curfews, but we normally stay out until midnight, sometimes even 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. This is not about rebelling or seeing how far we can push the adults before they come outside with a belt. (Fat-Dave has it bad like that.) It’s just that we’re exposed to more grown-up shit versus those in the safer boroughs and white-picket-fence neighborhoods. But when I call my mom to tell her I’m going to go stay over at Thomas’s, she talks to me as if I’m five years old. She needs to meet Thomas to make sure he’s not a drug dealer or some devil on my shoulder who might talk me off a roof.

We go wait for her by one of the brown picnic tables in the second court. This is the same spot where Brendan broke the news to me that he was going to spend the summer in North Carolina with his family when we were thirteen. I started drawing comics when he wasn’t around and he came home to find himself drawn as a Pokémon trainer.

Mom comes downstairs in my eighth-grade gym shirt, and I wish she had left her keys at home so Thomas wouldn’t see all her supermarket discount cards. “Hello.”

“Hi. I’m Thomas,” he says, offering a hand.

“Elsie,” she says with a smile, shaking it. “Please tell me that’s not sweat on you two.”

“Sprinklers,” I say.

“Thank God. What are your plans tonight, boys?”

“The movie we just saw bombed, so I thought I could show Stretch here Jaws,” Thomas says.

Mom looks at me. “You didn’t call and tell me you were going to the movies.”

“I got back in one piece.”

Her eyes fall on my scar and then back at me.

“He knows,” I say.

Thomas cuts in, “If it helps, Ms. Elsie, I can give you my address, my phone number, and my mother’s phone number. But I feel like Aaron hasn’t lived until he’s seen Jaws. You’re more than welcome to join us if you haven’t seen it yourself.”

This gets my mom smiling again. “I saw it in the theaters when I was a young girl. Thank you.”

Thomas almost looks jealous that she was alive when the movie came out. Maybe he thinks Back Then was a better time to be born. I personally think Much Later would’ve been a better time instead of Right Now.