Adam Silvera - More Happy Than Not

We both tell him no.

His friend, who smells like straight-up armpits, presses his middle finger between Collin’s eyes. He sucks his teeth. “They lying. I bet their little dicks are getting hard right now.”

Collin smacks the dude’s hand, which is just as big a mistake as my mom trying to save me from being thrown out the house last night. “Fuck you.”

Nightmare after nightmare.

One slams my head into the railing, and the other hammers Collin with punches. I try punching the first guy in his nose, but I’m too dizzy and miss. I have no idea how many times he punches me or at what point I end up on the sticky floor with Collin trying to shield me before he’s kicked to the side. Collin turns to me, crying these involuntary tears from shock and pain. His kind brown eyes roll back when he’s kicked in the head. I cry out for help but no one fucking breaks up the fight. No one fucking does the right thing.

The train stops and the doors open but there’s no chance for escape. For us, at least. Those two guys laugh while they run out onto the platform. New passengers walk in and some just grab a seat before there are none left. Others act like they don’t see us. Only a couple of people come to our aid. But it’s too late.

Collin refused to go to the hospital. He said he couldn’t afford it and even though my mom could probably help him for free, he knew she would call his parents and maybe tell them everything, including that thing he never wants to share.

I get home thirty minutes later, still holding my balled-up shirt to my nose to soak up the little blood coming down. I came in through the garage so I wouldn’t have to pass any of my friends all fucked up like this. I limp straight to the bathroom and the door is cracked open, lights on inside. Eric’s supposed to be working at GameStop, and Mom’s visiting one of her patients in prison. I open the door and when I see who’s sitting in the bathtub, I drop the shirt and blood just spills down my face and chest.

Holy shit.

Dad.

His eyes are open but he’s not looking at me.

He didn’t take his clothes off before getting into the tub.

The water is a deep red, stained by the blood spilling from his slit wrists.

He came home to kill himself.

He came home to kill himself before I could bring a boy here.

He came home to kill himself because of me.

All this blood.

All this red makes me black out.

My legs hurt like hell but I don’t stop running through the park. I hop onto a bench and soar off of it, landing hard on my bad leg from when I got jumped, but I keep going. I usually slow down when I’m racing Collin so he doesn’t feel as bad. But not today. These pigeons eating bread from a knocked-over trash can scatter when I charge through them. I keep running, but the memory of my father dead in a bath of red keeps chasing me and it’s impossible to stop until I trip over my shoelaces and tumble into dirt.

Collin catches up to me and falls to his knees, panting heavily. “You… okay?”

I’m shaking and ready to pound my fists on the ground like a child throwing a tantrum. He places a hand on my knee and I lunge up and hug him so hard I pop his back.

“Ouch! Shit,” he says, breaking free. “Cool it with that.”

I look around to see if anyone else is in the park. We’re alone. But Collin has his own ghosts too because of the last time I did something as simple as bumping his leg with mine; naturally someone would burn us at the stake if they caught us hugging. “I’m sorry.”

It’s only been two days, but I miss his face without the bruises and swollen eye.

Collin stands and I think he’s about to help me up but he just scratches his head. “I gotta go get cleaned up before I meet up with Nicole. She wants to talk.”

“Can you stick around for a little bit longer?” I see a no forming so I quickly say, “Forget it. Go do what you gotta do.”

And he does.

None of us went to the funeral. There was a closed casket. I’m sure the service was poorly attended. The hated and hateful aren’t exactly a popular crowd. Besides, he wouldn’t have wanted me there, which made it a missed opportunity to piss on his grave, but I ended up meeting with Collin instead and that’s poetic enough for me.

I’m sitting on the ground, and Collin is pacing back and forth. He still hasn’t really offered any real condolences or even hugged me, and it’s starting to get to me.

“He did this because of me,” I tell Collin, even though I’ve told him this over and over already. “Because of what we do together.”

“Maybe we should take a break,” Collin says. “Some time apart could be good for you.”

“That’s the last thing I want right now.” I don’t add the obvious, that we just got jumped together and my father killed himself. “We need to talk to the girls soon. I need you, uh… I need us to figure this out. I can’t have something else going wrong right now.”

“This is shitty timing, I know, but I actually can’t break up with Nicole, Aaron. Everything between us has been a slip. Look at everything that’s happened to you alone… You get why nothing else can go down between us, right?”

This is one of those times where you swear you have to be sleeping and living a nightmare because it’s so impossible that your life can only be a string of bad things until you’re completely abandoned.

“You can’t do this,” I say. “I told my mother about you. My father killed himself because of us. We got jumped on the train because of who we are.”

Collin keeps pacing and refuses to look me in the eye. “We chose to be the wrong people. It just can’t work. Nicole’s pregnant and I was trying to talk her into not keeping the kid before I told you, but she is, so I gotta be a man again.”

Another bad thing but not unexpected, that was always a risk. “So you knocked her up, whatever. That doesn’t make you straight and you’re never going to be—”

“It’s not happening, Aaron.” He walks to the fence. I expect him to come back like he’s still pacing, but he just crouches down and leaves without another word.

Something snaps in my head and I’m fighting back tears.

I slipped too.

Whatever, I have a girlfriend too.

I don’t need him.

I know Dad killed himself because of me.

Mom thinks that his recent jail stint tipped him over the edge, that his many chemical imbalances caught up with him.

Now I keep searching for happiness so I don’t end up like he did.

I learn about this town called Happy in Texas and think about how that must be the greatest place to live.

I teach myself how to say and read and write happy in Spanish, German, Italian, and even Japanese but I would have to draw that last one out.

I discover the happiest animal in the world, the quokka. He’s a cheeky little bastard that’s always smiling.

But it’s not enough.

The memories are still rattling around my head, twisting into me like a knife. I don’t want to wait around to see what comes next for me in this tragic story I’m living. I open up one of my father’s unused razors and cut into my wrist like he did, slit in a curve until it smiles so everyone will know I died for happiness.

I was expecting relief but instead it’s the saddest pain I’ve ever experienced. I never once stop feeling empty or unworthy of anyone’s rescue, not even when the thin line on my wrist makes everything go red.

I don’t want to die and I didn’t.

I spent a few days at the hospital where I met with this therapist, Dr. Slattery, who was the worst. I thought it was just me who couldn’t stand him, but I read his reviews online and saw I wasn’t the only one who thought the man was a joke: