Happy and You Know It

by Laura Hankin

At times like these, Claire thought that maybe God did exist, not as some benevolent being or terrifying father, but as the omniscient equivalent of a prank show host.

It was all a perfect recipe for feeling small. For feeling . . . not real.

with eyes like freshly washed blueberries.

Only now was she realizing how much she had missed it, how it was like she had been walking around with only one shoe on and wondering why she felt so off.

She’d always disdained those women with too-taut faces—she’d prefer to age gracefully!—but then she’d actually started aging.

A crush, she’d told herself. People get crushes. The important thing is not to act on them. She was going to forget about him, she told herself now, as she sat in his brownstone and breathed his air.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “He doesn’t give a fuck. All the most interesting people are that way. He’s going to grow up to do great things. Or become a serial killer. One of the two.”

“I can’t yet,” she said. “But can I let you know when I’m ready?” The wry twist disappeared from Amara’s mouth. “Yes,” she said. “But, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, don’t wait forever

to get your shit together, all right? Life only gives you so many chances.”

What a terrible feeling it was, to sift through your heart and guts and soul and to come up short.

“I did it,” Claire said. “It’s over, and I did not die.”

She pulled on some clothes and ran a brush through her hair, determined to harden her heart.

Vicki just kept doing her Vicki thing.

“The best part of my day is the moment I wake up, those couple of seconds before I remember everything that happened.

She was a useless lump for a while, and then she wrote and wrote.

—a solid career of quietly doing what she loved. Maybe that would be amazing.

“It was one of those things where you don’t realize how deep in you’re getting, and when you finally do realize, you’re too afraid to tell the truth.

“We’re all so obsessed with protecting our children, aren’t we?” Amara said. “That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. We want to paint a lovely picture that we hang over their window to block out how the world really works, to give them these perfect lives. And to do that, we think we need to keep ourselves perfect too. But no mother in the history of the world has been able to protect her child forever. The world barges in through the front door eventually.