Happy Place

by Emily Henry

I retrieve my suitcase from the dinky airport’s baggage carousel and emerge through the front doors feeling like a woman in a tampon commercial: overjoyed, gorgeous, and impossibly comfortable—ready for any highly physical activity, including but not limited to bowling with friends or getting a piggyback ride from the unobtrusively handsome guy hired by central casting to play my boyfriend.

“You look thirty years younger. Not a day over newborn.” “Oh, no, it wasn’t a medical procedure,” I say. “It was an Etsy spell.”

“How was the flight?” “Same pilot as last time,” I tell her. Her brow lifts. “Ray? Again?” I nod. “Of sunglasses-on-the-back-of-the-head fame.” “Never seen him without them,” she muses. “He absolutely has to have a second set of eyes in his neck,” I say. “The only explanation,” she agrees. “God, I’m so sorry—ever since Ray got sober, I swear he flies like a dying bumblebee.” I ask, “How did he fly back when he was still drinking?” “Oh, the same.” She hops in behind the steering wheel, and I drop into the passenger seat beside her. “But his intercom banter was a fucking delight.”

We’ve all been sitting on our hands and vibrating, waiting for you to get here.” “Wow,” I say, “things descended into orgy territory pretty quickly.” Another Trademark Sabrina Laugh. She jiggles the doorknob. “I guess I should’ve specified we were all sitting on our own hands.” “Now, that changes things considerably,” I say.

“Is it really you?” She shakes me by the shoulders. “Are my eyes deceiving me?” “You’re probably confused because she got a new face on Etsy,” Sabrina tells her. “Huh,” Kimmy says. “I was wondering what Danny DeVito was doing here.” “That probably has more to do with the edibles,” I say.

That snow globe feeling hits, where up is down and down is up and everything is either glitter or corn syrup.

Friendship with Sabrina, with this whole group, has always felt like a current I could toss myself bodily into. And that’s what I’m most used to: coasting along on other people’s whims and feelings. It had never occurred to me that that could be read as apathy. That they might think I just don’t care.